Child of Holocaust survivors; Israeli naval commando; Alaskan lumberjack; member of the Knesset and now minister of defense of Israel — there is nothing conventional about the life of Yoav Gallant.

Mr. Gallant was born at the Tel Aviv suburb of Jaffa in November 1958 to parents who were counted among the small fragment of Polish Jewry to survive World War II. In September 1939, Mr. Gallant’s mother Fruma fled with her family into Russian-occupied territory, where they were arrested by the Soviet secret police.

Deported to Siberia, her father exploited his skills as a carpenter to ingratiate himself with the local Red Army commander. Returning home at war’s end, Fruma’s family found Poland to be a wasteland of expropriated Jewish property and antisemitic violence designed to prevent reclamation by Holocaust survivors and their relatives. After the Kielce pogrom of July 1946, they left Poland bound for Palestine in defiance of the British prohibition against Jewish immigration.

Boarding the blockade runner Exodus (yes that Exodus) the family was intercepted by the Royal Navy and taken by force to Germany. They finally reached Israel only after independence was declared in May 1948, when Fruma was 14 years old. She later studied nursing and had a long career in Israel’s national health service.

His mother’s experience during the war had a lasting impact on Yoav Gallant’s upbringing. When he faced bullying during his primary school years, Fruma would tell him: “Never cry and show weakness. If they hit you, hit them back.”

Mr. Gallant took that never-say-die attitude with him to the military, when, in 1977 at age 18, he was inducted for three years of mandatory service. Volunteering for one of Israel’s most elite special forces units, the Flotilla 13 naval commandos, he survived a brutal training course that has an average washout rate of around 95 percent.

He then was selected for officer training, earning a commission and rising in the Flotilla to the rank of lieutenant. After six years of conducting raids behind enemy lines, mostly in Lebanon, Mr. Gallant took a discharge from the navy to follow the common Israeli practice of a post-army overseas tour. He wound up in Alaska for two years, working as a lumberjack.

Returning to Israel, Mr. Gallant was enticed back into the navy, qualifying as a missile boat officer in addition to commanding the naval special forces unit Flotilla 13. The young officer later transferred to the so-called “green army,” where he took command of armor and infantry units. Along the way, he earned a bachelor of business and finance degree at Haifa University.

A series of senior command positions followed until, in 2010, Mr. Gallant was nominated to succeed Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi at the pinnacle of the Israeli military as the Chief of the IDF General Staff. Then politics of personal destruction got in the way.

First, a left-wing non-governmental organization filed suit in the Israeli Supreme Court against Mr. Gallant’s nomination, charging him with indifference towards Palestinian civilian casualties during the 2008 campaign, known as Operation Cast Lead, against Hamas in Gaza.

Then, in a convoluted conspiracy replete with forged documents and anonymous tip-offs, Mr. Gallant was accused – falsely – of trying to torpedo the promotion prospects of Benny Gantz, his main rival for the Chief of Staff position. But the charge that finally stuck involved building permit improprieties involving his private residence, a big deal in land-poor Israel.

It didn’t matter that those transgressions were inadvertent and mostly owed to an error in the property title document. All of the above was enough to cause Prime Minister Netanyahu to rescind Mr. Gallant’s nomination to the Chief of Staff post.

Mr. Gallant has never forgiven the man he holds responsible for the ugly political machinations that ruined his rise to the top — a retired lieutenant general, Gabi Ashkenazi, the man he was supposed to succeed. Mr. Gallant retired from the military at the rank of major general.

After several years as a private sector consultant, Mr. Gallant entered politics in 2015 as the number two in the Kulanu party. Led by former Likud politician Moshe Kahlon, Kulanu positioned itself at the center of the Israeli political spectrum with a focus on social and economic policy.

Appointed to the role of Housing Minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, Mr. Gallant published an opinion piece arguing that economic development was the key to conciliation with Israel’s Arab population.

Yet in Israel, national security has a way of intruding and by 2018 Mr. Gallant gravitated from Kulanu to the more hawkish Likud. Following the Knesset elections of 2019, he was appointed Minister for Education and immediately made his mark by moving to expunge radical leftist themes from Israel’s secondary school system.

Mr. Gallant also tried to cancel an award of the prestigious Israel Prize to a Weizmann Institute computer scientist who supported the anti-Zionist boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. His ministerial decision was later overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court.

Mr. Gallant fell afoul of Israeli conservatives in the early months of 2023 when he urged the Netanyahu Government to back away from its controversial judicial reform agenda. Now serving as Minister of Defense, he was quoted in the Washington Post that widespread opposition to the reforms among certain groups of military reservists posed a threat to Israel’s national security. Netanyahu sacked Mr. Gallant for going public, but reinstated him two weeks later in response to public uproar over the dismissal.

All of this is now irrelevant because every aspect of Israeli society is divided into pre- and post-October 7. And because the most devastating military debacle in Israel’s history occurred on his watch as Minister of Defense, a giant question mark hovers over Mr. Gallant’s future in public life.

At present, Mr. Gallant is focussing on the military campaign against Hamas in Gaza. He’s issued tough-as-nails statements about Israel’s war objectives, rejecting international proposals for a ceasefire and declaring that nothing less than the destruction of Hamas will satisfy the government in Jerusalem.

The national trauma arising from October 7 runs wide and deep. So much so that a national commission of inquiry to investigate the intelligence and military failures of that day will be a near certainty once the war is over. Like the Agranat Commission empaneled in December 1973 to analyze the disaster of the Yom Kippur War, the findings of the October 7 inquiry are almost certain to be difficult.