Hasan argues media's embrace of Eisenkot ignores his record

Eisenkot quit war cabinet over strategy, not Gaza toll, Hasan wrote

In an opinion column published Monday, Hasan wrote that Western media outlets “cannot seem to get enough of” Eisenkot. He cited the Times of London’s question “Will Israel embrace the ‘anti-Netanyahu’ who lost a son in Gaza?” and the Daily Telegraph’s “He lost his son in Gaza. Now he’s coming for Netanyahu,” along with a lengthy David Remnick profile in the New Yorker headlined “How Netanyahu’s Top General Became His Strongest Challenger” and the Economist asking “Does Gadi Eisenkot offer Israel a new chance?”

“It’s a fair question,” Hasan wrote. “But perhaps British and American commentators aren’t the right people to answer it.” He suggested instead asking the Palestinians of Gaza, residents of the occupied West Bank, and residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs.

At what Hasan called “the height of the genocide,” from October 2023 to June 2024, Eisenkot sat in Netanyahu’s war cabinet while Israel waged its military campaign in Gaza, he wrote. During that period, Hasan wrote, Israeli airstrikes “leveled entire apartment buildings, hit schools, hospitals and refugee camps, and killed more than 30,000 Palestinians.”

Eisenkot resigned from the war cabinet in 2024, Hasan wrote — “not over the horrific death toll,” but over “what he regarded as the government’s strategic failures.” He noted that even Remnick’s sympathetic profile observed that Eisenkot, who lost his own soldier son, Gal, in the fighting, “remains reluctant to condemn Netanyahu in any detail for the extraordinary severity and duration of the war in Gaza.”

Tracing Eisenkot’s record, Hasan wrote that as Israel’s chief of staff during the “Great March of Return” in 2018 and 2019, Eisenkot oversaw the armed response to mass Palestinian demonstrations against the siege of Gaza. Israeli soldiers, mostly snipers, killed more than 200 Palestinians, including dozens of children, Hasan wrote, citing a UN commission of inquiry that concluded “The Israeli security forces killed and maimed Palestinian demonstrators who did not pose an imminent threat” and “found reasonable grounds to believe that demonstrators were shot in violation of their right to life.”

Hasan wrote that although Eisenkot opposes the far-right government’s annexation plan, he also opposes Palestinian self-determination and statehood. He quoted Eisenkot from an interview in June: “I have never said two states for two peoples, because I understand the depth of this religious-national-social conflict, and anyone who talks about ‘peace now’ and two states doesn’t understand the conflict.” Eisenkot added, “I very much believe in settlement in Judea and Samaria” — which the column notes is the biblical term for the occupied West Bank, where settlements that the column says the international court of justice and multiple UN resolutions consider illegal under international law sit.

Hasan also cited Eisenkot’s tenure as head of Israel’s Northern Command and his association with what came to be known as the “Dahiya Doctrine,” an Israeli military strategy of deterrence “premised on the widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure.” He wrote that the 2006 Israeli assault on Lebanon killed hundreds of men, women and children in Beirut’s southern suburbs, and he quoted Eisenkot telling an interviewer in 2008, “What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on,” adding, “We will apply disproportionate force on it [village] and cause great damage and destruction there.” Hasan described the use of disproportionate force against civilian targets as “an undeniable war crime.”

Hasan argued Eisenkot is not unique, writing that the Israeli political scene “is filled with wolves in sheep’s clothing.” He cited fellow retired generals in the opposition — Benny Gantz, who he said once bragged about sending parts of Gaza “back to the stone age,” and Yair Golan, who he said argued after 7 October that Israel should prevent humanitarian aid from entering Gaza and that people there could “starve to death – it’s completely legitimate” — as well as Naftali Bennett, who Hasan wrote has “a long history of vile anti-Arab racism,” oversaw the deadliest year on record for West Bank Palestinians as prime minister in 2022, and is currently threatening both Turkey and Qatar.

Hasan acknowledged the politicians “are not all identical” and “do differ in terms of tactics, personalities and political coalitions.” But he argued that replacing Netanyahu with Eisenkot or any other opposition leader “would not be a fundamental change in direction on the key issues of genocide, apartheid and occupation; it would only be a change in branding and messaging.”

Hasan described Netanyahu as “a clear villain – but he can also be a cartoon villain.” The danger with Eisenkot, he wrote, is that he is “a villain who projects the image of a ‘moderate’” — a “humble soldier,” in Remnick’s phrase — who, by simply not being Netanyahu, would “neutralize a lot of western liberal critics of Israel and restore the country’s standing in western capitals, while allowing the Israeli military and settlers to pursue the same policies of expansion and destruction in both the West Bank and Gaza.”

“Come October, Israel’s most notorious prime minister may finally be voted out of office,” Hasan wrote. “If that happens, we can and should all celebrate the end of the Netanyahu era – and hope the ICC gets its man. But then we’ll meet the new boss of Israel, same as the old boss of Israel.”