Saar's stormy exit sinks Gantz's chances

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Benny Gantz is feted in Washington and London as Israel’s prime-minister-in-waiting, the polls give his party an incredible 40 seats in the next Knesset, and he tops incumbent Binyamin Netanyahu by double digits. But a bird in the hand is worth more than a flock in the bush, and one of the two birds in his hand has now escaped.

Israeli politics took a dramatic turn last week with Gideon Saar, Benny Gantz’s number two, announcing the dissolution of their political alliance. This makes Saar the fourth key ally to ditch Gantz in four years, joining Yair Lapid, Gabi Ashkenazi, and Moshe “Bogie” Yaalon. But the timing might make this desertion the most damaging yet.

Saar is one of the savviest politicians in Israel. A former senior Likud figure and close ally of Netanyahu, Saar left the party with a door slam after the latter accused him of conspiring with then president Ruvi Rivlin to oust him. His new anti-Bibi center-right party, “New Hope,” was joined by fellow Likud defectors Zeev Elkin and Yifat Shasha-Biton, and made Netanyahu’s removal from power its primary objective—a goal accomplished, albeit fleetingly, with the formation of the Bennett-Lapid government.

After that government’s collapse, Saar united with Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot under the big tent of the National Unity Party. But ever since the party joined the coalition at the start of the war—a move Saar pushed by midday of October 7 — Saar’s relationship with Gantz cooled, even as his relationship with Netanyahu thawed.

As we’ve reported in these pages, Saar and Netanyahu were often seen exchanging notes during government meetings, and in a recent interview with Mishpacha, Saar ruled out returning to Netanyahu’s Likud but pointedly refused to rule out serving in a future government beside him.

Saar has grievances with Gantz, who reneged on his early agreements to hold internal primaries. Saar even blames Gantz, rather than Bibi, for his exclusion from the war cabinet. As Saar sees it, Gantz passed him over to choose party number-three Eisenkot to sit beside him in the war cabinet.

Saar may not be a former IDF chief of staff like Eisenkot, but he’s the politician with the second-most cabinet experience in the country, after Netanyahu. In a rookie mistake, Gantz simply ignored him. They hadn’t held a private conversation since Gantz joined the cabinet, and their factions stopped meeting together. This carelessness cost Gantz a third of his 12 seats in the current Knesset, no less.

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Why did Saar decide to jump ship now, of all times? The answer is complex.

First, there’s the security situation, with Saar viewing Gantz’s presence in the war cabinet as an obstacle to the occupation of Rafah and as the key factor in Israel’s overly generous humanitarian aid. In his recent sit-down with Mishpacha, Saar harshly criticized the uncontrolled flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, which has allowed it to be seized by Hamas.

But security considerations weren’t the only factor behind Saar’s decision. As Henry Kissinger famously said, Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic policy. Unlike Gantz, Saar scored big in the Israeli municipal elections this month. Many of the candidates supported by Saar were elected, while most of the candidates supported by Gantz in particular and the “change bloc” in general lost. Gantz’s failure to leverage his polling advantage and his poor choice of candidates in the local elections convinced Saar that while Gantz may be leading in the polls, he doesn’t know how to play his cards.

Saar’s announcement at a press conference last week left Gantz surprised, but hardly shocked, given their frosty relations over the past months. Netanyahu, on the other hand, wasn’t particularly surprised, and some in his circle even hinted that he knew about the announcement in advance.

Saar’s decision injects “new hope” into Netanyahu’s plan for political survival, which we discussed in these pages last week. While the New Hope chair clarified in our interview last month that he has no intention of returning to Likud, he just took a big first step back to the right-wing bloc. Saar, Avigdor Lieberman, Yossi Cohen, and Naftali Bennett will all be jockeying for the “moderate right” lane in the next election, and Saar just stole a march on his competitors.

Saar’s announcement that he intends to remain in the government until the end of the war renders moot Gantz’s threats to quit before the end of the campaign, and strips Ben Gvir of his kingmaker status at the same time. It’s no coincidence that Ben Gvir demanded his own seat in the war cabinet immediately following Saar’s statement.

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With 40 seats in the bush and eight in hand, Gantz now finds himself part of a right-wing government that controls 68 Knesset seats without him. The chareidim, who met with Netanyahu this week on the draft issue, see Saar and Elkin, two of the most formidable problem-solvers ever produced by the Likud, as a lifeline to a breakthrough. At this point, the chareidim hope for nothing more than a vague proposal to buy some time and keep the hot potato of “equality of burden” rolling.

Rav Aharon Leib Steinman ztz”l laid down the strategy of buying time from bill to High Court ruling. While in the past the chareidi parties were able to buy years of quiet at a time, they’re now reduced to buying months and weeks, at an exorbitant price.

But one person who bought all the time he needs last week is Binyamin Netanyahu. The day after October 7, no one could have predicted that six months on, Netanyahu would not only have stabilized his coalition but even expanded it, despite abysmal polling numbers.

The message reverberated abroad as well as at home. Faced with a public call for a change of government from the Democratic administration last weekend, Netanyahu responded by cementing his coalition.

“Israel is not a banana republic but a proud and independent democracy that elected Prime Minister Netanyahu,” the Prime Minister’s Office responded to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s call for new elections.

As usual, Bibi turned American lemons into Israeli lemonade, using his clash with the administration to unify the base. After Saar’s move, coalition figures assessed this week that between Biden and Netanyahu, the latter’s chances of surviving the year politically are better. —

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1004)