News Analysis
Though Gallant has been seemingly indispensable to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ongoing genocidal war against the Palestinian people, the Defense Minister has also been a thorn in his side when it comes to broader issues of policy.
The first major rift between the two became public only a few months after Netanyahu’s Likud Party won the fall 2022 elections. Gallant was a key to center-right balance in the mostly ultra-right wing coalition Netanyahu haed cobbled together to gain the necessary majority votes in the Knesset, Israel’s legislature, to support giving the Zionist Netanyahu another term. But despite Gallant’s backing of that fragile coalition of parties, he quickly drew fire from the prime minister for challenging the prime minister’s radical judicial constitutional reform proposal in March 2023.
Those so-called reforms would gut the power of Beit haMishpat haElyon (the Hebrew name for the Supreme Court of Israel. They would do so first by amending the process of selecting judges who sit on the court so the majority ruling party would now have the majority say in that process. A second change would allow the Knesset to override just about any ruling the high court might make. The changes would make the judges extensions of the ruling party while disabling their power to make tough decisions against either the legislature or the executive branches of government.
With Netanyahu still facing serious influence-peddling and judge-tampering criminal charges which could put him in jail for years, there was no question what these judicial changes were about. They were transparently corrupt moves to prevent him from ever being prosecuted, at least while he was still in charge.
Netanyahu received strong backing for these reforms from the far-right members of his Cabinet. Among those was Itamar Ben-Gvir, the National Security Minister, who commended Netanyahu’s power grab move as the right thing happening at the right time.
"The prime minister decided on the necessary step, and I congratulate him for that,” Ben-Gvir said at the time.
As the sole senior leadership voice in the Cabinet questioning the decision, Gallant debated the changes with Netanyahu in private unsuccessfully for the first few months of the new administration. He urged the prime minister to withdraw the draft bills which would authorize the changes from the Knesset. Since doing so quietly failed, Gallant finally went public with his adamant rejection of the proposed constitutional changes.
In a televised address to the nation on the night of March 27, 2023, Gallant declared to the public that he considered the proposed slashing of power of the judiciary as an “immediate and tangible danger” to the security of the nation. He went on to say that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) who reported to him were angry and upset over Netanyahu’s decision to move forward with the plan, with a ferocity he said he had never heard before from his troops regarding just about any issue.
Since the judicial changes would yield near-dictatorial power to the prime minister, Gallant said the reforms would make it near-impossible for the nation to take serious action when needed. That is why, he explained, this was not an issue of politics but instead of national security.
"The state of Israel's security has always been and will always be my life's mission,” Gallant told the citizens of Israel at the close of his address.
Airing his disagreement to the Israeli people was intolerable to Netanyahu. The prime minister fired Gallant within days and made immediate moves to replace him.
But then something happened that Netanyahu had not expected. Gallant’s strong base of support from the Israeli Defense Forces who report to him, those citizens who had been part of that military at one time in their lives by law, and others, rose up to demand Netanyahu reinstate Gallant or face serious consequences of his own.
Netanyahu tried to dodge their combined outcry over the firing but eventually blinked and almost immediately reinstated Gallant.
Just over six months later, Hamas launched its raid on northern Israel on October 7. Since then, Gallant and Netanyahu have been publicly joined as the two most critical members of the Cabinet in guiding the nature of the large-scale murder and mass destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Seemingly standing in lockstep with Netanyahu, only two days after the October 7 attack, Gallant notoriously declared Gazans as nothing more than “human animals”. He was also the one who told the world the IDF would be shutting off all access to water, food, and fuel to Palestinians in Gaza, sentencing them to something close to death even before the mass destruction of homes, schools, infrastructure, and hospitals which would soon come.
Since that time, Gallant proved a “good soldier” to Netanyahu in a brutal war against mostly defenseless Palestinians, resulting the murder now of well over 40,000 ordinary citizens across Israeli-occupied Gaza. Gallant also recently brought the same tactics into the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which if continued will also lay waste to much of that region.
The war in Gaza has also continued to drag on, something Netanyahu is said privately to have welcomed since it has enabled him to proceed with the judicial reform plans, dodge demands that he call for a new election over mishandling the war in general and having “allowed” Israeli prisoners to be held captive by Hamas in Gaza for longer than necessary, and evade criminal prosecution. The Israeli Defense Forces, supported by Mossad in many cases, have also expanded their military engagements well beyond the country’s borders. Those attacks led to targeted successful missions in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran, each of which in recent months included the assassination of key leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian forces.
Beyond those victories, there is also growing criticism of Israel’s defense capabilities on multiple fronts. Israeli citizens have recently protested in the streets in masses sometimes in the hundreds of thousands, in public squares in Tel Aviv and even surrounding Netanyahu’s home, demanding the military do something to bring the remaining Israeli prisoners home, regardless of the cost. Iran, with its raid earlier this year which successfully struck at least one Israeli military base, and Hezbollah, which continues to pummel Israeli strongholds in northern Israel, have continued to find holes in Israel’s vaunted air defense systems. The situation in northern Israel is sufficiently unstable and dangerous that large numbers of Israeli settlers have been evacuated from the region for months.
Then on September 15 Yemen, whose Houthi forces have been firing missiles for months at cargo ships designated as Israeli-owned or carrying the flags of pro-Israeli allies, launched what they claim is a new form of “hypersonic” missile, penetrated Israel’s Iron Dome, and blasted a crater near Kfar Daniel, located in central Israel.
Yesterday the prime minister vowed Israeli would “exact a heavy price” from the Houthis for their attack this weekend.
Netanyahu is also facing pressures notably from both the United States and United Kingdom, each of which recently throttled back on shipments of certain weaponry to Israel on the grounds they are being used to commit either genocide or other war crimes. Netanyahu continually denies those criticisms as baseless, saying his country has the “most moral army in the world”. He also throws in his ongoing rejection of any challenge to what he is doing on the grounds that Israel “has the right to defend itself” and that those who question Israel are doing so are racist and “anti-semitic”.
It is also believed more squabbling is happening within Netanyahu’s cabinet tied to all this, and with many questions as both what to do about the broadened war fronts Israel now has to defend, mostly because of its own actions, and who to blame over the inability to close out the war in Gaza and bring the remaining Israeli prisoners home. News reports say the prime minister wants a far more intense war launched against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, while Gallant is against escalating matters further, for example.
Netanyahu is also feeling multiple pushbacks from the United Nations for its actions in Gaza. Those come from multiple sources within the UN, such as from:
- The UN Security Council, which while still mostly useless in ensuring peace anywhere, did finally issue its first ruling since October 7, 2023, which ordered Israel to allow more humanitarian aid in and agree to a ceasefire.
- The International Court of Justice, which previously found a high likelihood that Israel was engaged in genocide in Gaza and recently provided an advisory opinion saying Israel is illegally occupying Gaza and the West Bank and must exit immediately.
- The vote by the General Assembly last week which for the first time granted the State of Palestine the right to be seated alongside the rest of the assembly members. The decision does not give Palestine voting rights or participation in certain debates, but the recognition afforded by this step is a big shift for the UN.
These latter moves, coupled with that the one-year anniversary of the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas in northern Israel, is probably why Benjamin Netanyahu will be traveling to the UN on September 24 to attend the organization’s first set of annual policy matter debates with the entire General Assembly.
It is against this background that leaks from Netanyahu’s Cabinet say the prime minister is about to kick Gallant out as the head of the Defense Ministry. The reasons could be he needs a “fall guy” to blame for the recent penetration of Israeli defenses by Yemen, Hezbollah, and Iran. It could be the disagreements with Gallant behind closed doors have reached a more serious tone, with the Defense Minister demanding substantial changes in strategy in Gaza, including perhaps everything from a potential ceasefire to closing down the war.
The background chatter suggests Netanyahu may be about to replace Gallant, a long-term military leader for the country, with Gideon Sa'ar. Sa'ar is a career Israeli politician with extensive high-level governmental experience, none of which is related to military or major security matters. He served as Minister of Education from 2009 to 2013, Minister of the Interior from 2013 to 2014, as Deputy Prime Minister for part of 2021, and Minister of Justice from 2021 to 2022.
Netanyahu has publicly denied he is replacing Gallant, but that could be simply a stall while he ensures Gideon Sa'ar will follow his directives once appointed.
As to timing, if Netanyahu does install Sa'ar in place of Gallant, it could happen either just before the prime minister attends the UN General Assembly meeting, or shortly before the one-year anniversary of the October 7, 2023, Hamas raid.