Peloni: This is an important detail review of the old conception as explored thru the military and political career of the current Defense Minister and his colleagues. It is a long essay filled with the background to much of what is being dealt with today, well worth the read with some interesting editorial reflections and queries raised towards the end.
Yoav Gallant does not want Benjamin Netanyahu’s job. But he might wind up with it anyway.
The death of a soldier dissolves some of the informality of Israeli life. Gal Eisenkot, the 25-year-old son of Gadi Eisenkot, a former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff and an observer in the war cabinet, died on a Thursday afternoon. He had to be buried on Friday morning, as soon as possible and before the early start of a winter Shabbat. There had to be infrastructure in place for family, friends, the wartime leadership of the country, and multitudes who had never known Eisenkot in life. A tent-shaded gravesite with rows of chairs and bags of earth had materialized according to a strict halachic timeline in the old cemetery in Herzliya, where cigarette-smoking policemen with the seal of the State of Israel on their black yarmulkes stalked through a network of metal crowd barriers.
At the cemetery gates, volunteers representing no organization—Israelis who had acted on an impulse to help—handed out packets of tissues as thousands of mourners filed into the spaces between the graves surrounding the tent, which rose from the cemetery’s military section.
An announcement rang out: In the event of a red alert, God forbid, we were to stand in place with our hands on top of our heads for protection. Aren’t we supposed to lie down during a rocket attack? I mused to a nearby mourner, an American-born man with a wild gray beard, wearing an IDF uniform from a distant era. Where would you lie down? he replied, pointing to the grave in front of us, resting place of Moshe Halpern, a veteran of the pre-statehood Haganah. With him?
Gal Eisenkot had been alive less than 24 hours earlier, when an urban land mine planted under the asphalt—a “tunnel bomb”—detonated during an operation to rescue two hostages in Jabaliya, in the northern Gaza Strip. These hostages did not leave Gaza alive. A photograph the IDF released later that week showed their flag-draped bodies departing a ruined street in the middle of the night on the back of a mud-green Humvee, in the company of fully kitted special forces whose faces were blurred out.
The beginning of the funeral commanded an awesome silence from a vast crowd, a national cross section made of sturdy aging men wearing caps with the insignia of a dozen IDF units and middle-aged parents with their teenage children, dressed in jeans and cargo shorts and black sunglasses. Between the bird cries and the whoosh of circling helicopters, under the glare of an unseasonably hot morning, the father, sister, and close friends of the dead man gasped to steady themselves as they struggled through brief and disbelieving eulogies, every voice a pain-stricken battle against the unimaginable fact of even being there.
The only exception was the heroically steady Benny Gantz, the former IDF chief of staff. “When we approved plans we knew their meaning,” Gantz said in his remarks. “We knew that the arrows on the maps could become arrows to the heart of good and dear families.” Sending the children of your friends and colleagues to their deaths was part of the holy and awful work of Israel’s survival: “Blessed is the land whose sons are like Gal.” After Gantz spoke, a bone-thin old man in a loose-fitting olive uniform put on an orange pair of gardening gloves and untied the bags of earth.
Within the anguished graveside blur of family and battle comrades and cabinet ministers, Benjamin Netanyahu became distinguishable only when he was called to lay a black memorial wreath. He looked ashen, defeated, long lines streaking his face, mouth in a half-scowl, eyes retreating into his head. The prime minister and a small security detail rapidly snaked its way to the back of the tent.
Towering amid the graveside crowd was Yoav Gallant, the defense minister. Since Oct. 7, the only outfit Gallant has worn is a Uniqlo-style double-breasted black shirt with black buttons, open enough at the top to reveal a black undershirt, as well as black pants held up with a military nylon black belt and black dress shoes as featureless as wooden clogs. The voidlike uniform communicates mournfulness, gravity, and perhaps a note of penance from the retired general and 30-year IDF veteran, who was Israel’s top civilian security official on the deadliest day in its history. That he continues wearing black means the goals of the war haven’t been achieved yet, which means there are still a quarter-million internally displaced, 350,000 soldiers mobilized, and 130 people in Hamas captivity. It means there are still Israelis dying in Gaza nearly every day.
When it was his turn to lay a wreath, Gallant, whose wife is a retired lieutenant colonel and whose children have served in special forces units, knelt at the grave, rose, spent an endless second staring down at the blank vessel that encased the son of a close colleague who had died on their watch, and then executed a sharp 90-degree military turn before merging back into the crowd.
Eisenkot, Gantz, Gallant and Netanyahu have been at the highest levels of their country’s leadership for much of the past 15 years. The funeral in Herzliya was only the latest and starkest confrontation with the reality they’d made. The sons of Israel’s founding generation had squandered a national patrimony that it might be too late to recover—a feeling and a reality of optimism, an ability to see the world clearly and to meet its challenges no matter what that required, ownership of a national destiny that Jews had no choice but to control themselves. Now they can only regain it all through months or even years of violence, and at the expense of their own children’s lives.
But these days, the war cabinet barely functions. Most everyone believes that the only three people who really matter are Netanyahu and Gallant, both of the Likud Party, and Gantz, who joined an emergency unity government the week after the Oct. 7 massacre (the final two members, observers Eisenkot and Ron Dermer, are backers of Gantz and Netanyahu, respectively). These people do not work well together and don’t seem to like each other. Netanyahu reportedly barred Gallant from attending a late December meeting with the country’s intelligence chiefs, and the two Likudniks have repeatedly declined to appear before the press together. When Israel’s plans for postwar Gaza, as well as a possible commission of inquiry into the army’s Oct. 7 failings, were raised before the full security cabinet in early January, the session plunged into a shouting match between IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi and far-right cabinet ministers. Gantz and Gallant leapt to Halevi’s defense; Netanyahu stood by as his coalition partners assailed the wartime leader of Israel’s military.
The war cabinet holds regular, highly tense meetings with families of the over 130 hostages still in Gaza. Within this high-stakes emotional maelstrom, “Gantz is somebody who people like to identify with,” one insider who has been present at these meetings said—a sharp contrast with Netanyahu, who often comes across as distant, badgering, or self-concerned. “[Gantz] speaks and he looks like Rabin.” Israel’s always unreliable polls show him as an early favorite for postwar prime minister. But as a key theorist of the failed multi-billion-dollar defensive barrier that Hamas breached on Oct. 7, it is hard to see Gantz transcending his image as an unexciting centrist mainstay, especially at a moment when the establishment he represents has sunk to all-time lows in credibility.
Gallant “is perceived to be very trustworthy, if not as cuddly as Gantz,” the source said of the hostage families’ reactions to the defense minister. “The way he speaks, and as a persona—he’s less lovable. But when he speaks his messages are respected. People don’t start shouting at him. He’s not polarizing. He comes across as someone who’s very professional. It doesn’t go beyond this. People don’t say, ‘oh, we love you.’”
Those familiar with Gallant’s thinking do not believe he wants Netanyahu’s job, though in the unknowable chaos of post-Oct. 7 Israeli politics he might wind up with it anyway. In a post-Netanyahu scenario, Gallant would be one figure capable of holding together a simultaneously chastened and energized secular right. If the war ends with Yahia Sinwar dead and Hezbollah pushed beyond the Litani, more credit would go to Gallant than to Netanyahu or Gantz.
It is possible to see the glimmer of Gallant’s future appeal. If there is anyone in Israeli wartime leadership who evokes a lost era of national power and confidence, it is Gallant, who issues dire predictions to the enemy in the short, grave, punctuated sentences of someone who really means it. “If Hezbollah wants to go up one level, we will go up five,” Gallant declared during a visit to the Lebanese border on Dec. 17, two weeks before an Israeli airstrike killed Hamas political chief Saleh al-Arouri in the Hezbollah stronghold of South Beirut, an attack reportedly carried out without prior warning to the U.S. Hamas fighters who are counting the days until the IDF withdraws from Gaza, Gallant said on Jan. 4, “need to change the count until the end of their lives.”
In these moments, Gallant is a Jewish war chief beamed in from the late ’70s, or maybe from the mid-’50s, or maybe from the time of the Shoftim themselves. Whether that is what Gallant really is relates to the question of what Israel now is—whether Oct. 7 has reawakened an ancient knowledge of the national condition, or exposed everything the country has lost.
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