They're a united front, despite everything. Since October 11, the five members of Israel's war cabinet leading the military operations in Gaza, on the Lebanese border and in the West Bank, have maintained the fiction of a unity around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This cabinet reflects the Israeli nation, united in mourning and in the largest military mobilization in its history (over 350,000 reservists), but disoriented and deeply divided.
Three generals surround Netanyahu, all dressed in black for the past month, constantly clarifying and contradicting the prime minister's statements: They're Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and former chiefs of staff Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot. These two elected members of the opposition (National Unity center-right) joined the government on the fifth day of the war, like reservists in uniform. They see themselves as a guard around the prime minister.
Netanyahu's cabinet includes Ron Dermer, an American considered his "second brain," one of the few people he sees as an alter ego and who has been by his side since 2000. A religious man born in Florida, Dermer did not serve in the Israeli army. He is in charge of relations with US President Joe Biden's administration, which has involved itself like none of its predecessors in Israel's wartime decision-making apparatus.
Dermer is intimately acquainted with these American officials: He's had a decade-long hostile relationship with them. When Netanyahu appointed him ambassador to Washington in 2013, advisors to then Democratic president Barack Obama considered refusing his credentials, arguing that he was less a diplomat than an American political operative, deeply involved in the Republican Party. A close friend of former president Donald Trump, Dermer helped convince him to withdraw from the 2015 international agreement on Iran's nuclear program in 2018. In 2021, the advisor publicly declared that Israel should forgo the support of Jewish voters in the Democratic Party, whom he deemed too critical, and should instead rely on the unwavering support of evangelical Christians.
Aryeh Deri, the leader of Israel's ultra-Orthodox Shas party and twice convicted of corruption and tax fraud, is the sole representative in the war cabinet of the coalition of religious fundamentalist parties that brought Netanyahu to power in December 2022. This longstanding, politically astute ally holds an observer seat in the cabinet. Deri heads a party whose majority of voters reject military service and which is seeking to preserve massive state subsidies granted in the spring.
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