Benny Gantz

Origins and early life

Benjamin Gantz, known as Benny, was born on 9 June 1959 in Kfar Ahim, a cooperative village in southern Israel that his parents helped to found. Both his parents were Holocaust survivors: his mother, Malka Weiss, came from Hungary and survived Bergen-Belsen, and his father, Nahum, the son of Munkacs Hasidim from Transylvania, survived Auschwitz and camps of the Buchenwald system before reaching Palestine on a clandestine Jewish immigrant ship.

Work and career

His father became one of the leaders of the moshav movement, and in 2013 his son met Esther Friedman, a fellow Bergen-Belsen survivor who said she owed her life to his mother. Drafted in 1977, he volunteered for the Paratroopers Brigade, became an officer in 1979 and later commanded the air force's Shaldag commando unit and the 35th Paratroopers Brigade. In 1991 he commanded the commando force that held the ground in Addis Ababa for thirty-six hours during Operation Solomon, the airlift that brought some 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel.

He went on to lead the Northern Command from 2001 and served as military attaché in the United States from 2005 to 2009, and on 14 February 2011 he became the twentieth chief of the general staff, a post he held until February 2015. He entered politics in December 2018 with the Israel Resilience party, which became part of the Blue and White alliance, and was speaker of the Knesset from 26 March to 17 May 2020. He then served as alternate prime minister and minister of defence in the government formed in May 2020, and from June 2021 to December 2022 as minister of defence and deputy prime minister.

After the attack of 7 October 2023 he joined the government as a minister without portfolio and a member of the war cabinet, which he left in June 2024. In September 2023 the Jerusalem Post placed him, with Yair Lapid, fourteenth on its list of the fifty most influential Jews in the world.