On May 18, Benny Gantz held a press conference during which he issued an ultimatum to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Asking the most extremist members of the war cabinet to propose a viable plan for the post-war in Gaza, to provide solutions to Israelis displaced in northern Israel by clashes with Hezbollah and to negotiate the return of hostages, the minister without portfolio announced that he would resign on June 8, if his conditions were not met.
They weren’t. While he had planned a press conference this Saturday, the release of four hostages during a brutal and deadly IDF operation south of Gaza City, which killed nearly 300 Palestinians and injured 400 others, forced to postpone speaking out. It was therefore on Sunday evening that Benny Gantz announced his resignation, deepening the crisis in the national unity government that the general, responsible for operations in Lebanon during the 2006 war, had joined after October 7.
After the attacks carried out by Hamas, the Israeli general agreed to enter a government of national unity on the condition that the extremist ministers of Jewish Force and Mafdal be removed from military decisions. Following the formation of a small cabinet without members of the far-right, Gantz joined the government, supporting the far-right government coalition with the limited parliamentary forces of his political party. At the time, the main opponent of Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies, Yair Lapid, refused to enter the government as long as ministers from far-right Zionist parties were there. Rejected by Netanyahu, he did not wish to participate in the restricted war cabinet.
Disagreeing with Netanyahu on the future of Gaza, Gantz called for entrusting the technical government of the enclave to a Palestinian entity and not subjecting the enclave to the regime of an Israeli military dictatorship, as desired by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, a solution he considered far too costly. After the publication of an investment and recolonization project for the enclave, produced by the Prime Minister’s Office, which planned to transform Gaza into a vast free trade zone, open to investments from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Gantz had expressed his disagreement.
By leaving the government, Gantz deprives the prime minister of the parliamentary forces of his small political party Hosen Yisrael and of the coalition he formed with New Hope, Gideon Sa’ar’s party, thus withdrawing from Netanyahu a support of twelve seats in the Knesset. With the departure of Gantz, the war cabinet thus lost its raison d’être; formed to exclude the extreme right from military decisions, the war cabinet is thus devitalized. Its dissolution should be recorded in the coming days, conferring de facto direction of military operations to Netanyahu and a group of close advisers. If Gantz, who had already participated in the government of national unity during the COVID-19 pandemic, was never a combative opponent of Benjamin Netanyahu, and his departure entrusted the Zionist far-right with the conduct of military operations.
If the Netanyahu government is deprived of part of its moderate support, it remains in a favorable parliamentary position and is not threatened in the Knesset, but loses part of the legitimacy offered to it by the standard of national unity . While four hostages have been released, at the cost of a new massacre in Gaza, the movement for the hostages could emerge galvanized from the situation as Gantz officially joins the opposition forces which is trying to capitalize on the mobilizations against Netanyahu and calls for new elections. Gantz’s resignation could thus consolidate the opposition to Netanyahu without, however, succeeding in forcing him to hold new elections.
However, today’s debates on the renewal of the exemption from military service for Orthodox Jews could force Netanyahu to hold new elections: if it were repealed in the Knesset, it would cause the Prime Minister to lose part of of its electoral, religious, messianic base and supporter of complete colonization of Palestine. Even in this hypothesis, if Netanyahu decided to once again call on Israelis to vote, it would in any case be unlikely that the Zionist parties of the center would manage to form a majority as Israeli public opinion has become so radicalized. As Louis Imbert points out in Le Monde, “ the head of government can still prevent his opponents from obtaining a majority of 60 seats out of 120 in the Knesset, prolonging an endless cycle of elections started in 2018. These opponents remain obsessed with the “white whale” of Israeli political life : around twenty seats presumed to be taken in the so-called “moderate right” electorate, religious people, former supporters of “King Bibi” Netanyahu, conservatives frightened by the excesses of his allies “.
While the Gaza war and the October 7 attacks have fueled the hardening of Israeli public opinion, united by a now broad colonial consensus and aligned with an increasingly hardline security line, the centrists would be forced to lead a campaign very difficult on the slogans of the extreme right. The resignation of Benny Gantz is a symptom: that of a crisis at the top of the Netanyahu government at the same time as the colonial and genocidal abyss into which the Israeli state is sinking.
