The history of Israel has seen its share of surprises, most famously the intelligence and security failure of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. There is no doubt that the murderous attack of October 7 was an intelligence failure of an entirely different order, with catastrophic consequences. Reading Shany Mor’s essay, despite its many insights, has reaffirmed my sense that attempts to learn lessons from the outbreak of the war—whether political or military—have tended to miss their mark. Mor addresses four ways of thinking that paved the road to October 7, the first of which is bound up with the outlook and governing style of Benjamin Netanyahu. This focus on Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies and leadership, which has dominated so much of the conversation about Israel’s fatal blunders, in fact impedes learning the broader historical lessons as well as more specific intelligence-related ones.
Mor confirmed my skepticism about his argument when he added the Knesset member Zvi Sukkot into the mix. The episode involving Sukkot that Mor recounts is entirely marginal, and can at most illuminate something about Sukkot’s personality; it is fantastical to think that his erecting a sukkah in the Arab village of Huwara caused forces to be diverted from the Gaza border to Samaria.
But let’s set Sukkot aside and focus on the first portion of the essay, devoted to the character and decisions of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Mor makes the original point that since 1945 there has never been a case of a militia being granted territory and then expected to establish a state there—except on the border of Israel. It is not a coincidence that these three terrorist groups surround the borders of Israel or are located inside those borders. But who caused this dangerous reality?
It was not Benjamin Netanyahu who created the threat on the Gaza border. No, these terrorist enclaves were established by three previous prime ministers: Yitzhak Rabin brought the PLO to Gaza and the West Bank, where it built up security forces much larger than those allowed to it by the Oslo Accords; Ehud Barak presided over the withdrawal from the security zone in southern Lebanon, bringing Hizballah to the doorsteps of the residents of northern Israel; Ariel Sharon carried out the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, restoring the pre-1967 border. I don’t know if Mor believes these leaders shared what he calls Netanyahu’s “cognitive vices,” but they certainly absorbed another mode of thinking he condemns: that of the peace-processors.
In this response, I want to explain Netanyahu’s accomplishments and the reasons for his political success and then return to the causes of current war. But first, it’s necessary to take a look at what happened when his predecessors were in office.
Experience has shownthat every area Israel hands over to the Palestinians, whether to the PLO or to Hamas, becomes a base for terrorists. Regarding Lebanon, there was a belief that withdrawing the IDF to the internationally recognized border would remove Hizballah’s motivation for attacking Israel, while granting Israel international legitimacy. Instead, Hizballah transformed from a force harassing Israeli soldiers to a tool with which Iran could deter Israel. It’s no exaggeration to say that the shambolic withdrawal from Lebanon—seen by Israel’s neighbors as a demonstration of weakness and an Islamist victory—encouraged Yasir Arafat and his comrades to launch the second intifada. It was Netanyahu who got Israel to reverse course.
Netanyahu was the first leader of the Israeli right to pursue policies based on the Revisionist tradition of Vladimir Jabotinsky while still remaining pragmatic and flexible. When he first became prime minister in 1996, he accepted the reality of the Oslo Accords, signed by his predecessors, and tried to work within their framework. His achievement at this stage was territorial: the Oslo Accords had as their goal the extension of Palestinian sovereignty over the entire West Bank up to the 1949 armistice lines; he effectively stopped this rush to trade away the land that Israel had won in the Six-Day War. Yet he was willing to make some territorial concessions to the Palestinians and furthered the peace process by signing the 1997 Hebron protocol and the 1998 Wye River memorandum. He succeeded in dragging the Likud along with him, despite its opposition to Oslo, while winning the support of the political center. But this wasn’t enough for the left, and still cost him the support of the religious right, leading to the collapse of his government in 1999.
From that three-year stint in office onward, Netanyahu found himself at loggerheads with the security establishment, and in particular with the senior officers of the IDF. These highly placed opponents dismissed his objections to giving more power to the PLO and were committed to additional territorial withdrawals with the aim of eventually establishing a Palestinian state.
Netanyahu returned to power at the head of the Likud after suffering crushing electoral defeats in 1999 and in 2006. The latter election took place after then-prime minister Ariel Sharon seceded from the Likud with his supporters—forming a new (and now defunct) party called Kadima—in order to carry out the Gaza disengagement. As a result of Sharon’s parliamentary maneuvering, Netanyahu once more became the leader of the Likud, which now consisted only of those who remained steadfast in their opposition to unilateral withdrawal. This rump party received a mere twelve seats (out of 120) in the 2006 elections. But what seemed like an electoral embarrassment was for Netanyahu an opportunity. Three years later, in the wake of his party’s near-collapse, he led it to victory, and, with the exception of a seventeen-month interlude, has held onto the premiership since.
The primary reason for Netanyahu’s success is straightforward. It came on the heels of the colossal failures of three prime ministers: Ehud Barak, who carried out the withdrawal from Lebanon and was prime minister during the outbreak of second intifada; Ariel Sharon, whose disengagement from Gaza left the residents of southwest Israel exposed to rocket fire, and, as we now know, to much worse; and the ineffectual Ehud Olmert, who could not form a coherent response to the Hamas takeover of Gaza and was seen as performing dismally in the Second Lebanon War.
In retrospect, Sharon can be seen as the first in a series of ex-Likudniks who turned their backs on their voters, their ideology, and the principles of security they once professed to believe in. This includes Olmert and Tzipi Livni (both of whom followed Sharon from Likud to Kadima and then successively led the party) and Dan Meridor (who defected from Likud in 1999 to oppose Netanyahu, adumbrating the progression of so many centrist politicians). To a certain extent it also includes Gideon Sa’ar (who broke from Likud to found the center-right, anti-Netanyahu New Hope) and Avigdor Lieberman, who has led the secular nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu since 1999.
As a general rule, Netanyahu has limited territorial withdrawals and aimed to keep the Palestinian national movement divided into two separate entities in order to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state. This was not a matter of his passivity, as Mor suggests, but a deliberate policy. Netanyahu’s opposition to a sovereign Palestinian state, however, is not only ideological; nor is it a concession to the messianic right. It is first and foremost a pragmatic position. In light of what we have seen in Gaza—the formation of a capable terror army armed with rockets, missiles, and anti-tank weapons—there is now a clear consensus in Israeli society: a Palestinian state would become a base for terror and rocket fire that would pose a far greater threat than the Hamas-stan in Gaza. And that is the reason that at present some 70 percent of Israelis don’t want a Palestinian state.
Yitzhak Rabin himself, who opposed Yasir Arafat and the PLO for his whole life, did not, at the moment of truth, understand the consequences of signing an agreement with the PLO. As Mor acknowledges, the PLO never aspired to autonomy, but to achieving sovereignty through armed struggle that would render all the land from the river to the sea free of Jews.
But this isn’t the main point. Netanyahu’s primary goal has been containing Iran, and especially arresting the progress of its nuclear program. Shany Mor pays scant attention to this issue, which was the focus of Netanyahu’s attention from 2009 until 2017. These were the years of the Obama administration, which recognized from day one an Iranian “right” to enrich uranium. For ideological reasons, President Obama pursued rapprochement with Iran while simultaneously adopting an explicit policy of creating “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel. Worst of all, he opened the way for Iranian hegemony in the Middle East.
During the past four years, President Biden has continued these policies of appeasement and even intensified them, as Michael Doran and others have explained. Mor and other opponents of Netanyahu lambast the prime minister for his fixation on messaging, but it was precisely this emphasis that focused international attention on the Iranian nuclear program, beginning with his first speech to the UN in 2009 and continuing with his sharing of intelligence about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. This effort compelled the Obama administration to ramp up its sanctions on Iran.
But that’s not to say that Netanyahu limited himself to messaging. Under his direction, Israel pursued an unprecedented and successful military campaign against Iran’s attempt to build up its forces in Syria with the goal of creating a Shiite crescent stretching through Iraq all the way to the Israel-Lebanon border.
And this brings us to the crux of the matter: the Israeli government has considered Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the West Bank more important from a security point of view than Gaza. Gaza remained a secondary concern. Netanyahu’s mistake—and there is no doubt it was a grave one—was to pursue a strategy of containment vis-à-vis Hamas, which included allowing the influx of funds from Qatar. The suitcases of Qatari cash, however, weren’t the primary reason Hamas was able to grow so strong: that was the underground highway it constructed beneath the Philadelphi Corridor, which Israel surrendered in 2005.
Netanyahu’s approach to Gaza reflected a consensus among the political and military leadership about the effectiveness of the underground barrier, which prevented Hamas from tunneling into Israel, and the high-tech “smart” fence meant to prevent aboveground assault. The confidence in these defensive measures stemmed from a widespread belief that the 2021 Gaza war had left Hamas without options. Netanyahu did not want to be drawn into a protracted military conflict in the Strip and, from 2012 on, accepted that there would be successive, brief rounds of fighting with Hamas that would fall short of all-out war. Indeed, after Operation Protective Edge in 2014—one of the most intense of these rounds of fighting—the Western Negev experienced an economic boom and demographic growth, demonstrating that the broader populace also felt that Hamas was contained. Sderot, a frequent target of Hamas’s rockets, over the course of a decade went from a town of 16,000 residents to one of 36,000.
Thirty years ago,Netanyahu warned that the Oslo Accords would turn Gaza into a launching pad for rockets, and Yitzhak Rabin accused him of abetting Hamas. That was the first articulation of the now common—and slanderous—claim that “Netanyahu has supported Hamas.” The truth was that Netanyahu was proved right in the summer of 2007, shortly after the terrorist group seized control of Gaza, when its first rocket barrages fell on Sderot. The late military analyst for Haaretz, Ze’ev Schiff, at the time wrote a biting column titled “Israeli Defeat in Sderot,” in which he called what had happened a national disgrace. And it was: Israel had no response to a heavily armed organization at its doorstep that went on to build a vast subterranean fortress beneath its territory and to amass missiles that could reach Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion airport. In an article for Israel Hayom, I described Gaza as a “mini-North Korea” and argued that Israel couldn’t live with this sort of hostile statelet on its southern border.
Only a handful of individuals believed that Israel should have done then what it is doing now at a much greater cost, that is, reoccupy Gaza and eliminate Hamas: the former head of the Shin Bet Avi Dichter (now minister of agriculture), the erstwhile finance and energy minister Yuval Steinitz, the late former defense minister Moshe Arens, and perhaps one or two others. The IDF, meanwhile, formulated various plans for conducting retaliatory strikes and restoring deterrence, but not for achieving a decisive victory, let alone reoccupying the Strip.
For the past fifteen years Israel has had several governing coalitions and a parade of defense ministers who were prepared to go no further than carrying out limited ground incursions into Gaza. Gadi Eisenkot, who was chief of staff of the IDF from 2015 to 2019, said not too long ago that Hamas was Israel’s weakest foe in the region, and that fighting against it weakens the army. Only a few days before the October 7 attacks, the security services, headed by the Shin Bet, formally recommended that the government continue strengthening Gaza’s economy to ensure continued calm. Shouldn’t a PM be able to trust the army to secure a 42-km border?
If there were political considerations that shaped Israeli policy in Gaza, they were those of left-wing leaders and high-ranking IDF officers who didn’t want to re-enter, let alone reoccupy, the territory, since doing so would be an admission of the massive failure of the policies they had long supported.
To identify the flawed conceptsbehind the intelligence failures of October 7, we should look at the inability of technocratic military leaders to understand the psychology of the enemy. A large section of the media, the intelligence services, and the IDF saw Gaza as a hostile territory only in a technical sense, instead of realizing that it was governed by bloodthirsty Islamist fanatics. And the problem goes further still: if you are alienated from your identity as a Jew, it becomes harder to understand an enemy that wants to murder you merely because you are Jewish.
This fundamental failure of imagination manifested itself concretely in the behavior of the IDF on October 7 of last year. Unlike the surprise attack of October 1973, when Golda Meir and members of her cabinet were informed of the threat but told to ignore it by the head of military intelligence, in October 2023 the military didn’t communicate the warnings it received to the prime minister or defense minister at all. The chief of military intelligence went back to sleep on the night before the attack. The IDF didn’t even order the units defending the border to go on high alert.
Even then, as Brigadier General Guy Hazot has written, the army is supposed to abide by the motto, “Even if we are surprised, we won’t be defeated.” That is, even when confronted with a surprise attack, it should be able to muster an effective defense immediately. Instead, what ensued on that awful day was a systemic failure of the security apparatus. It’s only thanks to the extraordinary heroism and grit of the Israeli people that the state regained control of the Western Negev after only three-and-a-half days.
October 7 saw a complete breakdown from the IDF top brass on down. In seeking to identify modes of thinking that led to disaster, we should begin with the conceptual error that caused a heavily armed and fanatical enemy to be perceived as a minor nuisance.
