In the middle of a 13-months-long, two-theatre war in Gaza and Lebanon, and a spiralling military engagement with Iran, the prime minister of Israel saw fit to dismiss the defence minister, Yoav Gallant. In his place he appointed a career politician, one Israel Katz, who was the foreign minister – not that anyone in Israel noticed him then.
Katz has zero defence credentials, zero credibility with the military top brass, and zero experience in managing such a huge and complex system. That’s on-brand Netanyahu; under him, four defence ministers have been fired or resigned.
This is not an isolated event. Netanyahu has always surrounded himself with eminently underqualified sycophants who never challenge or threaten him. But now, after a series of military successes and high-profile assassinations – including the Hezbollah secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah; Hamas’s political chair, Ismail Haniyeh, and its leader, Yahya Sinwar – Netanyahu felt empowered to dismiss Gallant, a career major-general turned politician. This recklessness must be viewed in two contexts: Netanyahu’s state of mind and the timing of the dismissal.
In terms of his mindset, Netanyahu has delusions of grandeur; he believes he can reshape the Middle East by toppling the regime in Iran, and remaking Israel through an authoritarian constitutional coup. He is afflicted by a Nero syndrome, which makes him ignore the fact his country is on fire, and an acute case of Louis XIV syndrome, wherein he actually believes that he and the state are one – L’État, c’est moi – and Israel cannot survive without him.
As for the timing. Netanyahu has always detested Gallant and his popularity. He tried and failed to fire him in March 2023. He embarrassingly retracted the decision after half a million people took to the streets, and he has been waiting for another opportunity. Gallant had become the US’s first point of contact, and Netanyahu, ever paranoid, was convinced his defence minister was working to undermine him. Timing this firing to coincide with US election day was clearly an attempt at diversion. Gallant also supports an equal conscription law, by which students at yeshivas (Orthodox seminaries), who are now exempt from military service, will have to enlist. The ultra-Orthodox parties recently threatened to vote against the state budget over this issue, which by law brings down the government. Finally, Netanyahu probably wants to draw attention away from a new scandal engulfing his office over the last few days regarding the illegal dissemination of secret intelligence documents, in order to disrupt a hostage deal.
On Tuesday evening, as protesting crowds started converging on the defence ministry in Tel Aviv, Gallant made a statement detailing the three reasons behind his summary dismissal. First, he said, everyone should honour mandatory and universal conscription and end the political haggling every few years of extending “special exemptions” to yeshiva students. This is a do or die demand for the ultra-Orthodox politicians who hold Netanyahu’s coalition together. The exorbitantly high proportion of ultra-Orthodox Jews murdered in the Holocaust led David Ben-Gurion in January 1951 to issue an exemption from the draft to 400 yeshiva students in an attempt to assist the Haredi community in rebuilding. That number has mushroomed today to 66,000, and the glaring inequality of ultra-Orthodox parties getting an inordinate share of government spending for their constituents while avoiding service has created a rift in Israeli society.
Second, the country’s highest moral obligation and responsibility is to get the hostages home. A deal – which Gallant has supported since December 2023 – was and is possible “but someone was and is blocking it”, he said, directly referring to Netanyahu, who has refused deals, reneged on deals he previously consented to, and is now under fire regarding the leaking of intelligence documents, some reportedly partially doctored or even forged, to the German Bild and the British Jewish Chronicle newspapers. Both Qatar, a relentless mediator, and the US, as a facilitator, have complained for months that Netanyahu was stalling, retracting his own proposals and then outright refusing to engage in negotiations because they included a ceasefire and then a postwar political framework for Gaza. Gallant supported the package. Two weeks ago he wrote a letter to Netanyahu and cabinet members arguing that the war is being conducted “without a compass” and without clear and coherent political goals.
Gallant has also called for the establishment of a state commission of inquiry that would investigate and understand why the events of 7 October 2023 occurred. Netanyahu has never taken responsibility for the worst calamity in Israel’s history and refuses to be held accountable.
With the US election looming, Netanyahu felt that it was a gamble worth taking and the US would not make a big issue of it. Now that Trump has won, that outcome seems likely. His only miscalculation may be underestimating the extent of the domestic uproar and fury.
Alon Pinkas served as Israel’s consul general in New York from 2000 to 2004. He is now a columnist for Haaretz
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