Israel's Gantz tests Netanyahu partnership in Washington

Benny Gantz, the Israeli war cabinet member visiting Washington this week, tells a story of how his mother, a Holocaust survivor, once had an operation in Germany performed by a Palestinian doctor from Gaza.

The story encapsulates the hope for reconciliation that motivates optimists in the Middle East but which has been cruelly tested by the war with Gaza that erupted on October 7, the deadliest day in Israel's history.

Gantz, 64, who leads a centrist party, joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's emergency cabinet last year. He says the fact that he was willing to join a unity government with the right wing Netanyahu and his nationalist religious allies, showed the scale of the crisis facing Israel.

"This is not a political partnership I am in," he told a group of journalists in a briefing last year, adding that 10 members of his family joined their units in the military in the biggest call up of reservists in years.

"There is no way I would stand aside and play with politics under such circumstances," said Gantz, who in 2020 briefly joined Netanyahu during the COVID pandemic in what was meant to be a rotation deal before their coalition fell apart.

Even so, the rules of politics have a way of reasserting themselves and Gantz's visit to Washington this week, where he is meeting both Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, has underscored the rivalry that has never gone away between Netanyahu and his reluctant partner.

Despite the international alarm at the mounting death toll in Gaza, Gantz, as hawkish on Israel's war aims as Netanyahu, is unlikely to deviate from the government's path of continuing the war until Hamas is destroyed and more than 130 hostages still in captivity have been brought home.

But the fact that it is he, rather than Netanyahu, who is making the visit has caused a storm. 

Netanyahu's relations with US President Joe Biden have been so strained that more than a year after taking office, he has still not received an invitation to visit Washington.

Anonymous briefers have told Israeli outlets "there is only one prime minister" and the media have reported that Netanyahu had forbidden Israel's ambassador in the United States from supporting the visit.



Reuters