It’s a warm, buggy night in Kfar HaNagid, a coastal village named for Shmuel HaNagid, the eminent poet, scholar, warrior, and statesman of medieval al-Andalus. A mature crowd of several hundred has gathered on the village green. They sit restively in white plastic chairs, awaiting the arrival of Gadi Eisenkot, a retired chief of the Israel Defense Forces who currently appears to have the best chance of unseating Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving Prime Minister in the history of the state. The elections are scheduled for October 27th. Eisenkot is running late.

Israeli pop songs blare over the loudspeakers, and the air is thick with political talk. The sources of alarm seem inexhaustible: the fighting up north in Lebanon; the Trump Administration’s turn from frenetic negotiations with the newly emboldened regime in Tehran to a prolonged bombing campaign; Netanyahu’s deals of convenience with the ultra-Orthodox, a crucial component of his voting bloc; the deepening hostility toward Israel across the ideological spectrum and all over the world. What is far more rarely discussed, in Kfar HaNagid and elsewhere, is the colossal human suffering and devastation in the Gaza Strip and the mayhem committed daily against Palestinians by settlers in villages throughout the West Bank.

Finally, Eisenkot arrives. He is sixty-six, a man of broad belly and pained expression. When he smiles, he winces as if from a twinge of sciatica. He is dressed in a dark polo shirt, his post-military uniform. Eisenkot’s parents were Moroccan immigrants of modest means. He was born in Tiberias and grew up in Eilat, two cities considered to be on the Israeli periphery. Were Eisenkot to win, he would be the first Prime Minister with such a background.