Benny Gantz
Benjamin Gantz is an Israeli politician and retired army general. He served as a minister without portfolio from 2023 to 2024, as the minister of defense between 2020 and 2022, and as deputy prime minister between 2021 and 2022. From 2020 to 2021, he was the alternate prime minister.
He served as the 20th Chief of General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces from 2011 to 2015. In December 2018, he entered politics by establishing a new political party named Israel Resilience. The party later allied itself with Telem and Yesh Atid to form Blue and White, the colours of the Israeli national flag. In 2022, Gantz became the leader of National Unity, made up of the Israel Resilience Party and New Hope.
Gantz was the 17th speaker of the Knesset from 26 March 2020 to 17 May 2020. On 20 April 2020, Gantz agreed to join a rotation government with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Under the terms of the agreement, Gantz was to serve as alternate prime minister and minister of defense, before succeeding Netanyahu as prime minister in November 2021. However, the coalition collapsed, resulting in another election in 2021. As defense minister, Gantz was in charge of Operation Guardian of the Walls in Gaza. In June 2021, he was reappointed defense minister and became deputy prime minister in the new Bennett-Lapid government, serving in those roles until December 2022.
On 12 October 2023, following the breakout of the Gaza war, the National Unity party announced that it would form a war cabinet with Likud. Gantz was appointed a minister without portfolio in the thirty-seventh government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On 13 June 2024, Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot exited the war cabinet, which was dissolved four days later.
Biography
Benjamin Gantz was born in Kfar Ahim, Israel, in 1959, which his parents helped settle. He was an only child.His mother Malka was a Holocaust survivor, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, originally from Mezőkovácsháza, Hungary.
His father Nahum Gantz Ostolish came from Sovata, in the more ethnically-Hungarian part of Transylvania, Romania, where his parents were Munkatsher Hassidim, a Haredi sect founded in Mukachevo, Transcarpathia, then Hungary, now Ukraine. He survived the Dragomirești Ghetto, Auschwitz, Harzungen and, sub-sub-camps of Buchenwald. Ostolish migrated to Palestine on the Arlozorov, an illegal aliyah ship. British authorities in Palestine arrested Ostolish for trying to enter the country illegally. He was an active member of the Labor Party and at one point a possible Knesset candidate. He served as the mapainik, a head of the moshav movement, and the community's baal toke'a, blowing the shofar on Rosh Hashana.
His parents were among the founders of Moshav Kfar Ahim, a cooperative agricultural community in south-central Israel. In his youth, he attended the Shafir High School in Merkaz Shapira, and boarding school at the HaKfar HaYarok youth village in Ramat HaSharon.
Religious background
According to his father, Benny Gantz was not religious and chose not to serve as the baal toke'a and does not know the Gaavad of Komemiyut, but continued in his father's Zionist beliefs serving in the military, and holds "close to his heart" the memory of the Holocaust which Benny stated was present, "there, in the experience of the house".Education
Gantz is a graduate of the IDF Command and Staff College and the National Security College. He holds a bachelor's degree in history from Tel Aviv University, a master's degree in political science from the University of Haifa, and an additional master's degree in National Resources Management from the National Defense University in the United States. Gantz is married to Revital, with whom he has four children. He lives in Rosh HaAyin.Early career
In February 2011, following the government decision to promote Gantz to Chief of the General Staff, Attorney Avi'ad Vissuli of the Forum for the Land of Israel unsuccessfully petitioned to revoke the appointment.In February 2019, an Israeli-American woman accused Gantz of exposing himself to her 40 years earlier, causing her traumatic disorders. Gantz denied all allegations, claiming that such an incident never took place, and that the allegations were politically motivated. Gantz has since sued the woman for defamation.
Military career
Gantz was drafted into the IDF in 1977. He volunteered as a paratrooper in the Paratroopers Brigade. His first mission as a young conscript in 1977 was as part of the security detail for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's visit to Israel. As a paratrooper, he fought in Operation Litani in March 1978 and also participated in a June 1978 raid against a Fatah training base in Lebanon. In 1979, Gantz became an officer after completing Officer Candidate School. He returned to the Paratroopers Brigade and served as a platoon leader and company commander, completed a course in the U.S. Army Special Forces, and fought in the First Lebanon War.File:IDF Paratroopers UNIT. XX.jpg|thumb|left|250px|Colonel Benny Gantz with IDF Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak during a Paratroopers Brigade exercise, 1996.
Later on, he led 890 "Efe" paratroop battalion in counter-guerrilla operations in the South Lebanon security zone. In 1991, he commanded the commando unit that was on the ground in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for 36 hours, securing the Operation Solomon airlift of 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel. He served in senior command positions during the Second Intifada and Second Lebanon War.
In the course of his military career, Gantz served as commander of the Shaldag Unit in the Israeli Air Force; commander of the 35th Paratroopers Brigade; commander of the Reserves Division in the Northern Command; commander of the Lebanon Liaison Unit; commander of the Judea and Samaria Division in 2000, before becoming the commander of the Israeli Northern Command in 2001; and as Israel's military attaché in the United States from 2005 until 2009, before becoming the deputy chief of the General Staff.
During his service, Gantz was given the nickname "Benny-chuta" for his "non-confrontational manner".
Chief of staff
Following the canceled appointment of previous nominee Aluf Yoav Galant, Defense Minister Ehud Barak announced on 5 February 2011 that he would be recommending to the government that Gantz be appointed the 20th Chief of the General Staff. Gantz had already been in the process of an honorable discharge from his army service.On 13 February 2011, the Israeli government unanimously approved Gantz to be the next IDF chief of staff. According to The Jerusalem Post, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated in the weekly Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem that Gantz was an "excellent officer and experienced commander, and had rich operational and logistical experience, with all the attributes needed to be a successful army commander".
On 14 February 2011, Gantz returned to the IDF and assumed command as the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. He served for the required three years and was nominated for a fourth year, which he agreed to fulfill, followed by retirement.
In his first year as Chief of the General Staff, Gantz appointed the IDF's first-ever female major-general, Orna Barbivai. In July 2011, Gantz appointed a special committee to address a controversy that had developed concerning mention of the word Elohim, "God", in the military Yizkor prayer. The committee determined that a disputed passage should read Yizkor 'Am Yisrael, "May the Nation of Israel remember", and not Yizkor Elohim, "May God remember". Gantz upheld the committee's ruling.
Gantz commanded the IDF when it fought against Palestinian factions in Gaza in the campaigns Operation Pillar of Defense and Operation Protective Edge.
File:Gen. Martin E. Dempsey meets with Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz.jpg|Benny Gantz meets with General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2012| thumb
Business career
Gantz was the chairman of the Fifth Dimension, a computer security and law enforcement technology company, which specialized in tracking via smartphone spyware. The company closed due to financial reasons, after its Russian investor Viktor Vekselberg was sanctioned under CAATSA by the United States during the Special Counsel investigation into Russian attempts to interfere with the US election, led by Robert Mueller.Political career
Early career
In December 2018, Gantz announced the formation of a new political party, but did not originally disclose his views or name of the organization. Polls demonstrated fluctuating support for the party. On 27 December 2018, Gantz formally established the Israel Resilience Party, with the intention of running in the upcoming April 2019 election. In his first major political speech on 29 January 2019, Gantz pledged to strengthen Israeli settlement blocs in the West Bank and said that Israel would never leave the Golan Heights. He neither endorsed nor rejected a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. "The Jordan Valley will be our border, but we won't let millions of Palestinians living beyond the fence to endanger our identity as a Jewish state," he said. In addition, Gantz helped formulate a unilateral separation plan for the Institute for National Security Studies calling for the unilateral creation of a contiguous Palestinian "entity" on 65% of the West Bank and a freeze on construction in settlements outside the major settlement blocs expected to be retained in a future peace agreement in order to stave off the perceived threat of a one-state solution, which the plan termed as being an existential threat to Israel, along with a nuclear Iran.On 17 February 2019, at the Munich Security Conference, Gantz enumerated the main challenges of the West as "extremist Iran, Islamic terror, and regional instability". Gantz criticized Benjamin Netanyahu's decision to bar U.S. Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from entering Israel, saying that Omar and Tlaib would have seen that the West Bank is "the second best place" for Arabs in the Middle East. In December 2021, Gantz described the Islamic Republic of Iran as "the biggest threat to the global and regional peace and stability".
Gantz negotiated with leader of the Yesh Atid party Yair Lapid, leader of the Telem party Moshe Ya'alon, and former Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, as well as with Orly Levy's Gesher. and reached an agreement with these parties, with the exception of Gesher, to form a political alliance and run jointly. the alliance, named Blue and White, was formally announced on 21 February 2019. with Gantz and Lapid agreeing to rotate the position of prime minister with one another if elected.