The Man Who Could Unseat Netanyahu

Just over 100 days ago, Benny Gantz was the leader of a small Israeli opposition party. Now, in a shared office inside a nondescript building within the Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv, “Mr.” Gantz is helping lead Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza as a member of the war cabinet formed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Gantz spends his days poring over operational plans, not just of the ongoing campaign in Gaza but also of contingencies for a war that may erupt with Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite organization, on Israel’s northern border. But the most complex challenge facing Gantz sits with him at the war cabinet table: Netanyahu. He has accused the prime minister numerous times in the past of dividing Israeli society. And since the war began, Gantz’s opinion of Netanyahu — and his estimation of the damage he is causing Israel — has sunk even lower, according to Gantz aides and political allies interviewed for this piece. Several security officials and foreign diplomats were also interviewed about Gantz. Gantz, 64, is in a unique and contradictory position. He is now, essentially, the grown-up in the room of the Israeli government. Many, if not most, Israelis, as well as Israel’s allies, look to him to prevent the radical moves being urged by the government’s far-right members. At the same time, according to polls, he is also the man most likely to replace Netanyahu and his disastrous government. To manage that transition and set the stage for a potential successful premiership will require political deftness, ruthlessness and, above all, an acute sense of timing. In his political career so far, he has yet to prove he has those qualities to the necessary degree. Practically from the moment he entered politics in 2018, Gantz found himself the target of a smear campaign orchestrated by a network of Netanyahu’s supporters. 

Despite this, he agreed to join an emergency government with Netanyahu to help Israel fight the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. That decision split his party (at the time it was called Blue and White) and cost him a large chunk of voters, and the government fell apart within a few months. Three years later, Gantz is back with Netanyahu once more. 

By all appearances, the war left him no alternative. On Oct. 7, as the scale of Hamas’s devastating surprise attack became evident, Gantz told Netanyahu he was willing to join an emergency government. If he had any concern, it was apparently about the presence of far-right party leaders in the coalition. Judging by the polls, it was the right political move for Gantz. Netanyahu’s popularity has plummeted. If elections were held now, Gantz’s National Unity party would receive the most votes by far. He could form a ruling coalition with ease. Gantz has often told the story of a phone call with his mother, Malka, a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, after rockets from Gaza hit the yard of his childhood home during a previous war with Hamas. 

As he has recounted, she said, “‘If it doesn’t hurt you, then everything’s fine. If it hurts, then you don’t feel it anyway. I’m just asking you one thing: Don’t stop fighting, but also don’t stop providing them food.’ That has become my moral legacy.” It’s a story that positions him perfectly in the Israeli political center: a tough general with morals inherited from his Holocaust survivor parents. Nahum Gantz, Gantz’s father, was an active member of the Labor Party and at one point a possible Knesset candidate. But Gantz himself has tried hard not to be pinned down on either side of the spectrum. Indeed, if Gantz held any political views during his more than 37 years in uniform, he rarely showed them. The first half of his military career was spent largely in the celebrated Paratroopers Brigade, where he rose through the ranks to become brigade commander. Most of his combat experience was in fighting Palestinian militant organizations, and then Hezbollah in Lebanon. Soldiers under his command describe him as brave under fire but deliberate in his decision-making off the battlefield, favoring consensus. 

He even acquired the nickname Benihuta, a play on his name and an Aramaic-Hebrew word for “laid back.” To his superiors, he was the epitome of a paratrooper: respectful of authority, commanding through example without raising his voice. He was fast-tracked through a series of command postings. At 42, he was promoted to major general, and a year later, in 2002, put in charge of the Israeli army’s Northern Command. But after that his career appeared to falter, with two dead-end postings. He seemed to lack the burning ambition and political acumen needed to reach the very top of the greasy pole. He made it there anyway. A dispute in 2009 between Defense Minister Ehud Barak and the Israeli army chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi over who should become the army’s deputy chief of staff resulted in a compromise candidate: Gantz. 

It was supposed to be his last posting, and he retired in November 2010. But a series of scandals tainted the leading candidates for the top job, and he was called back to serve as chief of staff. Once again, and not for the last time, it was Gantz’s even temperament that got him the job. Though many of the men who preceded him as commander of the armed forces ran for office after stepping away from the military, Gantz’s future in politics when his four-year term in that role ended was far from certain. Many thought he didn’t have the mettle. Though he apparently had reservations regarding Netanyahu and Barak’s plans for attacking Iran’s nuclear installations, as a cabinet minister has confirmed to me, his professional disagreements with his political masters remained hidden from the public. As the 2019 election neared, the absence of a candidate on the center-left capable of challenging Netanyahu led a group of political operatives to strongly encourage Gantz to run. As the former army chief of staff, he was already widely respected by the Israeli mainstream. 

He was such a textbook center-left candidate that, as the leader of the Resilience Party, he effectively forced the other centrist party, Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, to merge with his party, and formed Blue and White. The new party nearly drove the other Zionist-left parties, Labor and Meretz, into electoral extinction. Still, Gantz’s first years in politics hardly inspired confidence. He failed to instill a sense of unity in the camp opposing Netanyahu. Constant infighting among the senior factions of his new party and his own team of outside strategists made damning headlines.

The New York Times