One of the great ironies of recent world historical events is that a conflict that was planned to weaken, if not destroy, the State of Israel led to the immeasurable strengthening of it. Iran helped foment a multi-front war against the Jewish state that began on Oct. 7, 2023, when a Hamas-led Palestinian Arab assault on southern Israel communities resulted in the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. That orgy of mass murder, torture, rape, kidnapping and wanton destruction left the Jewish state at what may well have been the low point of its history. Its people reeled from the horror and saw their country’s leadership as responsible for a set of colossal blunders that made this catastrophe possible.
That tragic day might have sealed the political fate of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on whose watch it all happened. But thanks to the subsequent victories Israel’s soldiers won in the field against its adversaries, the prime minister not only remains in office but probably also has an even chance of winning another term whenever the nation’s voters go to the polls sometime in the next year.
Those victories came at a high price, which involved the deaths (at the time of this writing) of 893 members of the Israel Defense Forces. Those successes against enemies of the Jewish state were also made possible only by Netanyahu’s steadfast leadership and refusal to be bludgeoned into surrendering his country’s security by its sole superpower ally. In doing so, he was able to lead the subsequent successful effort to defeat Hezbollah and Iran, and help usher in the fall of the decades-long regime of Bashar Assad in Syria, an Iranian ally. That has led to what even his opponents must concede is a stunning revival of his popularity and the standing of his government.
And it also infuriates his political enemies in Israel and the United States.
In response, the drumbeat of incitement against him that has been going full blast since the moment he returned to office after winning the Knesset election held in November 2022 is now being stepped up.
Blaming it all on Netanyahu
Readers of The New York Times Sunday Magazine got a full taste of what that means this week with a lengthy story compiled by its main correspondents, including Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley and staff writer Ronen Bergman, who is the author of a number of books about the history of Israeli intelligence operations.
While throwing in occasional disclaimers attempting to give it a modicum of fairness and context, the main thesis of the piece is that Oct. 7 and the war that followed were not only Netanyahu’s fault but that he crucially prolonged it. It claims that he refused to accept a deal that would have ended the conflict and all of its attendant suffering in April 2024. And it argues that he did so principally out of a craven and unprincipled quest to hold onto power.
This smear, which amounts to a political blood libel, isn’t merely unfair. The truth is more or less the opposite. Far from Netanyahu being primarily motivated by political considerations, it was his opponents—both in the Biden administration and in Israel’s opposition parties—who have been playing politics with the war far more than the prime minister.
The Times’ thesis rests on four arguments that all revolve around the idea that everything that is wrong with Israel is Netanyahu’s fault.
The first is that they believe he should not have been a candidate in the 2022 election—that he should have withdrawn from politics after he was indicted on a handful of corruption charges. But these charges are flimsy at best and an example of lawfare being used by Israel’s liberal/left-wing establishment to eliminate a leader they couldn’t defeat in an election.
The second is that Netanyahu is to blame for the events of Oct. 7 because he allowed Hamas’s terrorist government to remain in place over the years, rather than moving to oust it, even allowing Qatar to financially support them.
That is true, though he was far from alone in thinking that this policy would maintain the status quo with the Gaza Strip. Virtually everyone in the political opposition that now clamors for his fall agreed with such a policy. The failure to understand that Hamas and its Iranian paymasters were still ideologues dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the genocide of its people, rather than pragmatists, was real. But it was a mistake made by the entire spectrum of the Jewish state’s political, military and intelligence establishment, which provided most of the off-the-record comments that formed the basis of the Times Magazine article.
The third element is the notion that Netanyahu’s efforts to reform Israel’s out-of-control and all-powerful judicial system, which undermines democracy rather than, as his opponents falsely claimed, sought to undermine or destroy it, caused such division within Israel that it encouraged Hamas to strike at that very moment.
The uproar over the issue throughout the course of 2023 did indeed undermine the country’s security and certainly distracted the prime minister. The responsibility for that, however, belongs as much if not more to Netanyahu’s domestic rivals, whose efforts to stop him included public refusals on the part of some in responsible positions to continue to serve in the military. Had the opposition confined their campaign against judicial reform to normal political discourse—as opposed to threatening to bring on a civil war rather than accept the verdict of the ballot box—Hamas would not have gotten the false impression that a political chasm existed in the Jewish state, and that Israel’s liberal and secular voters wouldn’t fight to defend their country.
The fourth charge against Netanyahu is that he could have ended the war after only a few months, yet chose not to do so because he believed that would end his political career.
The idea that Netanyahu—who lost his older brother to terrorism and is often called the “security” prime minister—prioritized politics over ending the war is fundamentally mistaken.
The first thing to remember about this charge is that the notion that this or any such conflict is entirely separate from politics is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of war. As the Prussian military and political strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote: “War is a continuation of politics by other means.” That is true of Iran and Hamas, and it has also been true of every war that Israel has fought to preserve its existence and to ensure that its enemies were not put in a position to threaten it.
Biden’s political motivation
More than that, those playing politics were the ones seeking to force an end to the war before Israel achieved the decisive results that it ultimately obtained.
The efforts of Biden’s foreign-policy team to force Israel to stop short of defeating Hamas and to end the war before it or its Hezbollah, Houthi and Iranian allies were defeated were motivated in part by their animus for Netanyahu. They didn’t want Israel to become “too strong,” so that the country could eventually be pressured into making concessions to the Palestinians.
Their primary motive, however, was their angst about divisions within the Democratic Party over the administration’s half-hearted support for Israel after Oct. 7. For the intersectional base of the Democrats, Biden was insufficiently hostile to the Jewish state; that posed a genuine threat to his chances for re-election in 2024. By the spring of that year, the administration was desperate to end the war because many Democrats opposed his policy of aiding Israel in its time of need, verbally and militarily, even while also slow-walking the delivery of supplies and doing everything in their power to hamstring the Israeli effort to eradicate Hamas.
Netanyahu’s political opposition also sought to end the war without achieving anything close to a victory over Hamas. Their reasons were similarly complex.
From the start, many Israelis believed that the only priority ought to be ransoming the hostages held by Hamas, regardless of whether or not this would strengthen the terrorists and only lead to future victims in the long run. Just as important, the Israeli left had long accepted the notion that the Palestinians must be appeased, rather than defeated, even if the overwhelming majority of the Jewish state’s citizens had long since given up on the hope that trading land for peace would accomplish anything more than an exchange of territory for more terrorism.
Throughout the war, they have clamored for the toppling of the coalition government, regardless of the unseemly nature of their arguments. This agitation strengthened the determination of Hamas to stick with a conflict that—from the moment it became clear that they were losing—they believed could still be salvaged if enough pressure from the United States, domestic Israeli critics, and international support from malign agencies and mass protests in major cities could be applied to make Netanyahu give up.
The Biden administration was not a passive spectator to Israel’s political turmoil. It took sides in the internal Israeli battle over judicial reform. That was an act of rank hypocrisy since their support for an all-powerful Israeli Supreme Court was in contrast to the Democrats’ openly stated desire to limit the ability of the much less powerful U.S. Supreme Court to decide constitutional questions.
Even worse, as many long suspected and has now only recently been proven by the discovery of the relevant documents, the Biden administration funneled financial aid to Israeli activist groups seeking to topple Netanyahu via the United States Agency for International Development and the State Department. In addition to that possibly being a violation of U.S. law, those disbursements were clear evidence that the Biden foreign-policy team was the one unscrupulously playing politics when it came to prolonging the war. It also lends further weight to President Donald Trump’s subsequent decision to shut down USAID because, in this and other cases, it was not so much helping the needy as it was an instrument of American intervention in the domestic politics of other nations, including democratic Israel.
The myth of the lost peace
The claim that Netanyahu discarded a chance for peace to hold onto power is particularly disingenuous.
As the Times Magazine article states, a deal concluded in April 2024 would have left the Hamas military formations and leadership in place near the city of Rafah in southern Gaza. There, it would have allowed the continued flow of supplies to Hamas via the tunnels under the border between Egypt and the Hamas enclave.
According to the article, the Israel Defense Force chief of staff at the time, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, thought the capture of Rafah was unimportant. That is a reminder that he—and many more of the country’s military and intelligence leadership—were not only fatally wrong about Hamas’s intentions and primarily responsible for Oct. 7. They also were unprepared for the post-Oct. 7 war in which, especially in its opening months, they seemed to accept the idea that Hamas was an “idea” that couldn’t be defeated rather than an actual terrorist military opponent that could be vanquished.
One doesn’t have to be a military thinker on the level of von Clausewitz to wonder why Rafah wasn’t taken in the opening months of the war to cut Hamas off from a main source of supplies. If the IDF was at times “going in circles” in Gaza in the conflict’s first phase, as the Times alleges, it is the fault of the generals and not Netanyahu, who, unlike an American president, is not the unquestioned commander-in-chief of Israeli forces.
Another myth that the Times article props up is that had Netanyahu buckled under American pressure in April 2024 and allowed Hamas to return to its Oct. 6, 2023 status as the government of Gaza, Saudi Arabia would have then recognized Israel.
Both the Americans and the Netanyahu government treat a Saudi willingness to join the Abraham Accords and exchange ambassadors with the Jewish state as a top foreign-policy goal. Still, the Saudis chose not to join the accords in 2020, and they may never do so. Even the modernizing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman understands that recognizing Israel would open his family’s rule up to attacks on the legitimacy of their status as the protector of the holy places of Islam and betray the extremist Wahhabi strain of Islam that has always been a main prop of their regime.
A lifeline for Hamas?
Nor should anyone seriously take the article’s claims that conceding to Hamas 13 months ago would have boosted Israel’s popularity in Europe or among the left-wing Democrats in the United States, whose hostility to the Jewish state has only grown. The red-green alliance of left-wingers and Islamists seeks Israel’s destruction. Whatever sympathy some might have felt after the atrocities of Oct. 7 evaporated even before the Jewish state rallied and began to defend itself three weeks later, seeking the destruction of the terrorists.
The myth of the lost opportunity for peace also ignores that the reason why Netanyahu’s coalition would have crumbled had he given in to the American pressure was rooted not so much in the demands of his controversial political partners, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, as it was in his duty not to damage the security of the Jewish state. Granting a lifeline to Hamas in April 2024, rather than carrying on the war until its military formations were fully destroyed, and Hezbollah and Iran defeated as well as Assad toppled, would have been a strategic disaster for Israel and may well have ensured that the terrorists would have soon been in a position to repeat the Oct.7 massacre. But it would have helped the Biden administration politically and also bolstered Netanyahu’s opponents.
There are many legitimate criticisms to make of Netanyahu’s decisions throughout his lengthy tenure as Israeli prime minister, in addition to those that contributed to Israel’s being unprepared for Oct. 7. It will be up to Israel’s voters to render the ultimate verdict as to whether or not what he has done since then, which may well constitute the finest hours of his career as a politician and leader of his country, outweighs his mistakes and personal faults.
Whatever one may say about him, the claim that the war has been extended primarily to help him cling to power is a smear that should not go unanswered. Fair-minded historians who are not anti-Netanyahu partisans will be forced to conclude that not only was this accusation false, but that by clinging to his principles, the prime minister did his country and the world, which is materially better off with a weakened Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, an inestimable service.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin
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