The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has published excerpts from a soon-to-be-published book that say Prime Minister Netanyahu and UAE President Al Nahyan had a phone conversation a week and a half before the October 7, 2023 attack in which the latter warned the former that the Hamas attack was coming. The PM’s office denies that there was such a phone call, and Mr. Netanyahu has threatened to sue for libel. The fact that Israel is holding a general election in about 5 weeks is the catalyst for all of this. One does not expect the libel suit to move forward after the ballots are cast because the paper has the documentation to prove its argument. This is a desperate move by a PM who has a good chance of losing his office.
India-based Firstpost stated, “According to excerpts from Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment, written by Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, the Emirati president, widely known as MBZ, had learnt that then-Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip Yahya Sinwar was planning a major attack that could destabilise the wider West Asia region.
“The book claimed that MBZ spoke to Netanyahu for about 45 minutes and warned him that Sinwar was preparing for a major operation. The UAE president also reportedly cautioned that such an attack could undermine the Abraham Accords, the US-brokered agreements that normalised relations between Israel and several Arab states.”
As it turns out, MBZ was entirely correct. Yet, the book via Haaretz says Mr. Netanyahu was quite calm about the warning. Moreover, he did not warn the military nor the intelligence community. This would appear to be a dereliction of duty. A responsible reaction would have been to ask Mossad if they knew anything about such an attack and to put the military on alert. Neither appears to have happened.
Earlier today, Donnie Deutsch, a branding expert and proud Zionist Jew, was on MSNow reminding everyone that Hamas committed the attack, and therefore, they are the bad guys and no one should forget that. No one is arguing otherwise. What Mr. Deutsch did was divert attention away from a very important question — in light of this information, should Mr. Netanyahu receive any votes at all in the upcoming election. This has nothing to do with who did what on the battlefield. This has to do with what the PM did in the week and a half that he had to prepare. It seems he did nothing, and that is the story here.
Consider if FDR on Thanksgiving day 1941 knew the attack was coming on Pearl Harbor and he did not alert the military or the intelligence services (as under developed as they were back then). That does not diminish the Japanese perfidy, but it also raises the question of whether the current president should continue in office. An American voter would have no way to influence what the Japanese did, but he or she could make sure the next president was not asleep at the wheel. The same applies to the present unpleasantness.
The Associated Press noted:
Gadi Eisenkot, a former top general who is seen as Netanyahu’s main opponent in election, accused the prime minister of ignoring dozens of warnings ahead of the attack.
“He is unfit,” Eisenkot wrote on social media.
Another Netanyahu rival, Naftali Bennett, said, “Netanyahu bears personal and direct responsibility for the failure that led to the deaths of thousands of Israelis on his watch.”
One may say a great many things about General Eisenkot and Mr. Bennett but neither is anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. They are making the points Mr. Deutsch ignores. Mr. Netanyahu may bear moral responsibility through his inactions for the deaths of his people on October 7, 2023. That does not excuse Hamas, but being a collaborator is not the moral high ground either.
Amotz Asa-El, a political analyst with the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, said of Mr. Netanyahu, “He’s never faced anything like what he faces now. Everyone in Israel shares a sense of historical crisis, and his name is all over it. And he knows this.”
It is in the hands of the voters. Whether they want Israeli blood on those hands time will tell.