‘Old soldiers never die,” say the English, “they just fade away.” That is what will now happen to Benny Gantz.
Gantz’s already truncated Knesset faction just lost its most popular member, Gadi Eisenkot. The following day, Gantz’s National Unity faction lost its second-most popular member, Matan Kahana. Before that, it had lost Gideon Sa’ar and another three of its 12 members.
Eisenkot and Gantz have been friends for decades and will remain such, but they disagreed on their party’s game plan for next year’s general election. We will get to those differences shortly as we try to assess Eisenkot’s promise. But before that, we must understand the rise and fall of Benny Gantz.
TALL, HANDSOME, and low-key, Benny Gantz had a good start in politics, as well as a fine measure of luck, with an ad-hoc formation of centrist parties making him its leader.
His first task was, therefore, to keep that package intact, a test he quickly failed.
The federated party, Blue and White, won a staggering 35 seats in 2019, equal to Netanyahu’s. However, as the inconclusive election produced more inconclusive elections, the federation unraveled, after Gantz argued (rightly) that the pandemic required joining Netanyahu’s government while his partners, Yair Lapid and Moshe Ya’alon, disagreed.
Gantz’s test was not about the choice he would make in that dilemma but about his ability to convince, to charm, and to win over his adversaries. To negotiate. To lead through compromise. That’s what politics is all about, an art about which he proved clueless.
The same disability surfaced last year, when Gantz failed to keep on board his next running mate, Gideon Sa’ar, who jumped Gantz’s ship to become Netanyahu’s nominal foreign minister (the real one is Ron Dermer). Now that disability has resurfaced for the third time, making it plain that Benny Gantz is unfit for politics and is now doomed to fade away.
It’s nothing to be ashamed of.
Most people are not suited for politics, especially retired generals. Where they come from, things are done by command, hierarchy, and rank, not by persuasion, negotiation, compromise, and deal. That’s why Britain has turned not one single general into its prime minister since the Duke of Wellington’s failed stints, nearly two centuries ago.
Israel’s unique circumstances have sent platoons of generals into politics, but almost none fared any better than Gantz, from Amnon Lipkin-Shahak and Moshe Ya’alon to Yoav Galant and Shaul Mofaz.
The problem with the generals who went into politics, certainly in the case of Gantz, was not only their deficit of political skill but also their lack of national vision.
Gantz had six years to say something meaningful about any of the basic issues that trouble most citizens – taxation, education, health, crime, religion, political reform, or the cost of living, to name but a few. He never did.
To watch from its corridors of power a country as politically flawed and socially disjointed as ours, and not say anything original, insightful, visionary, or inspiring about its problems and their solutions, should disqualify any candidate from aspiring to lead the Jewish state.
That is why Gantz, hardly a year after polls suggested he was set to be elected prime minister, will now be, at best, the next election’s “also ran” and the next prime minister’s fifth wheel.
Does this mean that Gadi Eisenkot is inevitably headed the same way? It doesn’t.
CHANCES THAT Eisenkot’s political aftermath will be the same as Gantz’s are high. At 65, he doesn’t have the decades it took Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin to learn the secrets of the political craft after entering the public arena in their 40s.
So what makes Eisenkot's different?
Still, some things make Eisenkot different. The first is his personality.
Eisenkot is a chubby, affable, and unassuming man, the type that the post-Netanyahu era demands, an antithesis to the era of charisma, machismo, bravado, and swagger that Benjamin Netanyahu personified and inspired.
Israel can now use such a humble successor the way it did when the woefully uncharismatic, but very effective, Levi Eshkol and Yitzhak Shamir succeeded David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin, respectively.
Then there is his patriotism. Yes, generals are always patriots, but Eisenkot – when the position of IDF chief of General Staff opened in 2011 after a series of scandals – chose to hand the job over to Gantz and become his deputy in order to disabuse Israel from another nasty race.
It was a show of leadership by example, humility, and sacrifice rarely seen here, especially among generals and politicians.
Such an attitude is exactly what the current opposition requires: a person who will think less about himself and more about the collective need, which, in the case of this opposition, is to create a whole that will be larger than the sum of its parts.
That is how Likud was born, when Menachem Begin added five other parties to his party, Herut, and then together they unseated Labor. This is the strategy that Eisenkot advocated, Gantz resisted, and Netanyahu’s removal demands. In taking this stance, Eisenkot showed he is learning politics faster than others.
Moreover, if anyone can emerge as a lynchpin between Naftali Bennet, Avigdor Liberman, and Yair Lapid, it may well be the disarming man who has already shown he is not obsessed with being number one.
Yet beyond and above all these, Eisenkot may emerge as Israel’s next leader because he has become a symbol of Middle Israel’s agonies, having lost, in the current war, a son and a nephew, Gal Eisenkot and Yogev Pazi, both of whom fell in Gaza.
Never self-important and always natural and humane, Gadi Eisenkot was not ashamed to sob in front of the whole nation while eulogizing his 25-year-old son over his open grave. The general’s tears, millions felt, were not only his. They were everyone’s. So are his hopes.
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarrim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.