Blue and White leader Benny Gantz can smell elections in the air. Like many of his coalition partners, he, too, doesn't believe longevity is in the cards.
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Next week, he plans to pose another challenge for the government when his faction will present an amendment to the equality law. Gantz knows this could trigger another coalition crisis but right now, he doesn't care about the latter's integrity. All he cares about is surviving the next general elections.
Once he declared a bid for the premiership, Gantz has positioned himself as the leader of the Israeli Center-Left: not too much of a leftist or a rightist – as Rabin-esque as possible. He wanted to be the man with a repertoire for any occasion; the ultimate crowd-pleaser, who can make an appearance at a wedding hall one night and at a kibbutz dining hall the next.
This method worked, and Gantz led Blue and White to impressive achievements, including having the president task him with forming a government – which is when everything started going wrong.
At that point, Gantz turned from the main character to a supporting one in a show led by Benjamin Netanyahu. Somehow, letting his constituents down so grossly did not end his career and Blue and White won eight Knesset seats in the March 2021 elections. Many saw him as yet another victim of Netanyahu's – the good guy who tried to stop the prime minister from doing the wrong thing and eventually fell on his sword to save the country.
Then, in a political twist of fate, Yamina leader Naftali Bennett became the prime minister. Yes – the man who unseated Netanyahu was not a one-size-fits-all centrist figure but a bona fide right-wing politician from the national-religious camp, who never presumed to represent everyone.
Those who admired Gantz for his sacrifice in the bid to offset Netanyahu could only admire Bennett for his deliberate decision to not only forsake his base and sideline his own rhetoric but to do the courageous, unprecedented and unthinkable – join forces with the Islamist Ra'am party to form a coalition.
Come the next elections, Gantz will no longer be able to claim he sacrifices his ideology for the good of the country. That credit will go to Bennett, who would be able to rightfully argue that his concessions – at a hefty political and personal price – spared Israel from another short-lived Netanyahu term followed by what would have been a fourth election campaign in two years.
It seems that Bennett has inadvertently become the best representative for the Israeli center.
Gantz is not oblivious to this process. He knows he will be devoid of his previous credits in the next elections, nor will he be able to claim he was swindled or that he made noble concessions – not considering the ones Bennett had to make.
Without these, however, Gantz has no political legs on which to stand. He has no campaign and nothing with which to entice the public to vote for Blue and White.
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