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Guest Essay
By Anshel Pfeffer
Mr. Pfeffer is a senior correspondent for Haaretz and the author of “Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin 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.
Mr. 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 Mr. Gantz sits with him at the war cabinet table: Mr. Netanyahu. He has accused the prime minister numerous times in the past of dividing Israeli society. And since the war began, Mr. Gantz’s opinion of Mr. 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 Mr. Gantz.
Mr. 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 Mr. 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, Mr. Gantz found himself the target of a smear campaign orchestrated by a network of Mr. Netanyahu’s supporters. Despite this, he agreed to join an emergency government with Mr. 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, Mr. Gantz is back with Mr. 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, Mr. Gantz told Mr. 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 Mr. Gantz. Mr. Netanyahu’s popularity has plummeted. If elections were held now, Mr. Gantz’s National Unity party would receive the most votes by far. He could form a ruling coalition with ease.
Mr. 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, Mr. Gantz’s father, was an active member of the Labor party and at one point a possible Knesset candidate. But Mr. Gantz himself has tried hard not to be pinned down on either side of the spectrum.
Indeed, if Mr. 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 Israel Defense Forces’ 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 I.D.F. chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi over who should become I.D.F. deputy chief of staff resulted in a compromise candidate: Mr. 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 Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Barak’s plans for attacking Iran’s nuclear installations, as a cabinet minister has confirmed to me, as I.D.F. chief of staff, 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 Mr. Netanyahu led a group of political operatives to strongly encourage Mr. Gantz to run. As the former I.D.F. 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, Mr. Gantz’s first years in politics hardly inspired confidence. He failed to instill a sense of unity in the camp opposing Mr. Netanyahu. Constant infighting among the senior factions of his new party and his own team of outside strategists made damning headlines.
Mr. Netanyahu’s highly disciplined political machine smeared Mr. Gantz by promoting unflattering stories — including that his smartphone had been hacked by the Iranians, and that he’d been in therapy (which he denied). Mr. Gantz and his campaign tried to shrug off the smears but struggled to come up with a consistent narrative of their own. Most crucially, while he drew many of the votes on the left and in the center, he failed to make a considerable breakthrough on the right.
At the end of March 2020, Mr. Gantz gave up. Three turbulent election campaigns in 15 months had been more than enough, and a global pandemic was looming. He joined Mr. Netanyahu in his “emergency national unity government.” But when Mr. Netanyahu failed to honor his commitments on the budget, the coalition collapsed. Israel headed for a fourth election in less than two years. Blue and White won only eight seats.
When Mr. Netanyahu returned to power at the end of 2022, many predicted that Mr. Gantz wouldn’t last long in the opposition. Surely he would go into government again with Mr. Netanyahu, replacing some of the far-right coalition partners “for the good of the nation.” Or perhaps he would retire.
But then the Netanyahu government rolled out its controversial “legal reform,” which was intended to weaken the independence and power of the Supreme Court. The move unleashed a wave of protests from the center-left, and Mr. Gantz and his party started to take off in the polls.
On other domestic fronts, he did not take sides in the rancorous debate on Israel’s lack of separation between synagogue and state. He lives a secular life but has gone out of his way to court religious audiences. And perhaps most importantly, he has maintained cordial relations with both the West Bank settlers and senior officials in the Palestinian Authority, something few other politicians have done.
As Israeli society tore itself apart over the future of its fragile and limited democracy, many saw Mr. Gantz as a unifier. His newly named National Unity party doubled its tally in the polls and reached a level footing with Likud. And yet, in the nine turbulent months of the coalition’s attempt to eviscerate Israel’s judiciary, he opposed the plans but agreed to work with Mr. Netanyahu on a compromise that would safeguard democracy.
In polls since Oct. 7, National Unity has surpassed Likud in popularity. When polled about his suitability for prime minister, Mr. Gantz outstrips Mr. Netanyahu, at times by over 20 percentage points nationwide.
Mr. Gantz has refused to give interviews since Oct. 7, eschewing even off-record briefings. But his very presence in the innermost decision-making forum has reassured Israelis. Mr. Gantz is said to have stood against the urgings of the generals, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, to launch a pre-emptive strike on Hezbollah in Lebanon. He advocated the hostage release agreement with Hamas, which generals initially rejected because it included a temporary truce during which Hamas could relieve its exhausted fighters.
Mr. Gantz has stuck to bland statements in public. His greatest political asset in a polarized society may be remaining a blank canvas upon which Israelis can project their aspirations.
According to conversations with diplomats for this piece, foreign officials reach out to Mr. Gantz to serve as a counterweight to Mr. Netanyahu. In such conversations, according to people close to him, when asked about the two-state solution, he responds that we’re in a new world and that the old phrase no longer applies, preferring instead to say “two separate entities.” It’s an example, his aides say, of Mr. Gantz’s effort to stay aloof from conflict with Mr. Netanyahu.
Mr. Gantz’s way of selling any future concessions to the Palestinians to Israelis is to wrap them in security necessities. During his period as defense minister, he was also a rare senior minister to meet with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.
If — or more likely when — Mr. Gantz decides to leave the war cabinet and take his party back into the opposition, it will mean a crossroads for Israel’s future. It could well be the moment that opens the floodgates of protest, which have been largely shut because of the war, and bring hundreds of thousands of Israelis, including many reservists returned from the battlefield, to the streets to demand Mr. Netanyahu’s resignation.
Mr. Gantz knows full well that he is currently the most popular candidate for prime minister. But he is up against a master of political survival who will stop at nothing to hold on to power. How Mr. Gantz charts his next moves in the coming weeks and months will determine not just his own political fate but also that of the country he has served for the last half-century.
Anshel Pfeffer is a senior correspondent for Haaretz and the author of “Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu.”
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