The Israeli military jeep rolled slowly through the dark streets of Beit Ummar, a Palestinian town in the southern occupied West Bank. It was the summer of 1988. For the last six months, thousands of Palestinians had been confronting Israeli forces in an uprising that would later be known as the First Intifada. In the front seat of the jeep was Benny Gantz, a young officer with the paratroopers. At nearly 6ft 5in he had to hunch his long frame to fit inside. The night was suddenly lit up by Molotov cocktails exploding all around the jeep. The Israeli troops jumped out with assault rifles raised but their attackers had already fled. “Other commanders would just say shoot everywhere. But not Benny,” said Dan Emergui, one of the soldiers in the jeep. “He’s calm and he’s cool. If he doesn’t have a reason to shoot, he won’t.” Three decades after the ambush in Beit Ummar, Mr Gantz is once again trying to hold his nerve under fire, this time in the midst of ugliest election campaign in recent Israeli history. Mr Netanyahu has tried to win support from the Israeli right wing as corruption allegations take their toll Credit: Ariel Schalit/ AP The 59-year-old, who rose from a paratrooper to Israel’s top general, has led his centrist Blue & White coalition to within striking distance of toppling Benjamin Netanyahu and ending the prime minister’s decade in power. The final polls before Tuesday’s election show Blue & White winning more seats than Mr Netanyahu’s Likud party. However, the same polls also show Right-wing parties with a narrow majority in parliament, which might be enough to keep Mr Netanyahu in office. In a last minute bid to win over Right wing parties, Mr Netanyahu promised over the weekend that he would annex all Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a step he has shied away from in the past. Mr Gantz’s campaign has been relatively light on policy. On the security questions which often decide Israeli elections he has taken similar positions to Mr Netanyahu and sometimes tried to outflank him in hawkishness. His main pitch to voters is that he is the candidate of decency and national unity while Mr Netanyahu, who is facing criminal corruption charges, is prepared to tear Israel apart to hold onto power. “We are speaking about a corrupt man who is destroying the country,” Mr Gantz said. “Something is wrong and I’m telling you, we need to fix the house, it’s an internal emergency.” Mr Netanyahu and his allies have not taken the challenge lightly. They have pummelled Mr Gantz as a paranoid delusional and tried to scare Jewish voters with claims he would bring Israel’s Arab minority parties into government. Mr Netanyahu (centre) and Mr Gantz (left) once worked closely together Credit: Photo by Jim Hollander – Pool/Getty Images Someone leaked a classified report that Mr Gantz’s phone was hacked by Iran, prompting Mr Netanyahu to claim his opponent was vulnerable to blackmail by Israel’s mortal enemy. Mr Gantz suspects the prime minister’s aides were behind the leak. Beyond the daily mudslinging, the election poses a larger question about Israel’s future: is the liberal Zionism of Israel’s early days still relevant or is Mr Netanyahu’s brand of divisive Right-wing politics now the country’s dominant force? Several measures indicate that Israel’s shift to the Right, of which Mr Netanyahu is both a cause and a symptom, may be permanent. Around 63 per cent of Jewish Israeli voters identify as Right-wing, compared to just 15 per cent for the Left and 18 per cent who consider themselves Centre. Surveys show that young Israelis, who grew up amid a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings in the early 2000s, appear more Right-wing than their parents’ generation. Demographically, religious conservatives Jews are having more children than their secular liberal neighbours. Letters from Jerusalem RHS Mr Gantz hopes his centrist appeals for national unity, bolstered by his military credentials, will be enough to turn the tide. “Benny has a calm and collected type of charisma that is not necessarily a sign of our populist times. The question is whether that type of leadership succeeds in this day and age. If it doesn’t, that will tell us something about ourselves,” said Peter Lerner, a former military officer who served with him. Mr Gantz has no political experience and his centrist Blue & White party is an unwieldy coalition of several other parties. Two other Israeli generals serve in the party leadership and Blue & White’s parliamentary candidates come from across the ideological spectrum. Mr Gantz has struggled to match the political skills of Mr Netanyahu, who has won four terms in office and is a master orator in both Hebrew and English. But the ex-officer has a quiet gravitas and has grown more publicly assured throughout the campaign. His main advantage is a wave of anti-Netanyahu sentiment among liberal Israelis who will support anyone who can drive out the prime minister. At Blue & White campaign rallies, voters often say they are tired of Mr Netanyahu rather than enthused about Mr Gantz. “The biggest reason to support him is to just to get Netanyahu out,” said Esti Nof, 26. “I don’t think he has clear definitive answers about what he wants to do.” Benny Gantz (right) while serving as a paratrooper in the late 1980s Credit: Courtesy: Dan Emergui Mr Gantz is the son of two Holocaust survivors and grew up in an agricultural community near the Gaza border. He has four children of his own and his eldest son followed his father’s footsteps and joined the paratroopers. Like Mr Netanyahu, Mr Gantz was a commando who fought on battlefields across the Middle East. In speeches, he jokes of having visited Arab countries “without a passport”. In 2011, he was promoted to the chief of staff of the Israeli military, a role where he would work directly with the prime minister. Mr Gantz was in command of Israeli forces during the 2014 Gaza war, known in Israel as Operation Defensive Edge. Human rights group have accused Israel of committing war crimes in the operation, during nearly 1,500 civilians were killed by Israeli strikes, according to the UN. Israelis had their own criticisms. Some said that Mr Gantz’s forces were unprepared and too slow to subdue Hamas while Israeli civilians were living under rocket fire for 51 days. Mr Gantz’s elderly mother spent nights fleeing to a bomb shelter during the 2009 Gaza war. Mr Gantz believes he struck the right balance in prosecuting the war while respecting human rights. “We are strongest when we combine military strength and moral standards,” he said. Among those who hailed his performance was Mr Netanyahu, who praised the general as “an officer and a gentleman, a warrior and a human being”. Those warm feelings have evaporated in the heat of the election. Blue & White’s best hope of victory is to defeat Mr Netanyahu’s Likud by at least four seats and then appeal to Israel’s president to give them a chance to form a government. It will take a series of backroom deals with Ultra-Orthodox parties and some Right-wing factions to cobble together a majority. Politics is a new battlefield for Mr Gantz and at a recent public event an interviewer asked how he was coping with the public attacks. “If it’s not easy then it’s not easy,” he replied. “But I’ll tell you what: one day in Lebanon is by far harder and I served there for 23 years.”
