Fearing disaster for Israel, Gantz issues ultimatum, but lacks the votes

The State of Israel is “heading for the rocks,” War Minister Benny Gantz told the nation on Saturday.

A small minority of “fanatics” have taken the helm, Gantz warned.

And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, once an “Israeli leader and patriot,” allowed them to do so, putting his personal and political interests ahead of the existential needs of the state, Gantz charged.

The leader of the National Unity party, a former IDF chief of staff who failed to oust Netanyahu at the polls several times in recent years, has joined forces with him in a war coalition emergency days after the devastating Hamas invasion and massacre in southern Israel on October 7. the benefits of that partnership – including a true spirit of unity and the initial ability to avoid mistakes in the ongoing war against Hamas – have long since dissipated, Gantz said. And now Netanyahu is failing to carry out the “acts of leadership necessary to secure victory.”

Gantz’s televised speech came just three days after Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a member of the prime minister’s Likud party, issued a similar denunciation of Netanyahu’s governance, or lack thereof. Thus, Netanyahu’s two ministerial colleagues in the three-member war cabinet have now declared to the public that the prime minister is leading Israel into disaster.

Gallant demanded that Netanyahu publicly rule out long-term Israeli civilian or military governance over Gaza, as demanded by far-right elements of the coalition, saying he “simply will not accept” that solution. Gantz, for his part, asked Netanyahu to commit to six specific strategic goals for the nation, and warned that his party would leave the government if the prime minister did not do so by June 8.

On the face of it, Gantz has more political clout than Gallant (who was fired by Netanyahu 14 months ago, when he rightly warned that the coalition’s ultra-controversial judicial reform plans were undermining Israel’s security , and who was reinstated two weeks later). Without the eight seats in the 120-member Knesset that Gantz’s largely centrist National Unity Party gives to the coalition, Netanyahu would be returned to the 64-member right-wing, far-right, ultra-Orthodox bloc with which he won the elections of November 2022, and therefore more openly vulnerable to the pressures and demands of his extremist partners. Such a government risks losing international support even more quickly than the current government and facing far greater pressure from key global partners, including Washington.

But the fact is that Netanyahu has turned to the far right and the ultra-Orthodox, even since his coalition took power. And although every political poll since the October disaster indicates that Gantz would win the election if it were held today, he does not currently have the Knesset numbers to bring down this coalition.

It would be almost impossible for Netanyahu to agree to Gantz’s six strategic demands, even if he wanted to. And the Prime Minister has long made it clear that he does not want to do that.

Gantz asks him, for example, to engage in possible normalization with Saudi Arabia. But this is conditional by the Saudis on at least some progress towards a Palestinian state, and if Netanyahu agreed to it, he would lose the two far-right parties led by Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.

Likewise, Gantz asked him to adopt “a framework of (military/national) service in which all Israelis will serve the state.” But this laudable and necessary goal clashes with the two ultra-Orthodox parties, whose young male voters are currently almost all exempt from any form of national service. These parties, too, would likely leave the coalition if Netanyahu insisted on recruiting their voters.

Gantz knows all this. He knows that Netanyahu can simply ignore his ultimatum and continue favoring far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties.

And so, despite all the sincerity and urgency with which he issued his ultimatum, and his real fears for the fate of the nation – an Israel deeply embroiled in Gaza with its hostages still in the hands of Hamas, which faces a escalation with Hezbollah across the northern border, and it’s causing a hemorrhage of global empathy and partial support in almost every area – he’s given Netanyahu a full three weeks to try to sort things out. Otherwise, “we will be forced to leave the government,” he declared with as much conviction as he could muster.

Maybe he’ll make good on his threat. Maybe he won’t. Netanyahu, who will portray him as undermining the war effort rather than seeking to save the country, can still move on.

And so it may well be that Gantz’s ostensibly dramatic ultimatum that Netanyahu fix things by June 8 is, if anything, a less potent threat than Gallant’s declaration that he will not personally accept the insistent indecision of the Prime Minister and his submission to the extremists of the coalition.

Netanyahu will continue to keep Israel’s destiny in his hands until the Knesset’s arithmetic changes. And that won’t happen unless, somewhere within this 64-member coalition bloc, a handful of MPs heed the dire warnings first issued by Gallant, one of their own, and recognize that, under Netanyahu, the ship of state is indeed heading for the rocks.