Bibi’s evolving Hamas story
Last November, I asked this question: why didn’t Benjamin Netanyahu keep his 2009 campaign promise to topple Hamas? I found at least part of the answer in his 2022 memoir, Bibi: My Story.
In that account, Netanyahu explained, first, that “the cost in blood and treasure was not worth it.” Overthrowing Hamas would involve the loss of “many hundreds [of soldiers] on the Israeli side,” burden Israel with governing Gaza “for an indefinite period,” and result in “the wholesale destruction of Gaza, with tens of thousands of civilian deaths.” Second, it wasn’t a priority. “Did I really want to tie down the IDF in Gaza for years,” he wrote, “when we had to deal with Iran and a possible Syrian front? The answer was categorically no. I had bigger fish to fry.”
In a new interview with TIME, conducted by Eric Cortellessa, Netanyahu preempts the question before it is asked. After rationalizing the Qatari funding of Gaza, he explains that before October 7, he had conducted “three full-fledged military campaigns against Hamas in which we killed thousands of terrorists, eliminated some of their top military leadership, and sought to prevent them from having the capacity to attack us.” But he adds this:
One thing we didn’t do was we didn’t come out to eradicate Hamas completely, because that would require a full-scale ground invasion for which we had no internal legitimacy or international legitimacy. Look at the problem we have with legitimacy now, after they conducted the worst terror onslaught on the Jewish people since the Holocaust…. We sort of cut the weeds, but we didn’t come in to uproot them completely until October 7th. October 7th showed that those who said that Hamas was deterred were wrong. If anything, I didn’t challenge enough the assumption that was common to all the security agencies.
The interviewer said he would “come back to that in a second,” and when he did, he formulated the question in his own pointed way: “Why didn’t you take out Hamas earlier? You could have gone all the way in 2014.” Netanyahu responded:
No I couldn’t. I don’t think there was—there wasn’t a consensus. There was, in fact, a consensus among the military that we shouldn’t do it. But more importantly, you can overrule the military, but you can’t act in a vacuum. There was no public, no domestic support for such an action. There was certainly no international support for such an action, and you need both or at least one of them in order to take such an action. I think that became evident right after the October 7th massacre.
“I decided”
These explanations differ significantly from the rationales Netanyahu provided in his memoir. There, it isn’t the public that lacks “consensus” over toppling Hamas; rather, “The public invariably expects the government to continue the battle and ‘flatten Gaza,’ believing that with enough punishment the Hamas regime would collapse.” In his memoir, Netanyahu credited himself with tempering this unrealistic expectation, which was fueld by political rivals who would “irresponsibly take contrarian positions which they know are wrong.” The final decision he claimed for himself alone: “I decided against a full-scale ground invasion.”
As for the need for “international” (largely American) legitimacy, Netanyahu made no mention of it in his memoir. While he obviously faced constraints during the eight years of Barack Obama, everything changed during his four-year partnership with Donald Trump. A centerpiece of the memoir is Netanyahu’s exploitation of Trump’s unprecedented support, from enhancing the Israeli status of Jerusalem and the Golan to rolling back the Iran nuclear deal. There is no evidence that Netanyahu prioritized Gaza.
And that brings us to the most important difference in Netanyahu’s latest apologia. It makes no mention of his earlier view of the relative threat posed by Hamas. According to Netanyahu’s own strategic priorities, a final showdown with Hamas would have been a trap: “After destroying the Hamas regime, Israel would have to govern two million Gazans for an indefinite period. I had no intention of doing that, especially since I had my gaze fixed on Iran, a much greater threat.”
Netanyahu, then, wasn’t simply aligning with the “consensus” of “security agencies” and the public when he held back on Hamas. Clearly, he calculated his priorities and took a decision that ended a policy debate. The TIME interview is disappointing for not quoting his memoir. Bibi: My Story offers the most comprehensive statement of his pre-October 7 strategy.
Another question remains unlikely to be answered: Did Hamas leaders who read the relevant passages of his memoir in 2022 conclude that Netanyahu, should he return to power, would be preoccupied elsewhere? Did they believe that as long as Netanyahu ruled, they enjoyed immunity from destruction? And did this belief embolden them to implement their plan, assuming he would stop short of toppling them? The mere possibility serves as a warning to all leaders: one should never publish one’s most closely held strategic thoughts before stepping down for good.
Bibi: My Story sold well. In November 2022, it spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It remains the most reliable starting point for understanding the events leading up to October 7.
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