Our person of the year 5786 must be an Israeli.
Yes, the year’s foreign news was dominated by a non-Israeli – Donald Trump – but unlike 5776, when this column crowned him person of the year, this year he did not represent a new era, as he sure did 10 years ago this fall.
The rest of the world also failed to offer such a figure in 5786. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been up to his neck in the Ukraine war. Britain again replaced its prime minister, but neither left much of an imprint on any front. France’s Emmanuel Macron entered his presidency’s twilight as his quest to marginalize radicals from the Right and Left clearly failed. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has fared no better. Out in Asia, the leaders of China and Japan, while effective at home, have shaped nothing abroad; the same goes for leaders across Africa’s 55 states.
The statesmen’s underperformance was not offset by a cultural figure – say, an artist, a scientist, a writer, or an athlete – whose inspiration, or notoriety, might have stirred the entire world.
The same goes for the Middle East.
Why is Netanyahu unfit to be Israel’s Person of the Year?
There were years when political dramas in the Arab world mattered globally and, while at it, produced gripping images of their victims and heroes.
That is how, in 5763, our person of the year was Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian greengrocer whose self-immolation sparked the upheaval that unseated four Arab leaders, including Egypt’s. Similarly, when that upheaval produced multiple civil wars and a mass exodus that took thousands of lives, our person of the year 5765 was five-year-old Alan Kurdi, whose photo of him lying dead on a Turkish beach encapsulated war-torn Syria’s despair.
There was no shortage of misery in the Middle East this year, but it produced no such iconic image. Nor was there a leader whose figure towered above the Middle East’s dramas, whether for better, the way Emirati leader Mohamed bin Zayed did before becoming our person of the year 5780, or for worse, the way Syria’s Bashar Assad did as our person of the year 5773.
This sense of political void was underscored by events in Iran, where the killing of its leader was not followed by the rise of a successor who shaped subsequent events. Similarly, consecutive Iranian attacks on multiple Arab countries did not give rise to an Arab leader who seized control of events, least of all by leading an Arab counterattack that the Iranian missile and drone attacks demand.
That is why our person of the year is an Israeli. This is not to say that Israel produced this year the kind of doer that other countries did not.
Last year's person of the year, Benjamin Netanyahu, shaped 5785’s roller-coaster events. Militarily, he ordered Operation Rising Lion, alongside attacks on the Houthi government in Yemen and the Palestinian leadership in Qatar. He also fired the defense minister, the head of the Shin Bet, and the chairman of the Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee. Netanyahu thus shaped that year’s Israeli events, on all fronts.
This cannot be said of 5786. Politically, it was a year of paralysis, underscored by Netanyahu’s failure to pass the draft-dodging legislation he promised his ultra-Orthodox allies.
Militarily, the year was dominated by Operation Roaring Lion, ostensibly a repetition of the previous year’s attack, and thus reason to name Netanyahu person of the year once again. But in fact, in their circumstances and results, the two attacks were entirely different.
This year’s attack on Iran was not an Israeli move with an American epilogue, but an American move with an Israeli partner. Second, this attack was inconclusive. That is why this attack’s main Israeli hero, then-air force commander Maj.-Gen. Tomer Bar, cannot be our person of the year, despite successfully preparing the IDF’s pilots for the complex and daring task they carried out as impressively as they did.
Despite its military drama, as Israelis experienced it 5786 was first and foremost a political year. That is why our person of the year, besides being Israeli, must be a political figure. And since Netanyahu did not shape the political year, the question is who did, and the answer is Gadi Eisenkot.
The choice of Eisenkot is problematic because he did nothing beyond field a party and a list of candidates.
Eisenkot did not present a single bill, articulate an original idea, unveil a program of action, or say anything substantial about major domestic problems like the judicial crisis; the political system’s structure; the shortage of doctors, nurses, and hospital beds; or the education system’s standards, resources, and norms.
Even so, during the most fateful political year in Israel’s history, Eisenkot came to be seen, on both sides of the political aisle, as the harbinger, symbol, and potential engine of change.
Whether the polls that flatter him are valid will only become known next month, but whatever the outcome of his effort to replace Netanyahu, he has already become the de facto leader of the opposition. The reasons for this emergence are clear.
In his humble character and unassuming appearance, Eisenkot brought a humility that contrasts with Netanyahu’s telegenic pizzazz, boastful rhetoric, and soloist management. As the son of working-class immigrants from Morocco, Eisenkot is a light-year away from Netanyahu’s upbringing in an Ivy League professor’s affluent home.
Above all, as the father and uncle of three soldiers who fell in Gaza, he has come to personify the sense of victimhood, defiance, and outrage that connected millions of Israelis over the past three years. That is how Gadi Eisenkot, our person of the year 5786, came to stoke the ruling coalition’s fears and personify Middle Israel’s pain, wrath, and hope.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestseller, The Jewish March of Folly (Yedioth Books 2026), now available in English on Amazon.