Israelis ranked Defense Minister Yoav Gallant as the best-performing minister in the government, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir the worst, in a poll released on Friday.
In the Channel 12 survey, 22% of respondents said Gallant was performing the best, and 35% rated Ben Gvir as the worst.
Gallant is a moderate in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party who warned against the government’s divisive judicial overhaul earlier this year. Netanyahu fired Gallant after the warning, setting off mass public protests. The prime minister later reinstated Gallant under heavy public pressure.
Gallant has been managing the defense ministry amid a wave of deadly Palestinian terror attacks and high tensions with Lebanon’s Hezbollah terror group on the northern border.
Ben Gvir, the leader of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, oversees the police force and has come under heavy criticism for the record number of murders under his watch.
Ben Gvir has also advocated for hardline policies against the Palestinians, and has made inflammatory comments, including saying last week that his right to move safely in the West Bank was “more important” than Arabs’ right to movement. The comments set off a firestorm of criticism in Israel and abroad.
After Gallant, Health and Interior Minister Moshe Arbel of the Haredi Shas party received the highest ranking, with 8% of respondents saying he was performing best.
Arbel was followed by Ben Gvir and Economy Minister Nir Barkat, with 6% each.
For the worst-performing minister, Ben Gvir was followed by Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who has led the judicial overhaul, with 7% of respondents saying he was doing the worst job. After Levin came firebrand Public Diplomacy Minister Galit Distel Atbaryan and far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, with 6% each.
Distel Atbaryan made headlines this week for firing her ministry’s director general, leaving only one woman at the helm of the professional echelon in any of the government’s 33 ministries.
Close to half of all respondents — 45% — said Foreign Minister Eli Cohen should step down after he revealed this week that he had met with Libya’s foreign minister. Cohen’s decision to announce the meeting led to severe diplomatic damage, sparked intense criticism of the government in Israel and reportedly infuriated the US.
The announcement also caused heavy backlash in Libya. The Libyan foreign minister, Najla Mangoush, was fired and fled abroad, protests broke out in the country, and its prime minister later rejected the possibility of normalization with Israel.
Thirty-three percent of respondents said Cohen should stay on as Israel’s top diplomat, while the rest said they didn’t know.
A majority of respondents — 54% — said Israel should hold new elections, although another round of Knesset voting is not in the cards. Among voters for Netanyahu’s Likud party, 29% said Israel needed new elections.
The Channel 12 survey was conducted on Thursday by pollster Manu Geva. The poll queried a representative sample of 502 adult respondents and had a margin of error of 4.4%.
While Israeli television polls are notoriously unreliable, they often affect public opinion and drive decision-making among parties.
