There is no other politician who has experienced an electoral roller coaster quite like Benny Gantz. Ahead of the 2021 elections, some polls had already put him below the electoral threshold. Pressure was mounting on him to withdraw. The argument — mine as well — was that it was simply too great a risk. Gantz stayed, managed to climb back above the electoral threshold, and returned from political death straight to the position of defense minister.
Now he looks back at those who had already written his political obituary with a dismissive smile. “I’ve heard this before,” he is surely thinking. Gantz is surrounded by a small, close-knit and talented group that knows how to work together. People often say about them, particularly about his chief of staff, Maayan Israeli, that they are the ones running Gantz. There is some truth to that, but this has been Gantz’s modus operandi throughout his career, including in the military. He tends to surround himself with strong people and let them manage him. They are not admirers of Benjamin Netanyahu, as people now like to claim about them; they do, however, appreciate his political abilities. They saw how they had worked for months to close every possible loophole that could allow the rotation agreement to be violated, and how Netanyahu nevertheless found an opening and survived by breaking what was arguably the most blatant political promise in Israeli politics.
Gantz is treated unfairly when his relationship with Netanyahu is described. On both occasions when he joined forces with him, he did so reluctantly. The first time was at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Netanyahu and his bloc surged past the 61-seat threshold. The second time, Gantz certainly made a major mistake by failing to set Yair Lapid’s condition — “I’ll come in only if you keep Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich out” — but as for joining the government on October 11, 2023, it is difficult to dispute the decision given the circumstances at the time.
Here is a small example: during the war, there were quite a few trilateral meetings involving Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi. Time and again, these meetings deteriorated into exchanges of accusations over the Hezbollah strike that was called off on October 11. Gallant accused Netanyahu of missing an opportunity to decisively defeat the enemy, Netanyahu argued that such a move would have undermined the campaign against Hamas, and Halevi tried to keep the two apart. What was not said in those meetings was that, had it not been for Gadi Eisenkot’s near-shouting objections, that strike might have gone ahead.
In the confusion of the war’s first days, both the IDF and the Mossad supported the strike as well, despite the enormous risk and fierce opposition from the United States — President Joe Biden told the prime minister, “If you go alone, you’ll be alone.” Faced with all this, Eisenkot drew on a tip he had received about the opposition of Military Intelligence’s Research Division head, Amit Saar, and used all his powers of persuasion to take the strike off the table.
The theory held by Gantz and his people is that, as the elections approach, the broader public will finally want to escape the madness, the endless wars, and choose a moderate and stable option. “People are thinking from the gut right now,” Gantz’s camp explains. “We think we’ll be able to convince them to choose not according to the anger of the past, but according to who they want to be there in the future.”
Given the past, it would be too arrogant to dismiss this possibility outright. Gantz has already been worth 40 seats; perhaps he can convince another two or three seats’ worth of voters that he is the solution. The point is that it is too great a risk. At the moment, he appears to be the weakest link in the bloc opposing Netanyahu. Lapid has weakened as well, but he has a realistic option for joining forces — Eisenkot. Gantz does not.
When he entered politics in 2018, Gantz used to say that he was coming for ten years. He really is a politician with a reasonable balance between considerations of ego and substantive considerations. Now, the smartest thing for him would be to shorten his promised decade in politics somewhat, step down, leave enough time for some of his more worthy MKs to find another option (Hili Tropper, Eitan Ginzburg), and avoid the scenario in which his continued presence in the race leads to the loss of everything he believes in, in the most critical election Israel has seen since 1996.