There was no way that the chairman of the Blue and White party could turn down the invitation he received Aug. 26 from the Prime Minister’s Office. Retired Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz was invited to receive a security briefing about the most recent developments on the northern front. At issue were threats made by Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah that he would respond to attacks attributed to Israel on Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighborhood and the decision by the Israeli security system to raise the alert level.
Gantz may head the largest party apart from the Likud in the Knesset, which dissolved itself in May, but he does not hold the official title of chairman of the opposition (he was not member of the Knesset before the April elections), a role that would have obliged the prime minister to brief him on political issues at least once a month. In fact, Netanyahu did not have to invite Gantz, who is a former chief of the General Staff, at all. More so, the timing of the invitation, three weeks before the Sept. 17 election, has a certain political significance that Gantz tried to minimize, and rightly so, as far as he was concerned. When the chairman of the Blue and White party was informed in advance that Netanyahu would not be attending the meeting, and that the briefing would be given by National Security Adviser Meir Ben Shabbat instead, Gantz insisted on a wider forum. Ben Shabbat is a personal Netanyahu appointee who served in the past as the prime minister’s political emissary to the country’s rabbinic leadership. The meeting could have easily been taken out of context and given some kind of election spin, along the lines of “Is Gantz heading into a Netanyahu coalition after the election?”
