In the bustling taxi ranks of Johannesburg and the quiet neighborhood cafes of Amman, news from Jerusalem arrives not with a gasp of surprise, but with the slow, knowing nod of people who have watched the machinery of empire change its operators many times before. When Western news wires flashed the development that Israeli President Isaac Herzog had bypassed Benjamin Netanyahu to hand opposition figure Gadi Eisenkot the mandate to form a government, European and American capitals breathed a collective sigh of relief. The narrative was immediately set in motion: the troublesome strongman was finally cornered, and the sensible centrists had arrived to restore order. But for the vast majority of the world, whose histories have taught them to distinguish between a change of management and a change of structure, the celebration feels entirely hollow.
The Western imagination has long insisted on reducing the agony of Palestine to the personal moral failings of Benjamin Netanyahu. If only this one obstinate, corrupt politician could be removed from the stage, the thinking went, the natural decency of the state would reassert itself, and the polite diplomacy of the status quo could resume. It is a comforting fairy tale for donors and diplomats who wish to sleep soundly at night without confronting what their billions in military aid have actually built. Yet to look at the transition through the eyes of a mother in Khan Younis, or a farmer in the hills of the West Bank watching his olive trees bulldozed behind a concrete wall, the face at the top of the cabinet table is perhaps the least consequential detail of their daily survival.
Gadi Eisenkot does not come to power as an emissary of peace, nor does he pretend to be one to anyone paying close attention. A former chief of staff of the Israeli military, his name is etched into strategic doctrine as the architect of the concept of disproportionate force—the deliberate, overwhelming leveling of civilian infrastructure pioneered in southern Lebanon and perfected over subsequent campaigns in Gaza. To the diplomats who will soon shake his hand in Brussels and Washington, he represents a return to military professionalism and sober governance. But to the families who have dug their children out of crushed concrete, that professionalism is not a virtue; it is simply the colder, more organized face of their dispossession.
Across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, this moment is being watched with a profound sense of moral clarity that Western capitals continually fail to understand. When South Africa took its place at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, it did not do so out of a personal grievance with Netanyahu. It acted out of an institutional, generational memory of what apartheid looks like, smells like, and feels like. Leaders in Bogotá, Brasília, and Jakarta do not need a briefing on Israeli coalition politics to recognize that an occupation does not soften simply because the man overseeing it speaks in measured tones rather than belligerent slogans. They know that colonialism has always preferred the company of polite administrators.
The real danger of this political shuffle is the off-ramp it offers to the Western powers who have spent the past year shielding catastrophe from accountability. A government led by Eisenkot allows the United States and its allies to pretend that a page has been turned, granting them permission to rearm, refinance, and re-legitimize the ongoing erasure of Palestinian life without having to answer for the vulgarities of the far-right ministers who previously occupied the television screens. It is the restoration of impunity wrapped in the respectable language of national unity and institutional norms. The checkpoints will remain. The administrative detention of children will continue. The siege will not lift.
There is a tragic predictability to the way global statecraft continually leaves the victims out of the communiqué. The headlines this week will obsess over Knesset mathematics, threshold percentages, and the delicate egos of former generals bargaining over ministries in high-ceilinged offices. Meanwhile, the essential question of human equality—the simple, non-negotiable proposition that an Arab child and an Israeli child possess the exact same right to breathe free air, sleep without terror, and live upon their ancestral land—remains entirely off the agenda.
Real peace will never be brokered in the backrooms of Israeli coalition politics, because the people who hold power there have never acknowledged the full humanity of the people they rule over. That recognition will have to be forced from the outside, through the steady, unrelenting moral pressure of the Global South, through the courage of ordinary citizens refusing to look away, and through the stubborn resilience of Palestinians who refuse to disappear. Until that day comes, the world should not confuse the rearranging of chairs in the commander’s tent with the end of the siege.