Imagine this: A soldier, rifle in hand, boots sinking into Gaza’s dust, eyes scanning the horizon for threats. He’s a young guy – maybe 19, maybe 20 – who’s already seen more in a month than most people will see in a lifetime. He’s braced for battle and determined, but his mind is churning. He’s not thinking about his next move against Hamas.
Instead, his thoughts are snagged on a headline flashing on his phone, a sentence passed around in whispers on the front lines: Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has been fired – in the middle of the war.
This soldier – standing in enemy territory, risking his life – is wondering: What on earth is happening back home?
We expect our soldiers to be strong and to fight with everything they have. But what does that strength even mean when, back in the Knesset, the message to both our troops and our enemies is one of fractured leadership, of weak priorities? Gallant’s sacking, right here, right now, is no simple bureaucratic change. It’s an earthquake, a shock wave that rattles from the top of the government to the battlefield trenches. It screams chaos.
Why fire Gallant in the middle of a war? Because he had the nerve to issue draft notices to the ultra-Orthodox? Because coalition survival suddenly trumps national security? That’s what this soldier in Gaza is hearing. Is this what I’m fighting for? Is this what I’m ready to die for?
For our young soldier, Gallant and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are no saints. Gallant, once a rising star, isn’t perfect. Netanyahu brought him into the fold; he saw his potential. But now, in the midst of conflict, Netanyahu shows him the door as if dismissing a low-level clerk. It’s a scandal, a betrayal. And for what? A political game, a trade-off of national security for the appeasement of political allies.
Netanyahu and Gallant are equally culpable. And let’s not forget the chief of staff. When the inquiry arrives – and it will – history will assign them all failing grades. Their names will be there in the report, next to every miscalculation, every blind eye, every moment they put their own agendas over the soldiers they command.
October 7 stands as a grim testament to these failures – a massacre we should never have endured, an event that will stain this government for years.
What are Israel's enemies thinking?
What must Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei be thinking, watching from Tehran? What signals are Hamas leaders picking up? They see a leadership at war with itself, tripping over each other as it attempts to lead a country from crisis to crisis. And amid this storm, we still expect our soldiers to march forward, to fight, to somehow trust in a government that treats its Defense Ministry as a bargaining chip.
And here’s the bitter irony. Gallant, once the darling of the press, was bold and unwavering. Netanyahu, the eternal survivor, is both despised and feared by the media. These two men are at the opposite ends of the political spectrum, yet are united by the mess they’ve created – a mess that has led us here, to October 7’s bloodshed, to this broken faith in our leaders. History won’t remember them kindly, nor will the soldiers they’ve left in Gaza’s dust.