Ahead of Tuesday's elections , party advertisements greet people arriving by train to the outskirts of the western Israeli city of Sderot.

Campaign posters with various slogans promote the right-wing Likud and the far-right Otzma Yehudit parties. However, one poster is seen more than any others: that of the liberal Yashar party.

Its slogan, "Rosh Memshala Dialna," combines the terms "prime minister" in Hebrew and the words "of our own" in Moroccan Arabic.

And there is a good reason why Eisenkot's campaign in Sderot and other cities on Israel's sociopolitical periphery focuses on his Moroccan roots.

Eisenkot's Mizrahi background

Sderot — located in the Negev desert, about 75 kilometers (45 miles) to Tel Aviv's south and just a kilometer away from the Gaza border — is a city with a large Moroccan Jewish community.…