Major General Gadi Eisenkot, 54, will become the Chief-of-Staff (COS) of the IDF in the spring. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved his nomination upon the recommendation of Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon as well as former IDF generals.

Born in Israel, Eisenkat was drafted into the IDF in 1978. He joined the Golani Brigade where he served in a variety of roles. During the 1982 Lebanon War he served as an officer and shortly afterwards, he became the commander of Golani’s Battalion 13. After commanding an infantry reserve brigade and regional brigade in the mid 1990s, he returned to Golani as its commander in 1997.

In 1999 Eisenkot was appointed Military Secretary to then-Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Since then he has commanded the 366th Division and the West Bank Division. He was promoted to head of the Operations Directorate in June 2005. Following criticism over the conduct of Major General Udi Adam in the 2006 Lebanon War, Eisenkot was asked to replace him as General Commanding Officer (GOC) of the Northern Command. On January 2013, following a short leave, he returned as Deputy Chief of General Staff, second only to outgoing COS Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz.

When he was appointed by then-COS Moshe Ya’alon as chief of the Judea and Samaria Division, an important position at the time of the Second Intifada, Eizenkot was one of the leaders of the “mowing the grass” approach to defeat Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank. This led to a halt in suicide attacks and to near-total calm at the end of the uprising in 2005 andfollowing the Second Lebanon War, he was sent to rehabilitate the Northern Command – a task he carried out successfully.

Eizenkot served as the head of the IDF’s Operations Directorate during the Second Lebanon War. He was among the very few who demanded that reserve forces be called up at the beginning of the war – to no avail. Despite that, he remained loyal to his commander and kept his criticism to discussions within the General Staff’s top brass. He also supported the destruction of Beirut’s Dahiya suburb and called for attacking Lebanese infrastructure as an act of deterrence. In fact he was one of the leading architects of the “Dahiya doctrine,” a military strategy advocating massive aerial strikes on all of the enemy’s assets in Lebanon in an attempt to halt the rocket and missile fire at Israel’s home front.

Read the article in full at BESA.