#benny gantz

[evilwickedme]

It's so clear to me that so many so called "anti Zionists" - especially the non Palestinian goyim - have no idea how the Israeli election system works, and how bibi remains in power, and why we had five elections in like, three years, despite elections supposedly being every four years - because he couldn't keep a government stable enough to stay in power. Bibi netanyahu is MASSIVELY unpopular, and his approval rate has tanked even more since the war started, even among likud voters, the people who vote for HIS party (although their approval rates ranked less than the rest of the population). He has an extreme right wing government because if he didn't cooperate with right wing extremists and haredim he straight up wouldn't have the majority he needs to be our prime minister in the first place. He's been on trial for corruption for years at this point, and tried to completely restructure the judicial system just to avoid prison - leading to nearly a full year of protests until Oct 7. Luckily it didn't end up passing.

If elections were held at any point in the last five months since this war started, not only would he not be PM, we'd straight up have a center-left government. My recent transformation into a Yair Golan stan account is a joke but also 100% real - according to polls from the last three months or so, if he does what he's campaigning to do, leading a combined avoda and meretz party, he'd get enough votes to have an actual influential left wing party in the government for the first time in decades. An unbelievable amount of Israelis are calling for bibi to resign, many of them not calling for it to happen after the war ends, but right now.

I am sourcing this information from polls conducted by channels 11 (kan), 12, and 13, as well as by the Israeli democracy foundation, all but one of our important news channels - channel 14, the last channel, is our equivalent of fox news, and despite their numbers often being extremely different due to what is in my opinion biased reporting and flawed methodology, even they at times have had to admit that gantz is currently leading in the polls.

(Disclaimer that I work for a company that provides subtitles for channel 13, but i do not directly work for channel 13. Channel 13 leans mostly center left, and employs several (self identified) Arab Israelis in front of the camera, including Lucy Aharish, who makes considerable effort to bring Palestinian and Bedouin perspectives to her show. It also employs at least one massive racist though.)

I write this post because I keep seeing an unsourced claim by goyim that there's a poll showing a high rate of approval - 88%! - of the destruction and/or deaths Israel and the IDF are causing in Gaza. I went down a rabbit hole and simply couldn't find a poll asking about approval of deaths or destruction, although maybe I was looking up the wrong keywords? As a result I have just... So many questions. Because with the information I have from trustworthy local news sources, from the news channels I mentioned above and papers such as yediot aharonot/ynet and Haaretz, it doesn't fit with current public opinion, including many recent protests for more efforts towards a ceasefire. So my questions are thus -

Who conducted this poll? Was it a think tank, a government agency, a paper, a news channel? If so, which one? Are they left leaning, right leaning? Was it conducted by an Israeli or foreign institution?

Who did they ask? Was it a sample of likud voters; all Israeli adults; did they include only Jewish Israelis or also Arab citizens (approx. 1.5 million out of our 8 million population), Bedouins, and other minorities?

When was the poll conducted? Was it in October, immediately after the Oct 7 massacre, before the death toll in Gaza grew? Was it conducted more recently?

What, exactly, did they ask? Did they ask about destruction in general, or about the death toll in particular? Did they ask about the attempts to rescue hostages with military means, or all military actions? Did they ask about the number of Hamas operatives dead, about their estimated ratio of Hamas to civilians, about the total deaths?

What was the size of the pool surveyed? Was it conducted on a few dozen, a few hundred, or a few thousand people?

Because without this information, that one, sole statistic is essentially useless. As Mark Twain said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Always look at the source and ask: who asked the questions, who got asked, and what the questions were.

More specific statistics and sources under the cut.

I did find one survey by the Israel democracy foundation that asked if the IDF should take the Gazan suffering into account - an entirely different question, although it did still have a horrific 89% Jewish Israelis and 14% Arab Israelis and Palestinian citizens who said they shouldn't. That said, the pool they were drawing from was not very large - 500 of the interviews were conducted in Hebrew, 100 were conducted in Arabic. Also, of the people who supposedly said that they shouldn't, a little more than half of both populations said they should "somewhat" take it into account - that is, they didn't say they shouldn't take it into account at all, just not make it their first priority. This survey was conducted mid December.

In another survey by the same source with a slight larger sample size (a little over 600 Jewish Israelis and a little over 150 Arab Israelis), an insanely low 15% still wanted Bibi to be the PM, with the only candidate who received more than 6.5% being the center candidate Benny Gantz, who historically has tried to cooperate with center and left parties, with a whopping 23% of the votes. The survey included 10 candidates, as well as five other non candidate options. 4% voted "just not Bibi", and an actually insane 30.5% voted they were undecided. Only a quarter of those surveyed believed Bibi would manage to maintain a coalition after the war, a number that includes more extreme right wing voters, and only the ultra Orthodox haredi population had a majority of people (60%) who believed he can. This survey was conducted in January.

The channel 13 news survey from early March - barely over a week ago! - covered more specifically which parties would manage to get into the government and how many seats they would get, as under a certain amount of votes you simply do not get seats. Not all seats get into a coalition. According to their poll, the amount of seats the likud would get is halved, from 32 to 17, while gantz's the state camp would grow from 12 to 39. While currently meretz gets 4 seats and haavodah do not get enough votes to get a seat at the table so to speak, a combined haavodah and meretz under Yair Golan gets 9 mandates. In total, the right wing only get 47 mandates, well short of the amount of mandates necessary to create a government.

Channel 12's corresponding poll from January shows 35 mandates for gantz, and bibi had 18 mandates. Channel 11, in the same month, gave gantz 33 mandates and bibi 20.

I also sources an English Jerusalem post article which reports on channel 14's polls; jpost is a right wing biased paper, and yet even they report 36 mandates for gantz and 18 for bibi as of February.

Sources

The Israel democracy institute: 1 (English), 2 (Hebrew), 3 (Hebrew)

Haaretz: 1 (English) (paywalled)

Channel 13: 1 (Hebrew)

Ma'ariv: 1 (Hebrew) (reporting on channel 12)

Podcast which summarizes the above article: 1 (English) (includes transcript)

Kan 11: 1 (Hebrew)

Jpost: 1 (Hebrew)

[vyorei]

Surprising? Nothing you genocidal fucks do is surprising. The fact no one has dragged ye out with a multinational army is surprising.

These fuckers need to go down.

[palestinegenocide]

DAY 163

- Netanyahu vows to invade Rafah despite international red line

- Aid deliveries reach north Gaza

- EU says Israel did not present evidence against UNRWA

- Israel bombs central Gaza, clashes with fighters in the north 

- Israeli forces kill Palestinian in Hebron; U.S. sanctions West Bank settlers

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Emma Graham-Harrison at The Guardian:

Israel’s defence minister has ordered the military to prepare plans to allow Palestinians “who wish to leave” Gaza to exit, after Donald Trump suggested the US take over the territory and resettle its residents in other countries. A Hamas official attacked the proposal as a “declaration of intent to occupy” Gaza, as Egypt, which Trump named as a possible destination for Palestinians, launched an intense behind-the-scenes diplomatic campaign to block it going further. Cairo’s envoys warned the US and its allies that it would resist any attempts to move Palestinians across the border, and said the plan threatened its decades-old peace deal with Israel, a template for later regional normalisation deals. Inside Israel, mainstream political reactions to Trump’s comments have ranged only on a spectrum of approval, from delighted celebration among the far right, to the opposition leader, Benny Gantz, saying Israel had “nothing to lose” from the proposal, and Yair Lapid describing the press conference as “good for the state of Israel”.

Their positions reflect popular opinion inside Israel. Eight out of 10 Jewish Israelis support Trump’s call for the “relocation” of Palestinians from Gaza, although only half think it is a practical proposal, according to a poll by the Jewish People Policy Institute. The only strong opposition to the plan came from a handful of politicians on the far left of Israel’s spectrum; some relatives of hostages still held in Gaza, who said they feared the project could derail the ceasefire deal; and some activists and journalists who echoed international warnings against ethnic cleansing. “If there were a true opposition in Israel, one with a conscience, a worldview and even some sort of plan for the future, it would’ve raised a loud warning: don’t drink Trump’s potion,” Gur Megiddo wrote in a column for Haaretz. “The idea of clearing an area of a specific ethnic group, even if it’s a bitter and ruthless enemy, is a concept that Jews – especially the sons of Holocaust survivors like Lapid and Gantz – must never support, no matter the circumstances.” The announcement by the defence minister, Israel Katz, of orders to the military to prepare air, sea and land options for Palestinians to leave Gaza appeared more political than practical, even if any wanted to go, because no countries have offered to host them. “The people of Gaza should have the right to freedom of movement and migration,” Katz said in a statement on X, although it was clear the journeys would only be in one direction. Before the war, Israel’s tight controls on movement in and out of Gaza made it difficult for Palestinians to travel internationally. Restrictions got even tighter after the conflict began; and after Israeli troops began operating near the Rafah crossing last May it was impossible for Palestinians to leave.

An agreement to allow medical evacuations from Gaza was part of the ceasefire deal, and the first group of sick children left on Saturday, although two died before they could be taken out and others had become too sick to move. Trump’s plan to turn Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East” caused international outrage, including a warning from the UN secretary general, António Guterres, that “it is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing”. Forced or coerced displacement is a crime against humanity, illegal under the Geneva conventions, to which Israel and the US are signatories.

Israel Apartheid State Defence Minister Israel Katz tells the IOF to prepare ethnic cleansing plans for Palestinians to leave Gaza.

[eretzyisrael]

by Jake Smith

Israel publicly announced on national television that it had a map of specific Hezbollah military targets years before it launched major strikes against the terrorist group.

Though the two have been in conflict since last year, Hezbollah has taken some of its most major blows in recent weeks from Israel, which has conducted several airstrikes against the group’s targets throughout Lebanon. Benny Gantz, at the time the Israeli Defense Minister, publicly showed a classified map of Hezbollah targets in Lebanon to Fox News during an interview in 2021.

“Let me show you something, which I think is very important,” Gantz told Fox News’ Trey Yingst before handing him a map in the 2021 interview. “This is a map of Lebanon. What you see there is ground forces, missiles, headquarters, launching sites, et cetera. Everything is aimed [at] civilian targets, and it is being conducted from civilian infrastructure.”

EXCLUSIVE: Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz shows Fox News a classified target map, revealing Hezbollah missiles amid civilian infrastructure https://t.co/fPisnRjtjs pic.twitter.com/fm4nOQ5yLm — Trey Yingst (@TreyYingst) March 4, 2021

“This is a target list for you?” Yingst asked Gantz after examining the map, which was blurred out by Fox News.

“This is a target map. Each one of them has been checked legally, operationally, and intelligence wise and we are ready to fight,” Gantz responded.

Israeli forces have conducted sweeping airstrikes against Hezbollah military targets in recent days, including against weapons storage sites and launch sites that were pointed toward Israel, according to Reuters. A senior Hezbollah commander was killed in an airstrike in Beirut on Tuesday, adding to the growing list of high-level Hezbollah operatives who have met similar fates at the hands of Israeli forces in recent months.

“Hezbollah today is not the same Hezbollah we knew a week ago. (It) has suffered a sequence of blows to its command and control, its fighters, and the means to fight,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Tuesday, according to Reuters. “These are all severe blows.”

[stephobrien]

According to Reuters: U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris urged Israel to craft a "credible" humanitarian plan before conducting major military activities in Rafah during a meeting with Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz.

Harris expressed her "deep concern" about humanitarian conditions in Gaza, where Palestinian authorities say more than 30,000 have been killed under a months-long assault by Israel in retaliation for the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, and the United Nations says many are on the brink of starvation.

The meeting comes as President Joe Biden and his administration face increasing pressure from the Democratic Party to back a permanent ceasefire, and push Israel to reduce the loss of civilian life in Gaza and allow aid to flow through in greater amounts.

In a sign of increasing desperation to get aid to Gaza residents, the U.S. military carried out its first air drop of food to Palestinians on Saturday. It plans more.

You can read the full article here.

Keep contacting your elected representatives. Keep urging them to push for a ceasefire, to vote in favour of sending aid to Gaza, and to vote against bills that put weapons in the hands of people who use them on civilians.

(And, a reminder for those who need it: send those messages to politicians who are in a position to actually do something about this, not to random Jewish people who aren't.)

[originalleftist]

Renewed anti-Netanyahu protests in Israel.

"The families of hostages have urged ministers, including Netanyahu's political rival and war cabinet minister Benny Gantz, to unite with other Knesset members in removing the prime minister from power, accusing him of deliberately sabotaging efforts to secure the release of their relatives"

[stupidjewishwhiteboy]

I may be wrong, but I suspect were Lapid or Gantz or Bennett or whoever PM since 10/7/23 there probably would have been an invasion of Gaza (and also probably Lebanon) but

* at some point the IDF would have withdrawn entirely or almost entirely from Gaza (although Hamas intransigence quite possibly would have caused a re-invasion)

* the PM would have been willing to be dragged into a day after plan by making assurances to the PA/Saudi Arabia/UAE about Palestinian self-determination in Gaza (and possibly also the WB)

I dunno, it’s quite possible I’m just having wishful thinking about a situation that doesn’t exist.

[alwaysbewoke]

"Benjamin Netanyahu has been prime minister for longer than other Israeli leaders since the country’s birth in 1948 and is increasingly unpopular, but many of his policies in Gaza and the occupied West Bank enjoy huge Israeli support. The problem in Israel isn’t solely Netanyahu. He’s the symptom of a major larger societal shift. Replacing him with another carbon copy will change little for the millions of Palestinians who live under a brutal military occupation. One possible successor, Benny Gantz, has spent his career proudly promoting the destruction he’s caused in Gaza in previous wars. There’s long been a western obsession with Netanyahu, wrongly believing that he’s the impediment to a more humane "Jewish state". It’s the same mistake recently made by US President Joe Biden and Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, who argued that Netanyahu was blocking any prospect of peace in the region. It’s his belligerence, we’re told, that makes ending the Gaza onslaught impossible. When cautiously questioned by CNN recently, Netanyahu said that he wasn’t some fringe player in Israel but a leader who spoke for many Israelis, pursuing policies in Gaza with broad mainstream backing. He was right, and ignoring this reality doesn’t make it go away."

[vyorei]

By 2026 I hope they're all in the fucking Hague or dead.

[palestinegenocide]

‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 248: Israel kills 274 Palestinians while freeing four Israeli prisoners in Gaza; Gantz resigns from war cabinet

Blinken arrives in Cairo on his eighth tour to the Middle East since the beginning of the war in the hopes of pushing for a ceasefire and prisoner exchange deal Blinken arrives in Cairo on his eighth tour to the Middle East since the beginning of the war in the hopes of pushing for a ceasefire and prisoner exchange deal

[link]

[dadsinsuits]

Benny Gantz

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Bethan McKernan at The Guardian:

The chief prosecutor of the international criminal court has said he is seeking arrest warrants for senior Hamas and Israeli officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant. Karim Khan said his office had applied to the world court’s pre-trial chamber for arrest warrants for the military and political leaders on both sides for crimes committed during Hamas’s 7 October attack and the ensuing war in Gaza.

He named Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas chief in Gaza, and Mohammed Deif, the commander of its military wing, considered to be the masterminds of the 7 October assault, as well as Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the group’s political bureau, who is based in Qatar, as wanted for crimes of extermination, murder, hostage-taking, rape, sexual assault and torture. In an extraordinary rebuke of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and its conduct in the war in Gaza, Netanyahu and Gallant are accused of extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, the denial of humanitarian relief supplies and deliberately targeting civilians. Monday’s statement notably does not include any Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officials, such as its chief of staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, focusing instead on political decision-making. Khan, the British ICC prosecutor, must request the warrants for the Hamas and Israeli suspects from a pre-trial panel of three judges, who take on average two months to consider the evidence and determine if the proceedings can move forward. The ICC has previously issued warrants for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony and the former president of Sudan Omar al-Bashir, but no leader of a “western-style” democracy has ever been issued a warrant.

While there is no imminent likelihood of prosecution, since Israel is not a member of the court, ICC warrants could put Israeli officials at risk of arrest abroad, further deepening the country’s growing international isolation over its conduct in the war in Gaza. The move also presents fresh challenges for Israel’s western allies, who are already struggling to reconcile support for the Jewish state with growing evidence of war crimes in the seven-month-old conflict and respect for the post-second world war rules-based order. Netanyahu described the prosecutor’s accusations against him as a “disgrace”, saying: “I reject with disgust The Hague prosecutor’s comparison between democratic Israel and the mass murderers of Hamas. “With what audacity do you dare compare the monsters of Hamas to the soldiers of the IDF, the most moral army in the world?” Joe Biden, the US president, described the move as “outrageous” in a statement, adding: “Whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”

[...]

Condemnation of Khan’s decision from across the Israeli political spectrum was swift. The Israeli opposition leader, Yair Lapid, called the ICC’s actions a “disaster”. Benny Gantz, a former military chief and member of Israel’s war cabinet alongside Netanyahu and Gallant, criticised the ICC’s announcement, saying Israel fought with “one of the strictest” moral codes and had a “robust judiciary capable of investigating itself”. Khan suggested heavily in his statement that Israel’s judicial system “shields suspects”. Last year’s conviction rate for Palestinians tried in Israeli military courts was 96%, while fewer than 1% of complaints against Israeli soldiers ended in a conviction, according to the US Department of State’s annual human rights report.

Hamas, too, was critical of Khan’s announcement. The ICC prosecutor’s decision “equates the victim with the executioner”, the senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters. Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz described the chief prosecutor’s decision as “a historic disgrace” that would be “remembered forever”. The US Republican party is all but certain to pursue sanctions against members of the ICC as a result of Khan’s announcement; a group of a dozen Republican senators wrote a letter earlier this month warning his office: “Target Israel and we will target you.” Sanctions were levied by the Trump administration over the court’s investigations into Israel and US actions in Afghanistan, but later reversed by Joe Biden. In 2021, Khan decided to drop the US from the ICC’s Afghanistan file.

ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan is seeking arrest warrants for senior Israel Apartheid State and Hamas officials, such as Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Gaza’s Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

[whitesinhistory]

Months Ago State Dept. Panel Exposed Israeli Units’ Rights Abuses, But U.S. Arms Keep Flowing

A State Department panel urged the Biden administration in December to disqualify multiple Israeli military and police units from receiving U.S. aid over serious human rights abuses, including rape and torture. According to ProPublica, Secretary of State Blinken received the recommendation in December but has still not taken any action. Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Netanyahu and his chief rival who is widely expected to succeed him in office, Benny Gantz, have been "publicly and fiercely lobbying against any proposed sanctions," says ProPublica reporter Brett Murphy. "Gantz said he called Blinken personally and they talked about it. They want him to reverse course."

Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday.

Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET.

[memenewsdotcom]

Gantz quits Israel emergency government

[cavalierzee]

Israel's Jewish Terrorists

Make no mistake: Jewish terrorists are the military wing of the organization to which Ben-Gvir belongs and whose interests he represents as a cabinet minister.

Ben-Gvir serves in the government, but he remains loyal to a bigger idea

Haaretz Editorial