Benny Gantz

Benny Gantz (born 9 June 1959) is an Israeli politician and retired general in the Israel Defense Forces. A veteran paratrooper who rose through the ranks over 38 years of service, Gantz commanded the IDF as its 20th Chief of the General Staff from 2011 to 2015, overseeing major operations including the 2014 Gaza conflict known as Protective Edge.

Entering politics in 2019 amid widespread public frustration with Benjamin Netanyahu's prolonged tenure, Gantz founded the centrist Israel Resilience Party and led the Blue and White alliance to strong electoral results, nearly forming a governing coalition as a perceived corruption-free alternative emphasizing security and governance reform. Despite initial vows against partnering with Netanyahu, Gantz joined a unity government in 2020 as Alternate Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, later serving in the 2021 Bennett-Lapid coalition in the same defense role until its collapse. Following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, he entered the emergency war cabinet as a minister without portfolio to provide broad national unity, resigning in June 2024 over strategic disagreements regarding the ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon.

Benny Gantz was born on June 9, 1959, in Kfar Ahim, a moshav in central Israel that his parents helped establish as Holocaust survivors and pioneers of the Zionist movement. His mother, Malka (née Weiss), survived the Holocaust in Hungary, while his father, Nahum Gantz Ostolish (1926–2005), hailed from Romania and was detained by British authorities in 1946 for attempting illegal immigration to Mandatory Palestine aboard the ship Exodus. As the only son among four siblings, Gantz grew up immersed in narratives of Jewish resilience and state-building, with his family embodying the labor Zionist ethos of agricultural self-reliance on land previously part of the depopulated Palestinian village of Iraq al-Manshiyya.

Gantz's religious upbringing reflected the predominantly secular orientation of Kfar Ahim, a cooperative settlement founded by Eastern European Jewish immigrants prioritizing communal labor over religious observance. No sources indicate orthodox or traditional Jewish practices in his immediate family, aligning with the broader secular Jewish identity of many moshavim established post-1948 by survivors seeking redemption through pioneering rather than ritual. During his youth, he attended a boarding school in a youth village near Haifa, further embedding him in Israel's state-secular educational framework before his enlistment in the Israel Defense Forces in 1977. This background informed his later political positions advocating separation of religion and state, such as supporting egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall and opposing ultra-Orthodox exemptions from military service.