Yoav Gallant

Origins and early life

Yoav Gallant was born in Jaffa on 8 November 1958 to Polish Jewish immigrants, and grew up in Givatayim, where he attended David Kalai High School. His mother, Fruma, born in Poland, survived the Holocaust, sailed for Palestine as a child aboard the Exodus, was sent back to Germany by the British and reached the new State of Israel in 1948, where she worked as a nurse.

Work and career

His father, Michael, had fought the Nazis as a partisan in the forests of Ukraine and Belarus, then served in the Givati Brigade in 1948 and named his son after Operation Yoav, in which he had fought. Gallant began his military service in 1977 as a naval commando in Shayetet 13, a unit he later commanded, then led the Gaza Division and in 2002 became military secretary to the prime minister with the rank of major general.

From 2005 to 2010 he was commander of the Southern Command of the Israel Defense Forces, in the years that followed Israel's withdrawal from Gaza.

Recognition

He entered politics in January 2015 with the new Kulanu party, was elected to the Knesset that year and became minister of construction, then moved to Likud and served as minister of aliyah and integration from 2019 and minister of education from 2020. Named minister of defence in the government sworn in on 29 December 2022, he held the post until November 2024 and left the Knesset on 5 January 2025.

Later years

When his mother died on 11 May 2023, aged eighty-eight, the Times of Israel recalled the words he had used of her in a speech: a Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Israel aboard the Exodus. In September 2023 the Jerusalem Post placed him ninth on its list of the fifty most influential Jews in the world.