FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
JERUSALEM – Yoav finishes his speech and Benny shakes his hand. Benny finishes his speech and Yoav shakes his hand. Before leaving after the address to the nation, each with their own proclamations, the two former generals hugged while Benjamin Netanyahu rearranged the notes alone a few meters away. Even on Saturday evening, all three wore dark shirts: But Gallant, the defense minister, and Gantz, his predecessor and former chief of staff, appear to be the only ones with changing rooms in the restricted war council room.
Benny left the opposition in time for the duration of the conflict, having spent 38 of his 64 years in uniform and unable to escape calls for a national emergency. Yoav was an opponent of Netanyahu, was verbally fired and never seriously kicked out: he had dared to call for an end to the justice plan implemented by the government and contested by thousands of Israelis because it was considered anti-democratic. What particularly worried the minister was the break in the Bundeswehr with the refusal to appear with the reservists of the special forces and the air force. For months, he, along with Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, tried to warn the government and its leader of the dangers that were growing on several fronts.
His mother Fruma, who died in May, arrived in what was then Palestine on the Exodus ship from Poland, but was sent back to Europe with her family by the British under Nazi rule. On the evening of Netanyahu’s greeting, a video shows Gallant listening to his voice and his mother telling him not to worry: “You’re smart and everything will be fine.” What didn’t work out was his appointment to chief of staff, after having been a military adviser to Ariel Sharon and leading the Southern Command during the first clashes with Hamas: his rise to the top had failed because of alleged irregularities in Hamas’s purchase of some land in the Galilee, where he lives.
The job went to Gantz, who fought the nearly two-month conflict with the fundamentalists as commander of the armed forces between July and August 2014. He grew up in an agricultural community a few kilometers from Gaza, a village co-founded by his parents along with other Romanian and Hungarian immigrants who survived the Holocaust, called Kfar Ahim in memory of two brothers who died in the first of Israel’s many wars , the Revolutionary War, were killed.
Gallant is a year older and is considered the more warlike of the two. It was he who pushed for a preemptive strike against the Lebanese Hezbollah in the first days after the invasion and massacres in the villages in the south of the country, and it was to him that Lloyd Austin, the American Secretary of Defense, turned directly to avoid massive reactions to the ongoing attacks on troops and civilians on the northern border by Shiite paramilitaries supported and armed by Iran.