Gantz’s exit may reduce Netanyahu’s room to move, but it won’t bring down the government

In October 2021 – nearly two years before the Hamas attack from the Gaza Strip that killed 1200 people in Israel – Bezalel Smotrich stood in Israel’s parliament and, finding himself heckled by MPs representing the Arab minority, told them: “You’re here by mistake. It’s a mistake that [David] Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw you out in 1948.”

Smotrich, in opposition at the time, has since become a cabinet minister. His main portfolio is finance, but to secure his support, he was also given a special role in the Defence Ministry, where he is replacing military control of the Israeli-occupied West Bank with civilian political control.

Benjamin Netanyahu (left) and Benny Gantz in October.Credit: AP

After the Hamas attack on October 7, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approached leaders of the country’s opposition to form a united front. One opposition leader, Yair Lapid, agreed to join on one condition: that the parties led by Smotrich and another far-right minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, be removed from the government.

The other main opposition leader, Benny Gantz, imposed no such condition. Along with Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, he became one of three leaders of the “war cabinet”, a triumvirate superimposed on the existing coalition government.

Last week, Gantz quit the war cabinet, citing Netanyahu’s failure to develop a postwar plan for Gaza and accusing the prime minister of prolonging the war to avoid a dual reckoning with Israel’s voters and its justice system.

Gantz’s resignation may reduce Netanyahu’s room for manoeuvre, but it cannot bring down the government because Gantz was never truly part of the governing coalition. Indeed, most analysts saw him as a fig leaf for that coalition’s uglier rhetoric and beliefs, which in Ben-Gvir’s case include the desire to establish new Jewish settlements atop Gaza’s razed cities. Gantz and Gallant were also seen as more sympathetic to the Biden administration and its increasingly desperate attempts to control events in the region.

Israeli coalitions rarely serve out a full term, but the next scheduled date for an election is in 2026. What happens between now and then depends largely on what Israeli politicians understand “the job” to be.

Is it, as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have proclaimed, to ensure the supremacy of Jewish Israelis (the “lords of the land”, as Ben-Gvir puts it) at whatever cost may befall the Palestinian population – be it death, expulsion or continued subjugation?

On his way out the door, Gantz contrasted Netanyahu’s talk of “total victory” over Hamas with his own conception of “real victory”, which initially means supporting the Biden administration’s “Israeli proposal” for a ceasefire and the release of the remaining hostages, and subsequently elections and an inquiry into how the October 7 attack happened.

Even if last year hadn’t been the 50th anniversary of what Israelis call the Yom Kippur War, every Israeli would know that such inquiries seldom end well for sitting governments. The inquiry into the 1973 war did not find then prime minister Golda Meir or her defence minister, Moshe Dayan, responsible for the failures leading up to it. But the public’s reaction to those findings ended their political careers.

Gantz’s “real victory” agenda is very different from Smotrich’s or Ben-Gvir’s. But it is still essentially inward-looking. Yet Jewish Israelis are not alone in the land.

The Biden administration has talked about Palestinian statehood, even as European countries have moved to recognise it and Australia has toyed with doing so.

But ultimately the question is whether it is considered part of “finishing the job” to realise Palestinian self-determination. That would mean ending the occupation and the settlement enterprise in the territories and scrapping dozens of discriminatory laws within Israel itself, to create peace and security between the river and the sea dependent not on military and ethnic supremacy but on codified equal rights for all.

If Palestinians do not live in their ancestral homeland by “mistake”, as Smotrich insists they do, then realising their rights must also involve a full and thorough investigation into the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and justice for those civilians whose lives have been destroyed. As Washington prepares for the rest of this rollercoaster presidential election year, it is hard to see the Biden administration paying much attention to such imperatives.

The result is likely to be that – once again – the world settles for a pause and talk of justice until the next bout of mass destruction, deferring the dream of Palestine until it explodes anew, and with it the demand on all sides to “finish the job”.

As for Netanyahu, his opposition to the Biden deal comes with one eye on his far-right coalition partners and the other on the US political calendar. He clearly believes that if the Gaza offensive continues, his coalition will remain intact, and that if he can tough it out until November and Donald Trump is re-elected, pressure from the White House to negotiate with any Palestinians will disappear. As bets go, it’s a multi, but he has seen them fall in his favour before.

Maher Mughrabi is an editor and senior writer. He is former features editor and foreign editor.

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