Benny Gantz has been in politics now for not much more than nine months, yet every speech and interview he gives still contain the words: “the reason I went into politics.”
It is as if he still does not quite believe he is a politician and needs to remind himself. Yet, by some standards, he is already a veteran.
In those nine months or so, Mr Gantz formed two new parties, ran two election campaigns, was sworn in as a Knesset member twice and, most crucially, twice become the person closest in over a decade to replace Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister.
Yet he still has the air of an accidental politician about him. And it is not an affectation.
“Benny is the last person you could have imagined with the drive to take down Netanyahu,” says a former senior IDF officer who served under him. “But, on the other hand, he surprised us many times in the past by how high he climbed.”
Mr Gantz’s political career is already beginning to look a lot like his military one. There were much likelier candidates for some of the most senior posts to which he was appointed. And yet he continued to get promoted.
He became commander of IDF troops in Lebanon when his predecessor was killed in a Hezbollah ambush, then West Bank division chief after his predecessor there resigned following a “friendly fire” incident.
He was appointed deputy chief of staff of the IDF as a compromise candidate because the then chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi and Defence Minister Ehud Barak vetoed each other’s candidate for the job.
Gantz ultimately became chief of staff a week after he had officially retired from service, when the two candidates chosen over him were tainted by scandal.
It is not that Mr Gantz’s high-flyer status was undeserved. He had proved in the elite Paratrooper Brigade to be an intelligent and well-liked officer, brave when necessary, and not too gung-ho.
But he lacked the qualities more usually associated with those who make it to the very top of the greasy pole. He had no burning ambition, no arrogance. He was competent and collegial, and did not leave much of a mark in his succession of senior postings.
Joining an elite unit was what was expected from people of Mr Gantz’s background. He grew up in Kfar Ahim, a small agricultural community founded in 1949, ten years before his birth, by Holocaust survivors who had just arrived in the new Israel from Romania.
His mother Malka was in Bergen-Belsen, a biographical detail he often mentions. Volunteering for the paratroopers and then volunteering again to stay on as an officer was just something Kfar Ahim boys did.
One of his childhood neighbours, Yisrael Katz, six years his junior, took the same path, but left service as a captain and became a Likud student activist. Today he is the foreign minister and intends to run for party leader after Mr Netanyahu goes.
Benny Gantz remained in the army for 37 years and had a Forrest Gump-like knack for being at the centre of historical events. As a young conscript, one of his first assignments was as part of the security detail for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s visit to Israel in November 1977.
In May 1991, he was in charge of the commando unit that secured Addis Ababa airport during the Operation Solomon airlift of Ethiopian Jewry.
As commander of the IDF division in Lebanon during the final pullback from the “security zone”, he was the very last Israeli soldier to leave the country in May 2000 after 18 years of continuous Israeli presence. Four months later, he was in command of the West Bank when the Second Intifada broke out there.
Unsurprisingly, the tall and imposing Benny Gantz was a favourite of the IDF’s spokesperson unit whenever they needed to put an impressive-looking officer before the cameras.
Back in January, when Mr Gantz launched his new party, Resilience for Israel (Hosen l’Yisrael), four videos were released. Three of them extolled his toughness as chief of staff during Operation Pillar of Defence (2012) and Operation Protective Edge (2014), complete with pictures of the destruction in Gaza and a rolling ticker of the number of Palestinian terrorists killed.
The fourth was about Israel’s search for peace. Mr Gantz’s campaign advisers were trying to position him ambiguously on the political map, three steps to the right, one back to the left.
His political entry was impressive; his rise in the polls meteoric. The party evolved into Blue & White (Kahol Lavan), merging with Yesh Atid and Telem, a centrist-right bloc rivalling Likud’s hegemony.
But Mr Gantz himself, coming under a toxic smear campaign by Mr Netanyahu and his proxies, seemed to be wilting in the limelight. He often stuttered in interviews and obviously was not enjoying the experience, which he would later call, “the most difficult months of my life.” Military campaigns seemed easier for him than the political kind.
But, despite the smears, his own lacklustre performance and the dysfunction of Blue & White’s leadership, with its “cockpit” of three former chiefs of staff and a former chat-show host, the party has done surprisingly well in 2019’s two elections, and is now the largest in the Knesset, with one seat more than Likud.
Mr Gantz’s greatest electoral quality seems to be that he is a responsible grown-up who is not Mr Netanyahu. But now he has to contend with the Prime Minister in Israel’s political deadlock.
He may have been prepared to enter a unity government with Likud and serve under Mr Netanyahu as defence minister. But, once again, his lack of ambition is not the main factor in events. Blue & White’s other leaders will not allow him to give up.
“Everything now is about not allowing Gantz to blink,” says an influential adviser to the party. “Netanyahu certainly won’t give up, but he’s running out of tricks.”
When that happens, Benny Gantz is positioned to become Israel’s accidental prime minister.
