Israeli elections: Is it just right wing versus right?

Israeli voters go to the polls on 27 October, but the choice on offer may be narrower than it looks: with Benjamin Netanyahu's main challengers sharing much of his right-wing platform, Al Jazeera's NewsFeed asks whether the election is simply "right wing versus right".

The clear frontrunner to unseat Netanyahu is Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief of staff who led the army from 2015 to 2019 before entering politics in 2021. Eisenkot joined Netanyahu's wartime coalition government in October 2023 but quit months later after falling out with the prime minister over the lack of strategy in Israel's war on Gaza, in which his son and two nephews were killed.

Eisenkot's party, founded about a year ago, promises to return stability and security, root out corruption and improve living conditions. He has pledged to enforce compulsory military service for everyone, including ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and Arab citizens, most of whom are currently exempt.

But on the Palestinians, his positions are difficult to distinguish from Netanyahu's. A Palestinian state would be "absolutely off the table", he backs the expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank -- if perhaps at a slower pace -- and he was a key originator of the "Dahiya doctrine", the military strategy of overwhelming force named after the Dahiya neighbourhood of Beirut.

Other challengers include a joint party formed by former prime minister Naftali Bennett and former broadcaster Yair Lapid, which describes its ideology as liberal Zionist but is polling poorly, according to the segment.