On Tuesday evening Israel time, as millions of American voters were still making their way to the polls, tens of thousands of Israelis were pouring into the streets to protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to fire Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, providing him only with a terse letter citing “difference of opinion and lack of trust.”
Gallant is not a particularly popular politician among the crowds who regularly protest against Netanyahu and his government’s policies. A former high-ranking military officer, Gallant is widely considered a hawk, and his comments about a total siege over Gaza contributed to the decision by the ICC prosecutor to issue a warrant for his arrest. But even those who vehemently disagree with Gallant tend to respect him. Even-keeled, reserved and often taciturn, he projects an image of no-nonsense, laconic integrity and deep commitment to the State of Israel. Among Netanyahu’s coalition of extreme nationalists, fundamentalist Messianists, ultra-Orthodox, and cynical self-serving politicians, he is seen as a responsible adult in the government.
Almost all of Gallant’s positions pose a threat to the stability of Netanyahu’s coalition.
Thus, the opposition was enraged when, in the midst of Israel’s longest and most complex war—with heightened fears of an imminent Iranian attack, the growing toll of dead and wounded, and with 101 hostages remaining in Hamas tunnels in Gaza—Netanyahu replaced Gallant with Yisrael Katz, a career Likud politician who has no experience in senior military command.
Actually, the dismissal has been coming for a long time. In March 2023, Netanyahu announced that he intended to fire his defense minister because Gallant opposed the judicial reform sought by Netanyahu’s government. Even the mere threat of firing him resulted in widespread demonstrations that nearly shut down the entire country, and Netanyahu had to backtrack.
But by Tuesday, Netanyahu knew that he had to fire Gallant if he wanted to stay in power, and he believed that the timing was right.
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Almost all of Gallant’s positions pose a threat to the stability of Netanyahu’s coalition.
Writing in Haaretz, military correspondent Amos Harel noted earlier this week that there has been a consensus in the defense establishment over the progress of the war. “All senior [security] officials…have been speaking in near-unison for a week,” he wrote. “After a dizzying series of military and intelligence successes in the past three months, the war in the Gaza Strip and in Lebanon has just about exhausted itself…it would be best to try to reach agreements that will end the fighting in the north and south and include the release of all hostages.”
However, Harel continued, “Whenever there is even the slightest shadow of a chance to advance a deal, the prime minister makes sure to shoot it down immediately, by means of a leak or a recording.” Netanyahu’s objection to a cease-fire, he observed, stems from the need to placate the extreme nationalists in his government, who are opposed to any such deals.
Gallant is also in favor of a speedy return of the remaining hostages held by Hamas since October 7, 2023, even if this means ending the war. However, once again, Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners have threatened to quit the coalition and bring down the government if Netanyahu agrees to any deal.
No less threatening to Netanyahu, Gallant has called for the immediate establishment of a state commission of inquiry into the failures that led to the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. Netanyahu opposes establishing a commission until the end of the war because, he argues, it would be destabilizing to the country. It does not escape anyone’s attention that the commission would probably lay much of the blame on Netanyahu.
More immediately, Gallant is opposed to impending legislation to exempt the ultra-Orthodox from military service. He has made it clear that he believes that this would create a crisis among the already-exhausted and increasingly bitter active duty soldiers and reservists, who resent that the ultra-Orthodox are not sharing the burden of service. But once again, passage of this law is crucial to Netanyahu’s government’s stability, since the two ultra-Orthodox parties in his government have also threatened to bring down the coalition if the law is not passed soon.
Lastly, by Tuesday, news had broken that a Netanyahu spokesman and four others had been recently arrested for stealing classified information from the military and leaking deliberately distorted versions of this information to foreign media in order to present ostensible security justifications for Netanyahu’s decision to stall hostage negotiations, and that another criminal investigation was underway regarding alleged tampering with minutes of government meetings dealing with the handling of the first hours and days of the Gaza War. But Netanyahu managed to overshadow this by announcing the dismissal at 7:55 pm, just five minutes before the 8 p.m. evening news broadcast.
Netanyahu’s supporters lauded his decision, arguing that Gallant had undermined Israel’s democracy and encouraged its enemies by opposing Netanyahu. “There’s a clear alignment between the protesters supporting Yoav Gallant in the streets and the disconnect between the prime minister and the defense minister,” wrote Naveh Dromi at Ynetnews.com. “Both leaders have known all along that Gallant served as a representative of the opposition within the government, and the National Security Cabinet.”
In contrast, criticism from every other side contended that Netanyahu’s decision to fire Gallant had nothing to do with trust or differences of opinion. The Israel Democracy Institute, an impartial think tank in Jerusalem, issued a statement describing the dismissal as an “unprecedented and dangerous nadir” in Netanyahu’s behavior, and that it is apparent that Netanyahu is “not motivated by considerations of Israel’s security but rather by political considerations.”
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It has long been apparent that Netanyahu has been hoping for, and even counting on, a win by Donald Trump. Netanyahu has frequently clashed with President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration over the war in Gaza and Lebanon and the extent of human suffering.
In contrast, Gallant has a positive, trusting relationship and vital partnership with his American counterpart, U.S. Defense secretary Lloyd Austin. In consultation with Gallant, the United States deployed forces to the region in order to deter Iran and spearheaded the regional coalition that made it possible to intercept almost all of the missiles the Iranians fired at Israel in early October.
Despite this, Netanyahu has repeatedly intimated that the Biden administration has been hostile to Israel and that he is looking forward to a newly reinvigorated relationship with the Republican Party. He may be convinced that he will have free reign to continue the war in both Gaza and Lebanon and even to escalate its intensity, since, he may be assuming, Washington will simply not have the will or the energy to do anything until Trump assumes office.
But a lame-duck Biden is not powerless, and Biden, too, may be thinking of his own legacy. It remains to be seen how he will respond to Netanyahu’s decision to fire his administration’s most trusted figure in Israel as Gaza is decimated, the threat from the Iranians escalates, and the West Bank implodes with settler and Palestinian violence just as he leaves office.
During the campaign, Trump did indeed pitch himself as a staunch defender of Israel, and he has said Israel should have more freedom to ensure its security as its leaders see fit. But a careful examination of all of Trump’s statements, as well as those of his running mate, Vice President-elect JD Vance, reveal a more complicated picture.
When Netanyahu and Trump were both in office, from 2017 to 2021, Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and parts of the West Bank, defunded Palestinian agencies, and pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement.
But since then, Trump has called for the Israel-Hamas war to be over and the Israeli hostages held by the terror group in Gaza to be released by the time he takes office in January. Furthermore, as noted in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, many of Trump’s allies include isolationists who would prefer to stay out of foreign regional conflicts.
Netanyahu may also assume that Trump will allow him to continue to expand settlements in the West Bank. But as Barak Ravid, author of Trump’s Peace, notes, Trump regards the Abraham Accords, which he brokered and which created bilateral Arab-Israeli normalization between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and between Israel and Bahrain, as one of his crowning achievements, and he hopes to expand them further. But these accords cannot last, and certainly not grow, as long as the Gaza war and the war in Lebanon continue and as long as Israel continues to expand settlements in the West Bank and stymie any possibility of an independent Palestinian State.
With regard to Iran, speaking on CNN in early October, not long after Iran attacked Israel with more than 200 missiles that were shot down by the Biden-brokered alliance, Vance declared that Trump would begin negotiations with Iran immediately.
And hovering over all of this is Trump’s increasingly close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which remains somewhat of a foreign policy wild card.
Furthermore, Trump is personally unpredictable, volatile and easily miffed. In his book, Ravid notes that both Trump and Netanyahu cultivated an image of a deep personal and professional bromance. But according to Ravid, this was at best a façade that served them both, and early on in their various meetings, Trump developed a dislike for Netanyahu, whom he views as self-serving, disloyal and untrustworthy.
Trump appeared to be particularly incensed by a video released by Netanyahu on January 20, the day Biden was inaugurated, in which Netanyahu said he and Biden had a “warm personal friendship going back many decades.”
“I liked Bibi. I still like Bibi,” Trump told Ravid, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname. “But I also like loyalty…I haven’t spoken to him since. [F–k] him,” Trump concluded.
This may be why, this week, Netanyahu was so quick to effusively congratulate Trump—even before the win was official. “Dear Donald and Melania Trump, Congratulations on history’s greatest comeback!” Netanyahu gushed early Wednesday morning, Israel time.
Top image: November 5 protests on Ayalon Highway against Yoav Gallant’s dismissal (Credit: Oren Rozen CC BY-SA 4.0).