Benny Gantz’s exit may reduce Benjamin Netanyahu’s room to move, but it won’t bring down 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.

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.

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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?