Benny Gantz

Benny Gantz is an Israeli security hawk who entered the war cabinet of Benjamin Netanyahu, his rival, during the Israel-Hamas War. When he joined Netanyahu’s government in the aftermath of the terrorist attack of October 7, 2023, he was seen by many Israelis and outsiders as the “grown-up in the room,” according to a Haaretz correspondent writing for The New York Times. Gantz is a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and served as its chief of staff from 2011 to 2015. He entered politics in 2018 to challenge Netanyahu, unsuccessfully, as prime minister; from 2020 to 2022 he served as the country’s defense minister.

Early life and enlistment in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)

Gantz was born in 1959 in Kfar Ahim, a cooperative agricultural community in central Israel. The village, built atop a Palestinian village destroyed in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, had been established by Hungarian-speaking Jewish immigrants who had survived the Holocaust. Malka and Nahum Gantz, Gantz’s parents, were among its founders. Gantz enlisted in the IDF in 1977 and joined the Paratroopers Brigade. He graduated two years later from the IDF officer school and became a company commander in the brigade.

Military career

Gantz rose through the military’s ranks and played significant roles in major military campaigns. In 1991, for instance, he led Operation Solomon, which airlifted 14,500 Ethiopian Jews into Israel, saving them from famine and war at a time when the Ethiopian government was prohibiting them from emigrating. In 1994 Gantz was in charge of restoring security to the city of Hebron after Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish extremist, killed 29 Palestinian worshippers at a holy site frequented by both Jews and Muslims. In 1999, in the final year of Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, Gantz became a commander in the Liaison Unit, which coordinates with foreign forces in operations outside Israel. He oversaw the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon the following year, and on May 24 he was in the final convoy to cross the border, giving the order for the gate to be closed and locked. He was soon after appointed commander of the IDF’s Judea and Samaria Division, which oversees IDF activity in the West Bank, just days before the outbreak of the second intifada. In 2002 he became commander of the Northern Region Command, which oversees IDF activity along Israel’s border with Lebanon and Syria.

As commander of the IDF Ground Forces, a position he took in 2005, Gantz reentered Lebanon during the 2006 Lebanon War to recover two soldiers who had been captured by Hezbollah. Over the course of 34 days, Israeli attacks (including those carried out by airborne and naval forces) killed at least 1,100 people, most of whom were civilians, and displaced about one million others. The conflict failed to free the abducted soldiers and ended in controversy. The Winograd Commission, which was convened to investigate the conduct of the campaign, issued a report in 2008 that was highly critical of both military and political leadership during the conflict. Among its recommendations was the creation during conflicts of a small war cabinet, comprising members with military experience rather than political figures. Gantz later demanded that the recommendation be implemented after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War in 2023.

In 2007 he served in Washington, D.C., as Israel’s military attaché. He returned to Israel in 2009 as the IDF’s deputy chief of staff and became chief of staff in 2011. During his tenure at the IDF’s highest rank, Israeli forces launched two major campaigns in the Gaza Strip: Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012 and Operation Protective Edge in 2014. A video for his election campaign in 2019 bragged that “parts of Gaza were sent back to the Stone Age” in Operation Protective Edge, a highly destructive conflict that hit thousands of targets in the Gaza Strip and left some 2,100 Palestinians dead.

Political career

Gantz retired from the military in 2015 and made a foray into the business world. Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister since 2009, had overseen years of stalemate on socioeconomic matters and became increasingly polarizing in 2018 when police recommended criminal corruption charges against him. When early elections were called later that year, Gantz formed a new political party, Israel Resilience, which called for domestic reform while emphasizing the security credentials of the party’s leadership—a platform observers believed would attract centrists disillusioned with Netanyahu. Gantz allied with Yair Lapid to form a joint electoral list called Blue and White (in reference to the colors of the Israeli flag).

The elections, held in April 2019, produced no clear winner, sending the country to elections twice more during the following year. The third set of elections, held in March 2020, also proved indecisive. In a historic development, both Yisrael Beiteinu, a far-right party, and the Joint List, an electoral list representing the interests of Palestinian citizens of Israel, endorsed Gantz for prime minister. But as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, Gantz agreed to form an emergency unity government under Netanyahu, while a portion of Blue and White headed by Lapid left the party to lead the opposition. Under this arrangement, Netanyahu and Gantz would alternate in the position of prime minister, with Gantz serving first as deputy prime minister and defense minister and taking over as prime minister in November 2021.

The unity government collapsed in late 2020, before Gantz could take his turn as prime minister. He remained defense minister when Naftali Bennett, leading a unity coalition, succeeded in unseating Netanyahu in 2021 and retained Gantz, a partner in the coalition, in the new cabinet. When Bennett’s broad but fragile government collapsed in 2022, Gantz sought to stave off Netanyahu’s return by forming a joint electoral list, called National Unity, that included Gideon Saʿar, a former top member of Netanyahu’s Likud party who had defected and formed his own party. But Netanyahu emerged victorious in elections, forming a controversial new coalition—the “most religious and hard-line government in Israel’s history,” according to the BBC—in December 2022 and bringing Gantz’s tenure as defense minister to an end.

Gantz sat in the opposition and was a vocal critic of Netanyahu’s new government and its polarizing attempts in 2023 to change Israel’s basic laws. In January he referred to the plan as a constitutional “coup d’état” with a “fatal impact on national security,” and in late March he took Netanyahu to task for attempting to fire Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a retired military general who had also raised concerns. (Gallant was reinstated in April.) The country saw unprecedented instability as many Israelis, including thousands of army reservists, took part in strikes and protests; in August senior military officials warned lawmakers that the readiness of the IDF for war had begun to weaken.

On October 7, 2023, the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an attack on Israel that killed some 1,200 people, making it the deadliest day for Israel since its independence. As Netanyahu drew intense scrutiny for his government’s failure to prevent the attacks, he called for an emergency unity cabinet that would stabilize the government during the Israel-Hamas War. On October 11 Gantz agreed to form a unity government with Netanyahu, on the condition that Netanyahu implement the Winograd Commission’s recommendation to form a small war cabinet. Netanyahu, Gantz, and Gallant served as the war cabinet’s primary decision-making members. Gadi Eisenkot (Eizenkot), a former IDF chief of staff from Gantz’s party, and Ron Dermer, an American-born Israeli diplomat-turned-minister from Netanyahu’s party, took part as observers. Polls showed a surge in support for Gantz over Netanyahu during the war, while observers noted that Netanyahu’s leadership now hinged on Gantz for its survival.