This Tuesday, Benny Gantz is scheduled to break his political silence once and for all. After putting out short campaign films over the past two weeks, he will make his first speech, to be followed by interviews.
"Everything is moving ahead according to plan," his campaign staff said this week. Gantz will be stressing two main messages in his public appearances – hawkish on defense and the need for reconciliation within Israeli society – with his main goal being to avoid being tagged as a leftist.
It won't be easy. Gantz might be putting right-wing people on his Israeli Resilience Party list, but even if he does – or is forced to – the Left is still pinning its hopes on him this time around.
The role the former IDF chief has taken up is clear to him and his staff, so the public should expect unusual ambiguity on the issues of the Palestinian territories and peace.
When it comes to Gantz's specific opinions, while he was still in uniform, he espoused the view that Israel needed to do everything to protect the Palestinian Authority, since PA security forces were an asset to Israel's security. Unofficially, he even took part in writing a peace plan proposal for the Institute of National Security Studies a few months ago that featured unilateral steps to establish a Palestinian state, including freezing Israeli construction in parts of Judea and Samaria. Given all this, Gantz has his work cut out for him to prove he isn't a left-winger.
Calm waters
Gantz was born 59 years ago on Moshav Kfar Ahim near Kiryat Malakhi in northern Israel. Both his parents were Holocaust survivors who sailed to Israel on illegal immigrant ships. His family history made a deep impression on him. Agriculture and public service were part of the fabric of his childhood and adolescence in the 1960s. His father was one of the founders of the Moshav movement and later worked for the Jewish Agency. His parents' socialist leanings did not prevent them from sending their son to religious school.
Gantz joined the IDF and volunteered for the Paratroopers Brigade. He spent most of his career with the Paratroopers and was made commander of the brigade in 1994. He took part in the operation to secure the mission that brought Ethiopian Jews to Israel. He rose through the ranks, serving as commander of the Lebanon Division and commander of the IDF's Lebanon Liaison Unit during Israel's withdrawal from the security buffer zone in southern Lebanon in 2000.
Gantz is seen as someone who did what needed to be done, at minimal risk, even as IDF chief. Some junior and senior officers who served with him and under him call him overcautious.
One officer who served with Gantz in south Lebanon in the 1990s said that under Gantz's command, the IDF carried out fewer special missions.
"I remember that missions we proposed weren't approved, unlike the period before him [taking command]," the officer, who preferred to remain anonymous, said.
A major general who served alongside Gantz for years added: "He is very cautious. Doesn't take chances. It's a matter of temperament."
Gantz's friend Dan Amergi, who was his radio operation in the 890th Battalion, rejects criticism that Gantz is hesitant.
"I think he exercises consideration, not that he's someone who doesn't know what to do. He does stop to think, even under fire, and you won't see him sweat a drop. He's very intelligent, and weighs the pros and cons, looks at the options, and then decides, without fear. I've seen him in dozens of situations in which we could have come home in body bags. I've never seen him scared."
Q: So what is his goal? What does he aspire to?
"He is aiming for the top, to be prime minister. The discourse in the Knesset disturbs him – the disparagement, the rude talk. This is what he means when he says, 'We'll do things differently.' We've gotten used to politicians having to be nasty, cheats, and liars. But why? If there isn't an example at the top, what can we expect lower down? If you visit him at home, you'll see someone who lives modestly. It's not Barak or Bibi [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu]."
Q: If he's running for prime minister, does that mean he doesn't like what Netanyahu is doing?
"Certainly. Benny told me that Bibi isn't doing good things. He did, but that's over. He [Netanyahu] can step aside because this isn't governance."
The rescue that never came
As a commander who decided policy, Gantz's most serious trial by fire was when he was appointed commander of the Judea and Samaria Division at about the time the Second Intifada erupted in 2000. In the spirit of the Oslo Accords, but also in accordance with his own style, Gantz instituted an approach of moderation. Despite incidents such as the lynching of two IDF reservists in Ramallah and suicide bombings in city centers – and even though others in the army had different ideas – Gantz refrained from operating inside the Palestinian cities from which the waves of terror were emerging. Gantz's successor in the brigade, Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Gershon, believed in using more force against terrorists.
One incident some hold against Gantz is the case of IDF soldier Madhat Yousef being left to bleed to death at Joseph's Tomb after being wounded in action at the start of the Second Intifada. As commander of the Judea and Samaria Division, Gantz was in the area, but on the order of then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, he didn't execute a prearranged plan to extract soldiers who found themselves trapped in Nablus. Instead, the army and the political leadership chose to trust the promises of Palestinian official Jibril Rajoub that he would guarantee the safety of IDF soldiers.
Some believe that if Gantz had been more determined to execute the rescue plan, he could have persuaded the political echelon to give him a green light. Others say that as an army officer, Gantz had to obey orders, even if he didn't like them.
Either way, others hold a grudge over a less well-remembered incident that took place some two weeks later, when a group of settlers were hiking on Mount Ebal and came under gunfire from the direction of Nablus.
"We were lying on the ground between boulders, with bullets whistling over our heads," remembers Eyal Luria, one of the hikers.
"They were shooting at us from the outskirts of Nablus and we couldn't move. It eventually turned out that at the start of the incident, Rabbi Binyamin Herling, who shot back, had been killed.
"The entire time we were sure that they were coming to rescue us, because we saw helicopters overhead. The entire incident took place only a few minutes' walk from the IDF base on Mount Ebal, and a few minutes' drive from the battalion command. Only later did we learn that there was no rescue because the soldiers had been ordered not to shoot at the terrorists, because negotiations were underway. In the end, when it got dark, the shooting eased up and they came to get us out," Luria says.
One settler leader calls the Mount Ebal attack much worse than the case of Madhat Yousef. "There were men, women, and children there, and it was four hours before they called in the nearby company to rescue them? What is that?" the settler leader said.
The Gantz campaign declined to comment.
Protective Edge
Other than Construction and Housing Minister Yoav Gallant, a current political rival and also the man who was passed over as chief of staff in favor of Gantz, most of Gantz's critics are careful about what they say and prefer not to identify themselves. First of all, what happens in the IDF stays in the IDF, since every senior commander makes mistakes that cost lives. Secondly, no one disputes that Gantz is a man of principle who has kept his hands clean. He doesn't play in the mud and he doesn't sling mud at anyone else.
Gantz was appointed chief of staff after a colossal fight between his predecessor Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi and then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak. He has described the intrigues that engulfed the IDF as "a corpse whose stench filled the room." It must be said that he cleaned things up, and the army under his leadership was free from that kind of friction. When his military career came to an end, he even devoted much of his time to social and educational work, but many wonder if he is prime minister or even defense minister material, with his moderation and desire to return home safely, which were an obstacle for him during Operation Protective Edge in 2014.
Gantz, like the defense minister to whom he answered, Moshe Ya'alon, failed to understand the nature of the operation. For weeks, trusting scraps of intelligence, they told the public and the cabinet that Hamas wanted a cease-fire. But Hamas hung in for 50 days.
"The 'anemone speech' [in which Gantz declared that quiet had been restored to the south, before the fighting resumed] is just the tip of the iceberg in his lack of understanding of the big picture," says a senior political official, who is closely familiar with what took place during the 2014 operation.
"It's very likely that if, for example, they had understood from the start what Hamas is and how it operates, everything might have been different," the official says. He refused to be identified by name.
The thought that Hamas was "begging for a cease-fire," as the IDF put it at the time, played a part in Gantz presenting the cabinet with limp-wristed plans. Members of the cabinet and other government forums were and are angry at him for not presenting alternatives.
"No other operational approach was proposed. In general, he gave the sense of a trotting horse, not a galloping horse," some cabinet members said.
Another area in which Gantz is deemed lacking is how he dealt with the Hamas terror tunnels.
"Even though the seriousness of the tunnel threat was already well-known, Gantz only mentioned it once [in the cabinet], which is not considered emphasizing the issue and did not describe in detail or explain how the threat developed, the significance of threat of tunnels that crossed the border into Israeli territory, and their links to the Gaza Strip," wrote State Comptroller Yosef Shapira in a report on Operation Protective Edge.
"Although he noted that hundreds of people would come to attack [Israel], he said that the tunnels 'did not signify overly great abilities [on the part of Hamas],'" Shapira wrote.
Between military and civilian
Many in the military and outside it characterize Gantz as unoriginal.
"I worked a lot with chiefs of staff," says Brig. Gen. (res.) Amos Gilboa, former head of the research division in Military Intelligence and a military historian.
"It's hard for me to find the exact word, but let's say [he] isn't Raful [Rafael Eitan.] In Operation Protective Edge, it seemed like the IDF wasn't operating with aggression and daring. … I'm not talking about the air force, I'm talking about the ground forces. We only went 2 or 3 kilometers into the Gaza Strip. That doesn't cut it. But in the end, Protective Edge had better results than the operations that preceded it, because we got four years of quiet," Gilboa said.
Gantz provided a glimpse at his view of the events of Protective Edge and in general in a speech he gave to the Shurat Hadin Israel Law Center four years ago.
"As far as the international community, we lost [the war] even before we began," Gantz said, explaining that the conventions of war accepted in the world today were not relevant to the civilian-filled battle zones Israel has to contend with.
"We need to go back to the time when the rules of war limited the bad guys because the only ones who obey the rules of war are the ones that care about them [Israel and the West.] There mustn't be legal naiveté," he said.
He went on to describe how "Hezbollah turned civilian villages 'operational' so they could be used as a base to fire rockets. Khiam, for example. Homes there are full of missiles and precise as warfare might be, how can I separate them? So we won't have any option other than to attack everyone. Don't tell me it's a nursery school or a mosque – because it's a rocket-launching site and I don't know any synagogue or church that has missiles," he said.
But Gantz also acknowledged that he kept "moral considerations" in mind.
"This dilemma of military vs. civilian comes up all the time, so we get into absurd situations like the 'knock on the roof' tactics, which sometimes seems funny. But we do it for reasons of morality," he said.
"During [Protective Edge], rockets fell in my mom's yard," he said.
"She told me, 'Benny, don't stop fighting, but keep sending them [the Palestinians] food.' Throughout the entire Gaza war, the sick and injured from Gaza kept coming to hospitals in Israel. There were more sick people than rockets, and I'm proud of that," he said.
