Will Netanyahu Escape His Reckoning?

But it is one thing to predict the ugliness of a campaign, and quite another to watch it play out. Earlier this week, Yinon Magal, the leading talk-show host and commentator on Channel 14, an ardently pro-Netanyahu outlet, denounced a group of former hostages and their families who contributed to a book called “Mr. Abandonment: The Legacy of the Man Who Abandoned the Hostages.” Their argument was that the Prime Minister had failed to make freeing the hostages his main priority. Magal did not hesitate to smear them. “Anyone who took part in the campaign saying he abandoned the hostages will be remembered in infamy, on a pillar of shame,” Magal said during a radio broadcast. The hostages and family members who dared to criticize Netanyahu for his handling of the issue, he said, are “the lowest people living in the State of Israel.”

Eisenkot, who joined a war cabinet at Netanyahu’s invitation, quit that council when he determined that Netanyahu was refusing to make the hostages his first priority. Magal, who welcomes Netanyahu onto his show “The Patriots” with the audience singing praises to him as the “King of Israel,” spit venom at those who dared to criticize the Prime Minister. “I’m telling you,” Magal said of the former hostages and their families, “these are despicable people, and the only thing that can absolve them is if they put the Likud ballot slip for Netanyahu into the ballot box in the election. ‘Forgive us, absolve us, pardon us.’ That’s the only way they can atone for the abomination they committed by participating in ‘Mr. Abandonment.’ ”

Netanyahu’s critics have often pointed out that, even in the early days of the war, he rarely visited the hostage families or expressed much concern for them. That omission, that coldness, has not been forgotten. At a ceremony Monday, in Jerusalem, commemorating the October 7th massacre, a bereaved father, whose son was killed at one of the kibbutzim near Gaza, rose during Netanyahu’s speech and said, for all to hear, “You did not protect my son. You did not protect the twelve hundred people who were murdered in a single day, on October 7th. Shame on you, disgrace.”

At the same ceremony, the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, called for an investigation into the security collapse. “No amount of time that passes can allow us to forgo this obligation. There are clear lessons we already know we must internalize: We must not ignore warnings or worrying signs.”

This is the very same message that has come from Eisenkot and so many of Netanyahu’s opponents. For three years, the opposition has demanded that Netanyahu do what the Israeli government did in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, in 1973, when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, despite warnings from various sources in the security establishment. That exhaustive investigation, the Agranat Commission, led to numerous resignations and, eventually, the end of Golda Meir’s career as Prime Minister. By contrast, Netanyahu and his circle have done all they can to defer any kind of official inquiry and, at the same time, to put out the word that everyone but the Prime Minister is to blame. Leading figures in the security establishment have issued public apologies and left the scene. Netanyahu remains.

It has been well known for a long time that Netanyahu badly misread the intentions and capabilities of Hamas, treating them as little more than a hyped-up street gang compared to Hezbollah, in Lebanon. His singular focus has always been on Iran. Over time, there has been a wealth of investigative journalism making plain that the security establishment ignored clear warnings of peril from mid-level intelligence officers and other sources. No less startling, Netanyahu himself got clear warnings from both the United Arab Emirates and Egypt that a major operation was imminent. Reporters for Haaretz wrote last month that Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, the President of the U.A.E., told Netanyahu in late September that he had reliable intelligence about Hamas and its plans to attack Israel. (Netanyahu has denied the report and similar ones about warnings from Egyptian sources.)