When Benny Gantz quit Israel’s emergency wartime cabinet, on June 9th, he did so with some political mudslinging. He and two of his colleagues in the centrist National Unity Party had joined Benjamin Netanyahu’s government immediately after the Hamas-led attacks of October 7th, “even though we knew it was a bad government,” Gantz said. “We did it because we knew it was a bad government.”
“The people of Israel, the fighters, the commanders, the families of the murdered, the casualties, and the hostages needed unity and support like they needed air to breathe,” Gantz went on. But unity was short-lived. In Netanyahu’s government, he said, “fateful strategic decisions are met with hesitation and procrastination due to political considerations.” Riffing on the Prime Minister’s motto of “total victory” against Hamas, Gantz claimed that “Netanyahu prevents us from progressing to real victory.” As a result, he said, “we are leaving the emergency government today with a heavy but whole heart.”
Gantz’s decision surprised no one in Israel. Last month, he gave an ultimatum that, if Netanyahu failed to spell out a concrete plan for the future of Gaza, he would leave the government. He had become exasperated with Netanyahu for agreeing on one thing in the wartime cabinet and then doing the opposite because of pressure from his far-right coalition partners, Gantz told Israel’s Channel 12 last week. The cabinet had formulated a phased proposal that would see the release of thirty-three hostages in exchange for a six-week ceasefire. “And then Smotrich goes to him and does what he does,” Gantz said, referring to Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s extremist finance minister, who had been threatening to topple the government if Netanyahu “waved a white flag.” Netanyahu changed his mind about the deal, Gantz went on. “I had to call him and demand another discussion.” (In a statement, Netanyahu’s Likud Party said, “Gantz is lying.”) The split between the wartime cabinet and the rest of the government had become so pronounced that, as Amit Segal, a political correspondent for Channel 12, put it, “those who know don’t decide and those who decide don’t know.” By Monday, Netanyahu had officially dissolved the war cabinet, amid demands from a far-right minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, to serve in Gantz’s stead.
Gantz, who is sixty-five, spent four decades in the Israeli military, rising to the top post of chief of staff in 2011. In 2015, he retired from the Army. Three years later, he entered politics, forming a new centrist alliance known as Blue and White that was supposed to provide a counterweight to the right-wing Likud. But, in 2020, after having been on the receiving end of a vicious smear campaign that was amplified by prominent Likud officials, Gantz shocked many by joining forces with Netanyahu, becoming his defense minister. Then, too, Netanyahu made an appeal for unity; then, too, he failed to deliver. Gantz was supposed to rotate in as Prime Minister after a year and a half, but Netanyahu reneged on the agreement, forcing an early election, instead. Gantz’s party came a distant fourth. “I intentionally left them in the dark on crucial matters to prevent them from scuttling my initiatives,” Netanyahu later boasted about Gantz and his party members.
Gantz’s popularity peaked in the weeks after October 7th, and has been steadily declining since. From the outset, some detractors of Netanyahu were aghast at Gantz’s decision to join a government that presided over the worst security failing in Israel’s history. Gantz was, in the words of Uri Misgav, a journalist for the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, “providing a political lifeline to Netanyahu time and again.” Netanyahu’s critics then blamed Gantz for leaving the government much too late. “He should have resigned five months ago,” when it first became apparent that Netanyahu was prolonging the war and scuttling a deal with Hamas, Amnon Abramovich, a veteran political analyst, told me this past week. The right is now accusing Gantz of abandoning the government at a time of crisis. “Benny Gantz is a loser who wants the State of Israel to give in to Hamas,” Shimon Riklin, a commentator on Channel 14, a pro-Netanyahu network, wrote on X last week.
Yet poll after poll shows that Gantz is uniquely situated to lead Israel in the post-October 7th climate. Most Israelis are unhappy with Netanyahu: sixty-eight per cent say that they don’t trust his handling of the war. A majority wants the government to adopt a hostage-release and ceasefire deal, something that Netanyahu has so far been unwilling to do. (He’s not the only one: Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, has thwarted such a deal repeatedly.) If elections were held today, Netanyahu’s coalition would lose more than ten seats, according to recent polling, and the government would lose its majority in parliament.
Gantz appears to have the ability to read public sentiment and act accordingly without coming across as an opportunist. Eighty per cent of Israelis wanted the opposition parties to join an emergency government in the wake of October 7th, which Gantz did. Yair Lapid, a more outspoken Netanyahu rival, did not, refusing to enter the government so long as two far-right ministers served in it. He now consistently trails Gantz in the polls. For voters who are disappointed with Netanyahu but who balk at the idea of a “leftist” candidate (none of the leading challengers actually come from the political left), Gantz has emerged as Israel’s good-enough option: he excites few but, more importantly, alienates fewer. He is the first politician in years who seems poised to move a significant share of the electorate from Netanyahu’s right-wing camp to the anti-Netanyahu camp—no small feat, given Israel’s political polarization. If elections were held today, Gantz would likely be Israel’s next Prime Minister.
Abramovich compared Gantz to the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Both men represented “an alternative, not an opposition,” Abramovich said. “That is Gantz’s strength. He is perceived as being clean of political interests.” That ability to remain above the political fray came from his parents, Gantz once told an interviewer. His mother was a Hungarian Jew who survived Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi concentration camp. When the camp was liberated, she weighed sixty-one pounds. His father, who came from Romania, worked as a carpenter in the Jewish ghetto, building coffins for the war’s dead. Gantz’s parents met in 1948 on a boat ferrying Holocaust survivors to a place that, two months later, would be recognized as the State of Israel. From them, Gantz has said, he learned that “strength and morality came into the world together. Without strength, what will we be? Without morality, who will we be?”
Despite Gantz’s security bona fides, the image he cuts in Israeli society is that of a lightweight, a political naïf. He is six feet three and has the silvery good looks of a Hollywood head of state. His nickname in the Army was Benny-huta, a play on an Aramaic word that means “slowly.” Although he posits himself as an antidote to Netanyahu—moderate where the Prime Minister caters to the extreme right; decisive where Netanyahu is endlessly waffling—his positions on the war have so far offered little contrast. Gantz and his party members supported Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, and have shown no qualms about the war’s death toll, which has reached roughly thirty-seven thousand. They were in favor of the military’s expansion into Rafah last month, and called for a decisive strike against Iran after it had launched hundreds of missiles aimed at Israel in April. They do not support a Palestinian state—but no Jewish Israeli party leader publicly does these days.
Chili Tropper, a National Unity politician who resigned from the government with Gantz on June 9th, acknowledged that, until now, Gantz and Netanyahu have generally agreed on what Tropper called “tactics,” and on the issue of a Palestinian state. “When Israelis look at what Hamas has done to Kfar Aza, Be’eri, and Nir Oz, they will not take a chance on having a Hamas-run state next door, which is what will end up happening” if a Palestinian state were created, Tropper told me this past week, naming some of the kibbutzim that suffered the worst of the atrocities of October 7th.
But, Tropper continued, he and Gantz disagree with Netanyahu on “strategy,” and what comes next. Netanyahu has refused to discuss what he envisions for Gaza after the war. That is no accident: Netanyahu’s extremist coalition partners won’t hear of assigning the Palestinian Authority any kind of administrative role. By contrast, Tropper said, “We want to strengthen the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria”—the West Bank—“and not destroy it like the government is doing. In Gaza, we propose to work with local Gazan forces. We have proposed the most far-reaching deal to bring the hostages home, not only because that is the right thing to do but so that we can then shift the focus of the war away from Gaza to the north,” toward fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon. Such positions were “for the good of the country,” Tropper added. But he also allowed that they were politically expedient. “The furthest that the ‘soft’ right is willing to go is to us,” he said.
Israel’s next election is officially set for October, 2026—an eternity in politics. But such dates rarely apply: the country recently had five elections in roughly four years. Israel’s opposition is hoping that Gantz’s move will help convince the more moderate voices in government to do the same. If five more of Netanyahu’s coalition members resign, this will dissolve his majority in parliament and trigger an early election. The defense minister, Yoav Gallant, is seen as perhaps willing to quit; his relationship with Netanyahu has been famously icy. Gantz, in his resignation speech, made a point to single out Gallant with praise, calling him a “courageous patriot.” But other coalition members have so far proven less tractable.
Until the next election, Gantz faces a seemingly impossible task: holding on to those “soft” right voters who drifted to him in the aftermath of October 7th while maintaining the support of what’s known in Israel as the “Just not Bibi” camp. Gantz has indicated that he would support any deal that would bring back the hostages, but it remains to be seen whether he would accept Hamas’s demand for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. He has echoed a widespread sentiment in Israel by speaking out against the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue warrant requests for Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, calling the prosecutor’s request a “crime of historic proportions,” and he has been careful not to present himself as purely an opponent of the Prime Minister. In his resignation speech, Gantz said that, although he may now at times protest against the government, he will do so “not out of hate.” That was seen as a jab at the “Kaplanists”—the anti-government protesters who convene every Saturday on Kaplan Street, outside the defense ministry, in Tel Aviv.
Haaretz, in an editorial, argued that Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot—another former military chief of staff and the third member of Gantz’s party to leave the wartime cabinet—must abandon their chase for a larger piece of the electorate: “It’s time for the former IDF chiefs of staff to take the reins and develop a clear ideological backbone, providing a true alternative for Israelis. Their role now is to lead the nation, not to continue making tactical moves.” The editorial called on Gantz and Eisenkot to join protesters outside the Knesset and on the beaches of Caesarea, where Netanyahu lives, and to stand with the public and “face water cannons.”
That—at least when it comes to Gantz—appears highly unlikely. “Benny plays by the rules,” Tropper said. “He is stately. For better or worse, this is who he is.” ♦