‘What Has Been Going on is Horrific’: Veteran Israeli Journalist on Netanyahu’s Failures

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech on Monday rejecting calls for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, comparing that refusal to the United States’s response to Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

The prime minister’s speech comes after Israel opened up a new phase in its war against Hamas on Saturday, expanding ground troops into Gaza.

Gershom Gorenberg, an Israeli-American historian and journalist based in Jerusalem, has covered Middle Eastern affairs for more than 30 years. Earlier this month, soon after Hamas killed 1,400 Israelis and took hundreds more as hostages, he wrote an essay for The New York Times decrying the failures of Netanyahu’s government in preventing the terror attack and calling for his ouster as prime minister.

Mediaite spoke with Gorenberg on Monday about Oct. 7 and the war against Hamas in Gaza, which has led to the deaths of thousands of Palestinians in the densely-populated enclave.

Gorenberg said Netanyahu’s missteps are dire and multi-tiered — from follied ego-driven political miscalculations to underestimating Hamas’ ability to execute such a massacre on his homeland.

“There are two levels of this,”  Gorenberg explained. “One is the immediate level of the last few months, and one is the longer story of a failed strategy in conception. The story of the last few months is that Netanyahu returned to the prime minister’s office at the very end of last year with both the most extreme and the least competent government he’s had in his many years as prime minister.”

“Competent people didn’t want to be a part of [Netanyahu’s government],” he said, thereby stifling any hope of centrist leaders forming a coalition with Netanyahu, who is “on trial for serious corruption charges, which they see as disqualifying him to be prime minister and because of a long record of broken promises and backstabbing when they were in previous government.”

According to Gorenberg, the prime minister was left with “ultra-Orthodox parties and the extreme religious nationalist right. His own Likud Party has steadily shed competent ministerial material as former allies have walked out, have grown frustrated with Netanyahu’s leadership, and have left, leaving what I would call a party of lackeys. It’s become more and more the party of the personality around Netanyahu, as people who disagreed with him felt that they had no place in the party and could not work with him. So you get a government of people who are distinctly unqualified.”

The result of this chaos, and the prime minister facing corruption charges, was that “Netanyahu simply wasn’t paying attention to security issues,” he said.

Additionally, Gorenberg said Netanyahu had a complacent and poorly-informed view of Hamas, which took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 in a coup that drove out the reigning Palestinian Authority.

“This group that essentially believes in the eradication of Israel meant that the supposed threat of a negotiated solution wasn’t there,” he said. “And Netanyahu came to believe, particularly after the last round of fighting in 2021 with Gaza, that Hamas had been deterred from future attacks on Israel, that it was essentially being bought off by relatively minor economic incentives. And once again, that the conflict could be managed. I would add to that that Netanyahu has always had his eye on Iran as the huge threat to Israel. And it’s as if he’s been walking around with his distant glasses on and can’t read the text that’s right in front of his face, which is the threat from Hamas. And there have been warnings from people within the Israeli political structure and in public that there’s this danger from Hamas that they could attack from there. But he has not paid attention to that.”

The failure does not rest solely with Netanyahu, Gorenberg said, as inattention plagued Israeli intelligence as well.

“If you think that the threat is in a different direction, you’re going to pay less attention to other threats,” he said. “It’s true that Israel has an incredibly sophisticated intelligence system, but it’s not unlimited. There are not 10 million soldiers available to listen and to decode and all of those things. So if you think that the threat is mainly from terrorists in the West Bank or mainly from Iran or mainly from people in the north, and you’re not paying attention to Gaza, you will get less information.”

Netanyahu has seen his support within Israel plummet since the attack of Oct. 7.

“80% of the Israeli public saying that Netanyahu should publicly take responsibility for the failure, something that he has doggedly refused to do,” Gorenberg pointed out. “Polling shows that if elections were held today, which is, of course, entirely theoretical in wartime, but if elections were held today, his party would lose nearly half of its support in the public and so forth. There are clear signs of a wide frustration and anger with Netanyahu, which have been exacerbated by reports coming out of warning signs that he missed or ignored and by the fact that the government has continued.”

After his speech on Monday, Netanyahu was questioned about the drop in his support and asked by one reporter if he planned to resign.

“The only thing that I intend to have resign is Hamas,” he replied. “We are going to resign them to the dustbin of history.”

Gorenberg, who spoke with Mediaite the morning of Netanyahu’s speech, said the prime minister has so far failed to address the crisis in an adequate way.

“President Biden showed more empathy and connection to human beings in a few hours visiting Israel than Prime Minister Netanyahu has since the war broke out,” he said. “It’s astonishing.”

As for the staggering toll of civilian casualties in Gaza, Gorenberg said: “Beyond that the messaging from the government in the explanation of its actions have been atrocious. The government, in fact, has a responsibility to make sure that its targets are military. It is a reality that the Hamas military infrastructure is buried deeply inside of the civilian structure, and at the very least, the government has a responsibility to do a much better job of explaining what the targets are and that it’s aiming at military targets and only at military targets. What has been going on is horrific. I would be very happy if this war wasn’t happening. I also understand that there is a real military conflict going on here and the government is not doing its job to explain why and where the strikes are going on or why.”

Gorenberg added that the ongoing communication failure from Netanyahu is not helping the Israeli cause.

“It only increases the impression that civilians are the target. And that this does not have to do with defense or with preventing another attack. So that is a major issue here,” Gorenberg said. “Beyond that, I would say that I think the discussion of the damage to civilians in Gaza is essential that Israel has a responsibility to do its best to minimize civilian casualties, but that it to outsiders, including the media and foreign leaders, could be that much clearer about the fact that the number one enemy of civilians in Gaza is, in fact, Hamas. It’s Hamas that has brought this war upon Gaza. It’s Hamas that has used its rule in Gaza for the past 16 years as a military base against Israel instead of focusing on the welfare of Palestinian residents.”

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