Former Israeli army chief and defence minister Benny Gantz has dropped out of the race for Israel’s parliament ahead of next week’s vote, after opinion polls suggested his party would fail to clear the entry threshold.
The leader of the Blue and White party announced on Monday that he would not stand in the October 27 polls. He said he would “continue to work for unity”. Gantz, who is 67, is expected to hold a news conference later the same day.
Polls kept Blue and White below the threshold
Opinion polls in the run-up to the election had repeatedly put Gantz’s party under the 3.25 percent threshold needed to win seats in the 120-seat Knesset, Israel’s parliament.
Recent polling shows Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and the far-right coalition it leads locked in a tight race with a self-styled Zionist opposition alliance. Neither side appears on track to win a parliamentary majority.
Two Arab-led electoral lists, representing Palestinian citizens of Israel who make up about 20 percent of the population, are projected to win 13 seats. They could be critical to any coalition formed after the vote, yet both main blocs have ruled out governing with them.
Gantz’s record alongside Netanyahu
A former main opposition leader, Gantz sat in a national unity government with Netanyahu from 2020 to 2021. He also joined Netanyahu’s war cabinet, formed to oversee the war in the Gaza Strip after the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Gantz left the emergency cabinet in early June 2024, saying Netanyahu “is preventing us from advancing toward true victory”. He had entered politics in 2018.
Opposition welcomes decision as analysts question its impact
Opposition leaders, including Gadi Eisenkot of the Yashar party, who is seen as a potential prime minister candidate, welcomed the decision as “correct” and “responsible”.
Nour Odeh, reporting from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, said the announcement was not really expected, although many would see it as consistent with how Gantz has conducted himself since entering politics. She said he had joined unity governments with leaders he had expressly opposed, especially Netanyahu.
Odeh added that Gantz’s call for unity was narrow, referring to a government of Zionist parties that excluded Palestinian Israeli and non-Zionist parties, even if that meant bringing Netanyahu back in.
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador and consul general in New York, said Gantz’s exit did not change the playing field. He called the departure “completely irrelevant and inconsequential” electorally, and said it was also inconsequential politically. Pinkas added that Gantz had lost “a lot of his aura” after he “overstayed his welcome in the Netanyahu government”.
