As the nation of Israel suffers a rapid decline in its global standing, prominent Israelis are blaming the country’s longtime leader for its political and diplomatic deterioration.
Benjamin Netanyahu is the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s 76-year history and the country has changed substantially under his leadership. His consequential 16 years in power secured the cultural hegemony of the Likud Party’s muscular Revisionist Zionism, a doctrine that claims the best way to maintain the continued existence of the Israeli state is through the pursuit of territorial maximalism.
The movement’s founders advocated for an Israeli state not merely “from the river to the sea,” but beyond the river into modern-day Jordan.
Today the movement’s political descendants dedicate themselves to securing full control of “Greater Israel,” an area in which they include the internationally-recognized Palestinian territory of Gaza and the West Bank. The ideal has implied a policy of “managing the conflict” with the Palestinians, presuming that Israel could maintain peace and deterrence in perpetuity even as Palestinians are subjected to the daily humiliations of settler violence, militarized checkpoints and the desecration of holy sites.
“I think the policy of managing the conflict has collapsed before our eyes,” said Israel’s former National Security Council head Eyal Hulata. The ex-official was one of a number of prominent former Israeli government figures who spoke on the record to the online outlet The Daily Beast about the shortcomings of Netanyahu’s leadership and how they contributed to Israel’s massive security lapse during Hamas’ unprecedented October 7 attack.
Above all the ex public servants alleged Netanyahu’s personal political calculations informed a strategy more geared towards ensuring his own self-preservation than achieving security.
“The more he had coalition partners who were pro-settlement, and against a Palestinian state, the more he had to take that into consideration politically and even personally,” said Uzi Arad, a veteran of Israel’s state security service, referring to hardline members of the prime minister’s governing cabinet.
Among such figures, notorious ultranationalists Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have received the most attention in mainstream media in recent months given their open support for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. But the Israeli political spectrum as a whole has shifted far to the right during the Netanyahu years, with current generations of young Israelis holding more extreme views than their parents, according to polling.
The growth of nationalist political sentiment and Netanyahu’s subsequent overtures to such interests have created a mutually-reinforcing dynamic, said Arad, who claimed Netanyahu has subjected his policy towards the Palestinians in general and his stance towards Gaza in particular to “his overall interest.”
“There is a question to what extent the intelligence people were politicized in their assessment because it was comforting,” he added, saying the prime minister constructed “a reassuring narrative” that the conflict with the Palestinians was under control out of “political expediency,” as quoted by The Daily Beast.
“The most significant failure was arrogance and the inability to absorb the idea that the Arabs can be smart enough to do what we would have done under similar circumstances,” said former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of the October 7 attack. “We thought we are the start-up nation, we are sophisticated, we are the smart guys. The Arabs, these bunch of primitives, turned out they were smart.”
“It’s all bullsh*t,” Olmert told The Daily Beast while speaking of Israel’s ongoing campaign in Gaza. “The Israeli government is saying openly that we will move them to Egypt. They want a comprehensive war but a comprehensive war is made for one thing, for the chaos that will allow them to keep us in the West Bank, expel Palestinians in the West Bank and create the political conditions that will allow annexation.”
Former Israeli spy chief Tamir Pardo said the policy, and the broader belief that Palestinian resistance could be eliminated by means of violent force, are both fundamentally flawed.
“You’ll never be able to quash the aspiration for liberty.”