Nobody in Israel — literally nobody — has seriously claimed that Israel’s security chiefs were not profoundly to blame for the failure to prevent the Hamas-led invasion, massacre and abductions of October 7, 2023.
Benjamin Netanyahu, however — the prime minister today, on that blackest of all days in modern Israeli history, and for almost 16 of the past 17 and a half years — is now seeking to assert that they were solely to blame.
They failed to read the signs ahead of the invasion, notably in the final hours before Hamas burst through the fence, and in their hubris and “miscalculation” deliberately chose not to wake him, he claimed this week. If they had alerted him, he would have ordered a mobilization and prevented the attack. “If they had woken me, everything would have been different. That’s the story of October 7,” he declared.
IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi, Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, IDF intel chief Aharon Haliva et al indeed failed to read the blood-red writing on the wall in the days, months, even years before the catastrophe. But so, too, of course, did Netanyahu — and he set the policy through those days, months and years.
He backed — indeed passionately championed — years of Qatari funding of Hamas-controlled Gaza, to the tune of hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars, right up until the invasion, proclaiming that it was essential to keep Gaza from humanitarian disaster, when it was manifestly easing Hamas’s rule in Gaza and helping finance its terrorist army.
