While America was deciding on its new president, Israel was in the midst of a political turmoil of its own. There is a parliamentary fight about funding for haredi daycares that threatens the governing coalition and a scandal over leaked information from the prime minister’s office, and Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who has served in the position since 2022. Netanyahu’s allies and opponents have different accounts of the reason for the dismissal of a figure who presided over the recent successes of the IDF but also—by his own admission—its failures on October 7, 2023. I doubt we’ll fully understand what happened until decades from now, when records of their private disputes become open to the public.

Gallant’s dismissal has sparked mass protests in Israel, similar to those that occurred the last time Netanyahu tried to dismiss him. In January, Armin Rosen published a long portrait of this man, who is now at the center of Israeli politics, which is worth revisiting:

Gallant is named after Operation Yoav, the decisive counteroffensive against the Egyptian army in the Negev during the War of Independence, which his father fought in. Both of his parents were Holocaust survivors from Poland—Gallant often talks about his mother’s childhood voyage aboard the Exodus, the Jewish refugee ship that British authorities blocked from landing in mandatory Palestine in 1947. His father, an anti-Nazi partisan fighter in Eastern Europe and decorated Israeli war veteran, died when Gallant was seventeen, not long before he began his military service.

The young Gallant did not get a fancy foreign degree or eye a career in business or politics, [paths taken by many IDF officers with impressive military careers], working instead as a lumberjack in Alaska when his initial six-year period of active-duty service ended. Gallant did not prepare himself for anything but a life in the IDF, which he treated as his natural home and his entire professional future when he returned to Israel. He once opened a talk before an AIPAC group in Jerusalem by saying: “Sorry for my poor English. But Hizballah and Hamas don’t understand English.”

Harel Knafo, who was Gallant’s chief of staff during his time as head of the IDF’s southern command in the late 2000s, said Gallant “wasn’t fooled by the Oslo Accords. He is not under the American point of view. The two-state solution is the American point of view. It is not the Israeli point of view.”

In 2008, Gallant proposed an invasion and temporary occupation of the Gaza Strip in response to rocket fire, but his military and civilian higher-ups opted instead for a surgical operation.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.