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Israel’s New Defense Minister: Netanyahu Loyalist, Settlers’ Friend 

A file photo taken on March 26, 2010 shows Israeli officer general Yoav Galant, chief of the south command, during a press conference near the border with the Gaza Strip. (AFP)
A file photo taken on March 26, 2010 shows Israeli officer general Yoav Galant, chief of the south command, during a press conference near the border with the Gaza Strip. (AFP)
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Israel’s New Defense Minister: Netanyahu Loyalist, Settlers’ Friend 

A file photo taken on March 26, 2010 shows Israeli officer general Yoav Galant, chief of the south command, during a press conference near the border with the Gaza Strip. (AFP)
A file photo taken on March 26, 2010 shows Israeli officer general Yoav Galant, chief of the south command, during a press conference near the border with the Gaza Strip. (AFP)

Israel's new defense minister Yoav Galant is a former general, a staunch ally of Benjamin Netanyahu and a vocal advocate of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. 

In the military, the 64-year-old oversaw Israel's 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and later commanded the "Operation Cast Lead" offensive against its Hamas rulers in 2008-2009.  

Since entering politics in 2015, he has served as minister for education, housing and immigration -- and has been a prominent backer of Israel's settlements, regarded as illegal under international law, that are today home to some 475,000 settlers. 

Some observers fear a radical change in policy on the occupied West Bank under Netanyahu's new government. 

Shlomo Neeman, who heads the Yesha Council, an umbrella group representing Israeli settlers living in the West Bank, welcomed Galant ahead of his appointment on Thursday. 

"Yoav Galant is a man who has done a lot for the settlement of Judea and Samaria," he said, using the Jewish biblical terms for the West Bank. 

Ahead of his nomination, Galant's predecessor Benny Gantz spoke with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, stressing "the important ties forged between the Israeli defense establishment and political echelon and the Palestinian Authority".  

Galant, born in the Mediterranean port of Jaffa in 1958 to Polish Holocaust survivors, was a career soldier.  

He was an officer in the elite marine unite known as Flotilla-13 when it carried out an operation against the Palestinian Fatah movement in Lebanon in 1978.  

The unit killed around 20 Palestinian gunmen, etching the operation into the Israeli military's history books.  

Top general  

Between 1982 and 1984, Galant took a break from the army to become a lumberjack in Alaska.  

Galant reached the rank of general in 2002, serving as former prime minister Ariel Sharon's military attaché.  

Galant would later rise to become commander of the southern military command, overseeing Israel's 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, including the evacuation of 8,000 settlers from the Palestinian enclave. 

He then commanded Israel's "Operation Cast Lead", a 22-day operation in Gaza that killed 1,440 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.  

A United Nations report accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes during that conflict.  

Nominated as the army's chief of staff in 2010, Galant was mired in scandal over the appropriation of public land to build his house.  

An investigative report led to a petition in the supreme court which did not result in criminal charges, but posed potential legal problems to his appointment.  

Instead, Benny Gantz, whom Galant now succeeds at the defense ministry, was selected.  

After leaving the army, he became director of a drilling company owned by Franco-Israeli tycoon Beny Steinmetz, but resigned in 2014 to enter politics.  

In 2015, Galant served as housing minister as part of the center-right Kulanu party, though he later joined Netanyahu's right-wing Likud in 2019.  

Under previous Netanyahu governments, Galant served as both immigration and education minister between 2019 and 2021. 

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Biden’s Legacy: Far-Reaching Accomplishments That Didn’t Translate into Political Support

US President Joe Biden waves while boarding Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on November 1, 2022. (AFP)
US President Joe Biden waves while boarding Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on November 1, 2022. (AFP)
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Biden’s Legacy: Far-Reaching Accomplishments That Didn’t Translate into Political Support

US President Joe Biden waves while boarding Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on November 1, 2022. (AFP)
US President Joe Biden waves while boarding Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on November 1, 2022. (AFP)

Sitting in the Oval Office behind the iconic Resolute desk in 2022, an animated President Joe Biden described the challenge of leading a psychologically traumatized nation.

The United States had endured a life-altering pandemic. There was a jarring burst of inflation and now global conflict with Russia invading Ukraine, as well as the persistent threat to democracy he felt Donald Trump posed.

How could Biden possibly heal that collective trauma?

“Be confident,” he said emphatically in an interview with The Associated Press. “Be confident. Because I am confident.”

But in the ensuing two years, the confidence Biden hoped to instill steadily waned. And when the 81-year-old Democratic president showed his age in a disastrous debate in June against Trump, he lost the benefit of the doubt as well. That triggered a series of events that led him Sunday to step down as his party's nominee for the November's election.

Democrats, who had been united in their resolve to prevent another Trump term, suddenly fractured. And Republicans, beset by chaos in Congress and the former president’s criminal conviction, improbably coalesced in defiant unity.

Biden never figured out how to inspire the world’s most powerful country to believe in itself, let alone in him.

He lost the confidence of supporters in the 90-minute debate with Trump, even if pride initially prompted him to override the fears of lawmakers, party elders and donors who were nudging him to drop out. Then Trump survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania and, as if on cue, pumped his fist in strength. Biden, while campaigning in Las Vegas, tested positive for the coronavirus Wednesday and retreated to his Delaware beach home to recover.

The events over the course of three weeks led to an exit Biden never wanted, but one that Democrats felt they needed to maximize their chance of winning in November’s elections.

Biden seems to have badly misread the breadth of his support. While many Democrats had deep admiration for the president personally, they did not have the same affection for him politically.

Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley said Biden arrived as a reprieve from a nation exhausted by Trump and the pandemic, reported The Associated Press.

“He was a perfect person for that moment,” said Brinkley, noting Biden proved in era of polarization that bipartisan lawmaking was still possible.

Yet, there was never a “Joe Biden Democrat” like there was a “Reagan Republican.” He did not have adoring, movement-style followers as did Barack Obama or John F. Kennedy. He was not a generational candidate like Bill Clinton. The only barrier-breaking dimension to his election was the fact that he was the oldest person ever elected president.

His first run for the White House, in the 1988 cycle, ended with self-inflicted wounds stemming from plagiarism, and he didn’t make it to the first nominating contest. In 2008, he dropped out after the Iowa caucuses, where he won less than 1% of the vote.

In 2016, Obama counseled his vice president not to run. A Biden victory in 2020 seemed implausible, when he finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire before a dramatic rebound in South Carolina that propelled him to the nomination and the White House.

David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Obama who also worked closely with Biden, said that history would treat Biden kinder than voters had, not just because of his legislative achievements but because in 2020 he defeated Trump.

“His legacy is significant beyond all his many accomplishments,” Axelrod said. “He will always be the man who stepped up and defeated a president who placed himself above our democracy."

But Biden could not avoid his age. And when he showed frailty in his steps and his speech, there was no foundation of supporters that could stand by him to stop calls for him to step aside.

It was a humbling end to a half-century career in politics, yet hardly reflective of the full legacy of his time in the White House.

In March of 2021, Biden launched $1.9 trillion in pandemic aid, creating a series of new programs that temporarily halved child poverty, halted evictions and contributed to the addition of 15.7 million jobs. But inflation began to rise shortly thereafter as Biden’s approval rating as measured by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research fell from 61% to 39% as of June.

He followed up with a series of executive actions to unsnarl global supply chains and a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package that not only replaced aging infrastructure but improved internet access and prepared communities to withstand the damages from climate change.

In 2022, Biden and his fellow Democrats followed up with two measures that reinvigorated the future of US manufacturing.

The CHIPS and Science Act provided $52 billion to build factories and create institutions to make computer chips domestically, ensuring that the US would have access to the most advanced semiconductors needed to power economic growth and maintain national security. There was also the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided incentives to shift away from fossil fuels and enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

Biden also sought to compete more aggressively with China, rebuild alliances such as NATO and completed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan that resulted in the death of 13 US service members.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 worsened inflation as Trump and other Republicans questioned the value of military aid to the Ukrainians.

Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack in Israel sparked a war that showed divisions within the Democratic party about whether the United States should continue to support Israel as tens of thousands of Palestinians died in months of counterattacks. The president was also criticized over illegal border crossings at the southern border with Mexico.

Yet it was the size of the stakes and the fear of a Biden loss that prevailed, resulting in a bet by Democrats that the tasks he began could best be completed by a younger generation.

“History will be kinder to him than voters were at the end,” Axelrod said.