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.

Ron Ben-Yishai, reporting from a visit to IDF forces in the Gaza Strip, analyzes the state of the fighting, and “the persistent challenge of eradicating an entrenched enemy in a complex urban terrain.”

Hamas, sensing the war’s end, is mounting a final effort to inflict casualties. The IDF now controls 65 percent of Gaza’s territory operationally, with observation, fire dominance, and relative freedom of movement, alongside systematic tunnel destruction. . . . Major P, a reserve company commander, says, “It’s frustrating to hear at home that we’re stagnating. The public doesn’t get that if we stop, Hamas will recover.”

Senior IDF officers cite two reasons for the slow progress: meticulous care to protect hostages, requiring cautious movement and constant intelligence gathering, and avoiding heavy losses, with 22 soldiers killed since June.

Two-and-a-half of Hamas’s five brigades have been dismantled, yet a new hostage deal and IDF withdrawal could allow Hamas to regroup. . . . Hamas is at its lowest military and governing point since its founding, reduced to a fragmented guerrilla force. Yet, without complete disarmament and infrastructure destruction, it could resurge as a threat in years.

At the same time, Ben-Yishai observes, not everything hangs on the IDF:

According to the Southern Command chief Major General Yaron Finkelman, the IDF is close to completing its objectives. In classical military terms, “defeat” means the enemy surrenders—but with a jihadist organization, the benchmark is its ability to operate against Israel.

Despite [the IDF’s] battlefield successes, the broader strategic outcome—especially regarding the hostages—now hinges on decisions from the political leadership. “We’ve done our part,” said a senior officer. “We’ve reached a crossroads where the government must decide where it wants to go—both on the hostage issue and on Gaza’s future.”