Mitchell Plitnick
Mondoweiss / November 5, 2024
Benjamin Netanyahu’s firing of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has removed the one minor restraint on expanding Israel’s regional war against Iran and the axis of resistance. International pressure to stop Israel is needed now more than ever.
In a move that has been brewing for many months, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has fired his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. He will be replaced as Minister of Defense by Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz, who will, in turn, be replaced as Foreign Minister by Gideon Sa’ar.
While Gallant has been on Netanyahu’s “hit list” for a long time, he has been reluctant to replace the Defense Minister while Israel is involved in so many significant military operations. So, why did he do it now?
Domestic considerations
Netanyahu’s decision has nothing to do with military concerns, but with domestic politics. His coalition is currently being rocked by controversy over a bill strongly supported by the United Torah Judaism party that would allow ultra-orthodox (referred to as Haredi) men who refuse to serve in the Israeli military to continue to receive childcare benefits. The underlying purpose of the bill is to get around new laws requiring that Haredim, who have long been exempt from compulsory military service, serve like other citizens.
Gallant is not the only member of the governing coalition to publicly oppose this bill, but he is the highest profile one. It’s a stark reminder that Gallant is one of the few in the inner circle who is not a Netanyahu sycophant. He’s opposed Netanyahu publicly before, but this time, as will be discussed below, Netanyahu sees more of a need to replace Gallant before the next U.S. administration takes power.
Yisrael Katz, on the other hand, is very much Netanyahu’s man. However he has no significant military experience, and this will be a concern in Israel. He hasn’t been in the military in over 45 years and has never even served in a civilian capacity in the Ministry of Defense.
Katz was transparently appointed so Netanyahu would effectively have full control over the Defense Ministry, while Gallant’s firing was retribution and a very loud warning to anyone from his governing coalition who might consider going against him on crucial legislation.
Security concerns
Gallant sees the genocide in Gaza as well as the operations in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, as security-driven. While he knew he would be due for a reckoning over the massive Israeli failures on October 7, he doesn’t put his personal concerns front and center the way Netanyahu does.
For Gallant, genocide was the appropriate response to October 7. He was, we will recall, the one who made the brazen announcement about blocking all food, water, electricity, medicine, and all life-sustaining materials from those he called “human animals” in Gaza.
But he was also the one who wanted to end the operations when he felt that Hamas had been effectively neutralized. Again, this was not out of concern for any Palestinian life, but because he understood it as being in Israel’s best interest.
Katz is much less likely to question any of Netanyahu’s decisions, and upcoming changes in Israel’s military leadership also played a role in this decision, and its timing.
The Chief of General Staff Herzi Halevi—Israel’s top military commander—is said to be stepping down, possibly as soon as next month. Netanyahu will likely want to replace him with a man named Eyal Zamir. He has been close to Netanyahu for many years, including serving as his military secretary. Zamir is currently the Deputy Chief of Staff, so he’s well-positioned.
The hitch for Netanyahu is that when Gideon Sa’ar agreed to join his government, one of the perks Netanyahu gave him was veto power over the next Chief of Staff. This fact certainly played a key role in Sa’ar—who bolted from Likud to form his own party after years of challenging Netanyahu—being appointed as foreign minister.
Sa’ar also has been outside of most of the decisions made regarding the genocide in Gaza, which will help him as Foreign Minister, keeping him out of the sights of the International Criminal Court and the potential risk of traveling abroad that could come with ICC arrest warrants should they ever be issued.
What it means in the region
With Gallant out of the picture, and Netanyahu now surrounded by his people, the imperative for major international pressure is even more intense. Gallant, who has no problem slaughtering innocent Palestinians by the tens of thousands, still saw matters through a security lens, albeit a vicious and brutal one.
Netanyahu has other concerns. He wants to prolong the fighting to continue to delay his corruption trial, but he is also moving forward with his so-called “judicial coup,” an effort Gallant also opposed. That is more reason to avoid any diminishment of violence. His right-wing coalition partners want to see Israel move toward a regional military victory, eventually defeating Iran and establishing Israel as the undisputed regional hegemon, in their vision.
We have already seen Israel taking steps to advance the genocide in Gaza, to exponentially increase the violence in the West Bank, to devastate Lebanon, and to try to establish dominance over Iran. Gallant was raising questions of long term strategy, which held some hope for at least minor restraint. There will be no such voice now.
That may not necessarily mean escalation, but it does make de-escalation less likely. Netanyahu sees time as being on his side and is more threatened by the end of the fighting—even if it were to end in what most Israelis would call victory in Gaza and Lebanon—than by its continuation. Men like Katz and Zamir are not going to talk him down from that, so as long as Sa’ar is bought off, Netanyahu will have successfully removed a “renegade” in Gallant and will face even less restraint than he did before, hard as that it is to imagine.
What it means in Washington
Yoav Gallant was the main point of communication between Joe Biden’s administration and the Netanyahu government. He was well-liked in Washington, and he cultivated that relationship to the point where the Americans would sometimes go through him to press Netanyahu or just to annoy him. His relationship with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was particularly strong.
That’s done now, and for the remainder of their time in office, Biden officials will likely be dealing with someone much closer to Netanyahu. Ron Dermer, who is as Republican as he is Netanyahu’s right-hand man, is likely to take on the communicator role between the American and Israeli governments.
That might make for some public tensions, relatively speaking, although none of that will translate into policy changes. Still, without Gallant, the relationship between the two governments will be a bit frostier.
Regardless, Netanyahu’s decision to fire Gallant was certainly made with Washington in mind. Washington was far from the main factor, but it was a factor.
With Gallant gone, Netanyahu will be even less concerned about Biden’s feeble words of sympathy or the State Department’s spokesman Matthew Miller contemptibly laughing about Israel’s failure to comply with American law regarding allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza. But more importantly, it speaks to the next administration, whoever wins today’s election.
If Donald Trump emerges victorious, this is exactly the kind of government he feels most comfortable dealing with. He can cultivate his personal relationship with Netanyahu, deal with him directly, and worry little about any other players. This will also help Netanyahu, as he will be in a position to flatter, mollify, or confuse Trump should Trump decide that it would be better if Israel backed off on its aggression. Netanyahu’s team will be united in convincing Trump that this would be a bad idea.
Should Harris win, she will find an even more opaque Israeli government than Biden has, with no one she can see as an ally in approaching the issues from a military or security standpoint rather than a political one. That was what Biden got from Gallant more than anything, and Harris would not have it.
Netanyahu will surely recognize that pressure on Harris will only grow to restrain Israel, and, while she has given no indication that she will depart even a little from Biden’s policy, Netanyahu is also keenly aware that she doesn’t have the enthusiastic attachment to those policies that Biden has. As a result, setting up his inner circle where there is no “adult in the room” to talk to (except perhaps Sa’ar, but a Foreign Minister’s leverage is far less than a Defense Minister in this regard) gives him an extra layer of insulation against any meagre pressure that might develop.
The one hope that emerges from all of this comes back to where it all started. United Torah Judaism, the Haredi party, is insisting on the child care bill moving forward, even though Netanyahu took it off the Knesset’s agenda because it lacks the votes to pass. Ironically Gideon Sa’ar and his New Hope party also oppose this bill, though it may be that part of his appointment as Foreign Minister is a deal to change that.
UTJ holds seven seats in the Knesset. If this legislation doesn’t pass, they will refuse to vote on any other legislation, which threatens the whole governing coalition. Without UTJ, Netanyahu’s majority falls to just one seat, which opens the door for Sa’ar or another leader to emerge, even from within Likud, to bring this government down.
But Netanyahu has routinely found ways to resolve issues like this over the past fifteen years. And if he does, it is likely that he will have further insulated himself from any possibility of American pressure to curb his aggression in Gaza, Lebanon, and beyond.
Mitchell Plitnick is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy; he is the co-author, with Marc Lamont Hill, of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics
