One of Israel’s senior strategic advisers once quipped that there are only two kinds of people who file libel suits: complete saints and complete fools. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is neither.
Netanyahu announced on Wednesday that he had instructed his legal team to file a defamation lawsuit against the Haaretz newspaper and journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, after the pair reported in an expose published Tuesday that the prime minister had received a dire warning from United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed about an extreme impending action by Hamas, just 10 days before the October 7, 2023, massacre, and had ignored it.
Netanyahu had no choice but to go on the offensive. Eldar and Yuval’s blockbuster report deals a fatal blow to Likud’s ongoing “They didn’t wake me up” campaign — Netanyahu’s repeated public defense that IDF and Shin Bet chiefs had failed to rouse him from his sleep on the night of October 6 to report suspicious Hamas activity — which lies at the heart of his attempt to shift the entirety of the blame onto the security establishment. Had he only been alerted, the premier insists, the outcome of the following, terrible morning would have been entirely different.
