Why Netanyahu Fired His Defense Minister

On Tuesday evening, a political earthquake shook Israel: In the midst of war, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed his defense minister, Yoav Gallant.

The quake was inevitable, even if the timing was not. The coalition that keeps Netanyahu in power is built astride a political fault line. On one side are the ultra-Orthodox parties that have served as reliable partners for Netanyahu’s Likud party for decades. Their quid pro quo is government funding for their self-segregated community—and exemption from the military draft, on the grounds that young ultra-Orthodox men devote themselves to religious studies. The exemption, in their eyes, is essential for maintaining their separation from mainstream Israeli society.

On the other side of the fault line are two extreme right-wing parties, and at least part of Likud itself. This wing of the coalition sees the war as an opportunity to resume Israeli rule of Gaza and even Israeli settlement there. Pressure from this direction is at least one reason the war continues, with no end in sight. The policy translates into longer army service for draftees, extended stints of reserve duty for large numbers of Israelis, and photos of fallen soldiers leading the national news on a daily basis.

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In June, Israel’s supreme court ruled unanimously that with the expiration of a previous draft law, no legal basis existed for continuing to exempt ultra-Orthodox men. The ultra-Orthodox parties are demanding a new law that would largely preserve the exemption. Satisfying that demand while continuing the war has produced rising public fury. Ignoring the demand could, in theory, break up the coalition and cause the government to fall.

Gallant has been the most prominent coalition politician to oppose a new law in the form that the ultra-Orthodox seek. On Monday, he approved an army plan to send draft notices to thousands of ultra-Orthodox men. The next day, Netanyahu fired him.

The timing served Netanyahu for another reason: Last week, news broke that one of Netanyahu’s spokespeople was under arrest on suspicion of leaking highly sensitive intelligence material to foreign media. Aspects of that material were further distorted in a manner that supported Netanyahu’s scuttling of a deal with Hamas to free Israeli hostages. As of now, most details of the case remain under a court gag order. No claim has yet surfaced that the prime minister knew of or ordered the leak. But he certainly used media reports of the leak to justify his positions. Dismissing Gallant was controversial, but it also pushed the leak affair out of Israeli headlines, at least temporarily.

Netanyahu announced Gallant’s dismissal without mentioning either the draft controversy or the leak scandal. Instead he attributed his decision to “substantial disagreements” with Gallant “on the management of the military campaign,” which made working together impossible.

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This was a piece of the truth that covered up the whole truth. The disagreements are real, and wider than Netanyahu admitted. In a Knesset hearing in August, Gallant reportedly dismissed Netanyahu’s claim that Israel would achieve “absolute victory” against Hamas as “nonsense.” He has publicly clashed with Netanyahu over the need for a plan for “the day after” the war and has pushed for civilian control to be turned over to a Palestinian administration “not hostile” to Israel. He reportedly proposed that a security force linked to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank be deployed in Gaza—an idea that Netanyahu rejected. The prime minister appears to remain committed to his prewar stance of preventing unification of Gaza and the West Bank, lest this create momentum toward Palestinian statehood.

In Gallant’s speech the night he was dismissed, he cited three points of dispute with Netanyahu. One was over a deal to free the hostages, which Gallant supports. “There is not, and cannot be, any atonement for abandoning the hostages,” Gallant declared. A second was over establishing a state commission of inquiry into Israel’s failure to prevent the Hamas attack of October 7. Gallant knows that such an inquiry would assign him a large share of blame as defense minister at the time. But it would likely assign even more responsibility for the catastrophe to the prime minister. Netanyahu is determined to avoid such an inquiry, in a bid to let the army take all the blame. Gallant, an ex-general, doesn’t accept that evasion.

The third clash, Gallant said, was over conscription. He insisted that “everyone of draft age must be drafted.” But if Netanyahu were to accept that position, his coalition would collapse.

Gallant is no dove. He shares the blame not only for the failures of October 7, but for the brutal way the war has been conducted since. Until now, he has also not been an effective politician. He has not managed to build a faction of Knesset members loyal to him within Likud. For this reason, Netanyahu is probably safe from a rebellion within his own party over the dismissal.

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In fact, this is the second time Netanyahu has fired Gallant. The first was in March 2023, when Netanyahu and Justice Minister Yariv Levin were pushing for rapid enactment of their “judicial reform,” a plan to eviscerate constraints on the government’s powers. Gallant warned that forcing through such changes without wide consensus was a threat to Israeli security. Netanyahu responded by announcing that he was dismissing the defense minister. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis poured into the streets, making the “Night of Gallant” the high point of the protests against the constitutional changes. That time, Netanyahu backed down, let Gallant remain as defense minister, and temporarily put a hold on the “reform.”

This time around, protests again erupted, but not on as large a scale—perhaps because the dismissal seemed inevitable, or because many of the potential protesters are now on reserve duty, or because many months of protest have led to exhaustion.

So Gallant has left office. Yet the pressures on the government remain. Netanyahu needs a new draft law to satisfy one piece of his coalition. He needs to continue the war, without a hostage deal, to satisfy the other. Members of his own party know that both policies are unpopular. Another earthquake seems likely. Whether it will crack the government’s foundation remains to be seen.