The Politics of Suspicion: Israel and Netanyahu
Deceiving an enemy is not betraying one’s citizens
By what absurd elevation does an Israeli government’s failure to prevent the October 7 massacre become proof that it consented to it? And why should an accusation of such calculated depravity be granted easier admission to public debate than an allegation of ordinary ministerial misconduct? Accuse a politician of taking an improper payment and one may reasonably be asked for a bank record; accuse Benjamin Netanyahu of knowingly leaving his citizens to be murdered, and the discovery that his government had enemies, ambitions and intelligence failures is apparently expected to suffice. The evidentiary discount is considerable.
Let us grant the prosecution its strongest premise: that warnings existed, that dangerous assumptions persisted, and that those entrusted with Israel’s defence failed disastrously. The military inquiry published in February 2025 described an underestimation of Hamas and a mistaken assessment of its intentions; the Shin Bet’s inquiry the following month acknowledged missed signs and erroneous judgements. These are substantial admissions. But the proposition that a disaster should have been prevented does not establish that it was deliberately permitted.
To establish that further charge, an accuser must undertake the tedious business of showing who knew what, when they knew it, and whether protection was withheld in order to let the attack proceed. Tedious, certainly, compared with announcing “Israel must have known” – a phrase whose principal achievement is to conceal several unanswered questions inside four confident words. A state is not a single consciousness, however convenient that fiction may be to its prosecutors.
Hamas is meanwhile afforded the curious indulgence of disappearing into an account that attributes its actions to Israeli design. The military investigation described attackers overwhelming border forces and disrupting command structures, exploiting a defence unprepared for the assault’s scale. Israel had a fundamental duty to protect its citizens; its failure to fulfil that duty does not make the murderers instruments of an Israeli design.
When the argument turns to Netanyahu’s supposed political advantage, the same omission reappears in more worldly dress. Assume, if you wish, that he exploited the war to rally support or postpone an accounting: you have described a politician’s conduct after a catastrophe, while the accusation concerns his knowledge and intentions before it. “Cui bono?” may direct an investigation towards a suspect; it does not relieve the investigator of having to investigate.
Nor does the devastation in Gaza supply the missing evidence, though it supplies abundant cause for examining Israel’s military decisions. Palestinian suffering cannot tell us what Netanyahu knew on October 6. To use the subsequent campaign as proof of prior permission is to give chronology the duties of a conspirator: the ending is instructed to arrange the beginning. Whatever judgement one reaches about the war’s conduct, it must stand upon evidence relevant to that judgement.
A serious defence of Netanyahu requires neither a certificate of infallibility nor a declaration that his critics are all dishonest. His decisions deserve scrutiny, and an independent inquiry should be free to produce findings unwelcome to his supporters. Equally, those who sincerely believe the conspiracy may be mistaken rather than deceitful; we cannot protest the invention of his motives while casually inventing theirs.
Having distinguished an unproven accusation of complicity from documented failures, we should also distinguish deceiving an enemy from betraying one’s own citizens. If political deception consists in knowingly cultivating false beliefs to acquire power, preserve it or turn an opponent’s calculations against him, its moral character cannot be settled merely by pronouncing the word “deception” with sufficient disgust. We must ask who was deceived, by what means, and to what end.
A government that misleads an armed enemy about its intentions, encourages that enemy’s complacency and strikes where he believes himself secure may have sound justification for doing so. An adversary is hardly entitled to an advance copy of the battle plan. The case for Netanyahu should rest on that defensible ground: the weakening of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the exposure of Iran’s vulnerability, can support an argument for strategic deception in the service of national defence. Those military gains cannot retrospectively justify deliberately abandoning Israeli civilians to massacre, nor establish that such abandonment occurred.
To make this argument convincingly, however, we must resist the temptation to improve military achievements by exaggerating them: Hamas and Hezbollah have been weakened, not conclusively destroyed, while damage to Iranian nuclear facilities does not establish that nuclear weapons production was under way or that Iran’s nuclear capabilities have been permanently eliminated. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has reported serious limits on its ability to verify the programme’s status. If concealment and calculated misdirection helped Israel damage hostile organisations, unsettle Tehran’s confidence and reduce its enemies’ capacity to attack, they may be justified by those purposes and results, subject to scrutiny of their means and costs. If such deceptions occurred, and that is what they accomplished, there is a familiar name for them: politics.
