Throughout his four terms as prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has always been careful to appoint someone considered an authority on defense matters as his defense minister. In his first term in 1996, it was Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Mordechai, fresh out of the army and a new Likud member. Netanyahu fired him on the eve of the 1999 elections and appointed his old friend and defense minister in two previous governments, Moshe Arens.

When Netanyahu returned to power a decade later, he named Ehud Barak as his defense chief. Barak had been Netanyahu’s commander in the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit and had served as prime minister, defense minister and military chief of staff, instilling in Netanyahu a sense of confidence as he set about planning to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. Anyone looking at this duo during those years came away with the impression that Netanyahu truly needed Barak and relied on him to manage all aspects of the country’s security.

Netanyahu did not deviate from this pattern in his third term, naming former Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon as defense minister in 2013. The two worked well together and Netanyahu once again entrusted him with the defense minister’s job after the 2015 elections as he entered his fourth term.

That was the old Netanyahu, who must have sensed that he needed an experienced defense minister at his side and feared bearing sole responsibility for managing Israel’s complex defense issues. After all, he knows better than anyone else how messy security-related issues can get and how ruinous they can be for political careers. In addition, handing the defense job to someone else put some space between himself and the demands of the West Bank settlers, given that the defense minister is in charge of matters in the territory. Barak, as a member of the leftist political camp, did not have a problem with this status, but Ya’alon paid a heavy political price on the right.