Eizenkot Leads to Become Israel's Next Prime Minister as Netanyahu's Hold Slips

Gadi Eizenkot, the former IDF chief of staff turned war-cabinet critic, has emerged as the figure most likely to lead Israel's next government — a verdict now held with increasing conviction by those staking serious money on the country's political future. While Israeli and international media remain transfixed by Benjamin Netanyahu's day-to-day maneuvering, the accumulated weight of informed wagers points to a post-Netanyahu era already taking shape around a specific successor.

The signal is neither thin nor drifting. With more than $28 million in total volume behind the question and Eizenkot commanding a 53% share — more than Netanyahu's 34% and the rest of the field combined — this reads as genuine conviction, not noise. What would have to be true for this pricing to make sense? Bettors would need to believe that Netanyahu's legal jeopardy, coalition fragility, and war-management failures have crossed a threshold of no return, and that Eizenkot's combination of security credibility and centrist appeal positions him as the consensus figure a fractured Israeli electorate can coalesce behind. The 7-point surge in the probability of Netanyahu's departure by year-end — crossing 42% in a single day — reinforces exactly that read.

The broader cluster of markets around Israel's security situation adds texture to the political picture. Airspace closure odds climbing toward the end of August, a ground operation in Iran still drawing meaningful money at 22%, and a Lebanon withdrawal that fewer than one in eight traders expect this calendar year all paint a country deep in prolonged, multi-front conflict. That environment has historically destroyed Israeli prime ministers — and the money appears to believe it is doing so again, this time to Netanyahu. His legal trials were already a slow bleed; commanding a war that has not produced clean victories has accelerated the political hemorrhage.

Eizenkot's rise is inseparable from his role inside the war cabinet that Netanyahu assembled after October 7. He spent months as a public dissident within that cabinet, criticizing the absence of a day-after plan for Gaza and pushing for a hostage deal over military maximalism — positions that polled well with the center-left and even with exhausted Likud voters. When he eventually resigned, he left as something rare in Israeli politics: a decorated general with clean hands on the war's failures. That biography is the source of his current market valuation.

What matters for observers beyond Israel is that a potential Eizenkot government would represent a meaningful foreign-policy reset. His instincts run toward the security establishment's traditional realism rather than the ideological expansionism of Ben Gvir and Smotrich, whose combined market share has collapsed to near zero. A government he leads would likely be more receptive to US-brokered frameworks for Gaza, more predictable for Arab normalization partners, and less inclined to the settler-movement maximalism that has strained relations with Washington.

Two paths remain visible from here. The likeliest, if the money is right, is that Netanyahu's coalition cracks under the combined weight of legal verdicts, hostage-deal pressure, and coalition defections before any scheduled election forces the issue — and Eizenkot positions himself as the unity candidate in the resulting political reorganization. The scenario worth watching as an underpriced risk is Netanyahu's survival: at 34%, the market is not dismissing him, and any security escalation that triggers a rally-around-the-flag dynamic could compress Eizenkot's lead quickly. What would break the market's read entirely is a third figure — Bennett at 7% is the only one with residual oxygen — consolidating the anti-Netanyahu vote before Eizenkot can lock it down. The odds say that is unlikely. They do not say it is impossible.