Editor's Notes: Israel's election exposes deep political divisions after Gantz withdrawl - comment

On Monday night, at a conference hall in Ramat Gan, Benny Gantz announced that he would not be running on October 27. The polls had his Blue and White party at about 1%, far under the 3.25% a party needs to win a single seat in the Knesset.

Seven years ago, this was the man who came closest to replacing Benjamin Netanyahu. He said he had failed to convince enough people of his path, that he would keep working for a unity government, and that he had always been, before anything else, a soldier of Israel.

His rivals praised him within the hour. Gadi Eisenkot, who left his party this year, called the decision responsible. Yair Golan said the same. Bezalel Smotrich explained that Gantz had withdrawn so as not to waste votes for the left-wing bloc. Gantz spent years insisting he belonged to neither bloc. It didn’t help. Even on his way out, he was filed under a label he had refused.

Gantz was not a gifted politician. His allies left him one after another, and his campaign never found a sentence that explained what he was for.

But I think he is a mensch, and that is not a word I reach for about many people in his profession. He kept trying to do the complicated thing. In 2020, he joined a Netanyahu government to end a year of deadlock, and a large part of his voters never forgave him.

After October 7, he joined the emergency government, sat in the war cabinet, and in June 2024 walked out over the way the war was being run, and a different part of the country never forgave him for that.

On Monday, he said he knew what joining the emergency government would cost him. He did it anyway because he thought the country needed it more than he needed his seat. Each camp remembered the half it hated, and between them there was no room left for a man who had done both.

That is what I want to write about in this last column before the vote: how little space this election leaves between looking at a person and enlisting with him.

I learned this again on a smaller scale this week. I posted a photograph from our interview with Netanyahu on Facebook, with a few lines about what we saw before and after and the atmosphere at the campaign venue. Dozens of hostile comments followed. Some readers needed remarkably little information to decide what the encounter meant and whose side I was on.

I expected the questions about our questions. Amichai Stein and I asked Netanyahu about Qatar, including the allegations in the Qatargate investigation involving people in his close circle. We asked about his trial, his coalition, and violence by extremist Israelis in Judea and Samaria (West Bank). Readers are entitled to examine what we asked, what he answered, and how we presented it. That is part of the work.

I didn’t expect a plain observation to need a political explanation. At 2:15 a.m., Netanyahu was alert. Several of the people waiting around him were asleep. You could see this with your eyes. You didn’t need a pollster.

Something similar happens whenever I hear people talk about this election. Intelligent people, capable of real subtlety in their work and their marriages, suddenly sound like a campaign’s morning briefing. The phrases arrive intact, including the approved descriptions of the other side. The campaign managers should at least send thank-you notes.

We hear a name and reach a conclusion before the next sentence has begun. I don’t say this with contempt. Political loyalties have histories. They come from families, from faith, from economic experience, from memories of humiliation and fear. People have reasons for belonging where they belong. The trouble starts when belonging decides which facts we are willing to see.

A voter can recognize an achievement by Netanyahu and still conclude that the failures of October 7 outweigh everything else in deciding whether he should remain prime minister. That is a serious judgment. Pretending that every decision since must therefore have been wrong makes it weaker because it asks people to deny something they can see.

The same goes for his supporters. A successful military operation does not answer questions about the years before October 7. A prime minister’s record accumulates. The later chapters stay attached to the earlier ones.

It can be done. Yair Lapid publicly supported Netanyahu’s decision to strike Iran in February. His opposition to Netanyahu survived the experience.

I’ll admit that I expected the first election after October 7 to look different. I wrote in this space about a reshuffling of Israeli politics, about voters whose old political homes no longer seemed to contain their doubts. I thought a third bloc might form among people who wanted a broader government and a different distribution of responsibility. Gantz, whatever his faults, was the candidate most clearly built for those voters.

As election day approaches, the two familiar camps remain remarkably recognizable. I have already admitted here that my wish for a third bloc colored my reading of its chances. Pollsters are much more pleasant company when their numbers agree with your theory.

Maybe three years is a short time to turn an upheaval of this size into a settled political position. Maybe the parties on offer never gave those voters a convincing place to go. I’m less sure of the explanation than I was of the original expectation.

Laly Derai has described this better than I have. She is a religious Zionist activist whose son Saadia fell in Gaza, and she is running with People of Israel (Amcha Yisrael), the party led by former brigadier general Ofer Winter. At the party’s launch in August, as our Herb Keinon reported, she described what we had done to ourselves before October 7.

“We had become so preoccupied with sharpening our positions against one another that we sharpened the pencil until there was no pencil,” she said.

We have spent this election sharpening again. An opponent’s whole life gets reduced to a label, and the label saves everyone the trouble of looking further.

Take Eisenkot. People on the Right tell me the former army chief is left-wing with the confidence usually reserved for identifying the color of a traffic light. Ask which position they mean, and the answer gets considerably less precise.

There are real arguments to have with Eisenkot about his security proposals, his likely coalition, and his judgment. Have them. His campaign has also been calm, organized, and deliberate, and the steady introduction of candidates suggested a party choosing its people with some care. Alongside familiar faces from other parties, his list includes Alex Rif, Adi Altschuler, Elisaf Peretz, and former Shin Bet chief Yoram Cohen, people with biographies that deserve a look beyond the label on their leader.

Netanyahu, too, has run a disciplined campaign. He has kept his composure and avoided the panic that can swallow a campaign in its last weeks. His experience shows. Saying so leaves every question about his record in office exactly where it was.

Naftali Bennett has had a rougher time. Some of his choices, including his alliance with Lapid, have made it harder for parts of his original constituency to recognize themselves in his project, and he has spent valuable weeks repairing that relationship. But his work on the ground has been effective. He goes from city to city and sits with the informal groups Israelis call “parliaments,” friends around a café table who argue about the country whether or not a candidate is present. He answers, argues back, and stays in the conversation. There is something useful about a candidate having to deal with a person who can interrupt him.

I can hold all of those assessments at once. Readers will disagree with some of them. I’d rather they disagree about what the candidates did than about which tribe I belong to.

Golan is another test. His actions on October 7, when he drove South to rescue people, deserve recognition. His political positions and his rhetoric since then deserve separate scrutiny. Anyone who objects to his language about the war should still be able to acknowledge the people he helped save. Anyone who admires his courage should be able to question his words. Instead, gratitude for one act is treated as endorsement of everything a person has done since. It is an exhausting way to judge people. It means rewriting their biographies every time they say something we dislike.

Derai has also described what it costs to try to change the conversation. In an interview this month with Kan Reshet Bet, Israel’s public radio, she said: “Among other things, we came to change the discourse.” She described harassment directed at her party’s candidates and their families, including attacks that invoked her dead son.

There is a legitimate argument about whether a small party will cross the threshold and what happens to its votes if it fails. Gantz answered it this week by leaving. Other candidates should answer it too. Invoking a mother’s dead son to demand political obedience is cruelty, and election arithmetic doesn’t excuse it.

I worry, too, about how far these habits travel.

Israelis will cast the ballots. Jewish communities around the world will live with some of the consequences, including the language our leaders choose and the relationships they damage or preserve. October 7 and the hostility so many Jews met abroad afterward should have made that responsibility impossible to ignore. A politician speaking to his most loyal supporters in a hall in Israel is also speaking within earshot of a student on another campus, on another continent, who will be asked to answer for the sentence in a language the politician doesn’t speak.

The next government will be accountable to all of Israel’s citizens. Its decisions will also carry consequences for Jews who had no vote in choosing it. That asks some restraint of people who have grown used to measuring every sentence by the applause it gets in the room.

So here is my request, the only one I’ll make before the polls open. Give yourself permission to notice one thing that complicates your choice. An achievement by the candidate you plan to vote against. A failure by the one you plan to vote for. You can weigh it and still arrive at the same decision. You may even become better at explaining why you made it.

On Wednesday morning, we may have results without knowing who will govern. Then the coalition negotiations begin, with their arguments over ministries, military service, budgets, and the courts. Some very confident promises will acquire qualifications. I hope the people who repeated them so faithfully will ask their own candidates what changed.

Gantz, on his way out, had a warning for the party leaders who will sit at that table: Do not take us back to October 6. He was mocked for years for wanting a government that crossed the blocs. If the arithmetic on Wednesday turns out to require exactly that, the people who laughed will be the ones who have to build it, and they will do it without him.