Reuters reports:

Benny Gantz, the Israeli war cabinet member visiting Washington this week, tells a story of how his mother, a Holocaust survivor, once had an operation in Germany performed by a Palestinian doctor from Gaza.

The story encapsulates the hope for reconciliation that motivates optimists in the Middle East but which has been cruelly tested by the war with Gaza that erupted on Oct. 7, the deadliest day in Israel’s history.

Gantz, 64, who leads a centrist party that now holds a commanding lead in the opinion polls, joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s emergency cabinet last year. He says the fact that he was willing to join a unity government with the right wing Netanyahu and his nationalist religious allies, showed the scale of the crisis facing Israel.

While Gantz has been as adamant as any other leader in Israel that the war can only end when Hamas is destroyed, he is far more open to dialogue with the Palestinians than Netanyahu and his allies from the settler movement like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich or Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Despite the international alarm at the mounting death toll in Gaza, he is unlikely to deviate from the government’s path of continuing the war until final victory.

But as U.S. and international pressure grows for a revival of efforts to reach a two state solution, Gantz’s willingness to think about a political end to the conflict has brought the divisions more clearly into focus. [Continue reading…]