The Blogs: This time, The New York Times seems accurate

In an very long article that appeared in last Friday’s New York Times with the title “How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power” the paper revealed in significant detail the results of a six month investigation into the period before October 7, 2023 and since to try to determine why we are still in the midst of a war in Gaza, with 50 hostages still imprisoned there and Hamas, while seriously depleted, still able to launch rockets at Israel and continue to cause fatalities to the IDF.

For that article, according to the paper, their investigative reporters spoke with more than 110 officials in Israel, the United States and the Arab world and reviewed scores of documents, including meeting minutes, war plans and court records.

Given that we live in Israel, there will be an immediate negative reaction to the piece. No doubt the first response of large segments of the community here will be “Oh, the New York Times, well, what would you expect?” However, I would caution that before anyone jumps to conclusions it could be instructive to look at the takeaways from the investigation and compare them to what most of us already know to be the truth.

While they took 11,008 words to give all the background data and commentary on the issue, the conclusions are summarized in the five bullet points listed below. To be brutally honest all of this has been going through the minds of most of us ever since the massacre of October 7^th. Their takeaways are followed by my analysis.

Before Oct. 7, Netanyahu ignored repeated warnings about a potential attack.

For us here in Israel this is common knowledge. We knew, for example, that the IDF’s people stationed at the border with Gaza had been warning the upper echelons about questionable activity in that area for some time. We knew that people who lived there had raised the alarm based on what they heard beneath them in the runup to October 7^th. We also knew that elements of our intelligence community predicted the attack and their dates were amazingly close to the actual date of the attack. And we knew that the IDF Chief of Staff at the time requested to meet with the Prime Minster urgently before October 7^th, to alert him to the risk but that meeting was never scheduled.

Netanyahu deflected responsibility and tried to blame defense officials.

Nothing new here. We saw with our own eyes and heard with our own ears that the Prime Minister tried to blame others for the debacle. That he never once said, as former US President Harry Truman was fond of saying, that “the buck stops here” and as Prime Minister “I take full responsibility.” And finally, that he has yet to agree to the empaneling of a State Commission of Inquiry to determine who was at fault, but as importantly how we can make sure we are never again caught unprepared.

To avoid alienating far-right allies, Netanyahu dragged out truce negotiations.

There is no way to be 100% sure of this. However, the talk on the street for the better part of the last year is that the Prime Minister knew that if the war did not continue, he would probably lose his coalition because of pressure from the right. That was disappointing in and of itself. What has also been disappointing, and was not covered in the article, is that the silence of other members of his coalition who were not as “right wing” so to speak, who could have forced the issue but chose not to do so. As a result, they, too, share some of the blame for extending the war.

Conflict in Lebanon, Syria and Iran helped restore Netanyahu’s lost prestige.

For sure, all of us here give credit to the Prime Minister for leading the effort to recalibrate the geopolitical landscape of this region. The successful defanging of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the destruction of the bulk of Iran’s military capacity to defend itself, and the assassination of so many of the senior leaders in Lebanon, Iran and Gaza laid the groundwork for the fall of the Assad regime in Syria as well. Nobody on October 6^th, 2023 would have given us good odds on achieving this level of success. For that, everyone here thanks the Prime Minister, our IDF leadership and its forces as well as our technology sector whose role in these events is often not fully appreciated.

Celebrated in Israel as a victory, the military campaign left Netanyahu’s party in a stronger polling position than at any point since October 2023.

Anyone with a brain in his head here understands this to be true. Nevertheless, while the Prime Minister might very well get elected once again if elections were held now, many of us who have congratulated him for Israel’s recent achievements still believe he has served long enough. It is time for a new generation to take the reins, build on what has been accomplished and let us move forward.

As for the Prime Minister’s reaction, earlier today Israel’s Ynet News wrote:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked the extensive New York Times investigation regarding his conduct during the “Iron Swords” war, claiming it was a “defamatory article” based on quotes from “supporters of officials who called on me to accept Hamas’ terms and end the war – and have since been replaced.”

While the New York Times and other outlets world wide often defame Israel, their key points will seem very much in line with what most of us here believe to be the truth. Is the article critical of the Prime Minister? For sure it is, yet no one is above criticism and most of what has been printed seems to reflect what the bulk of the population believes happened.

My only regret about the article, is that the investigation that the New York Times sponsored should have been undertaken by our government here as the natural next step after the debacle of October 7^th. The fact that an outside agency did so should disappoint all of us.