“They didn’t wake me.” And my hands cannot be washed clean

There are phrases that set out to explain a catastrophe and end up revealing something rather deeper.

“They didn’t wake me” is one of them.

Benjamin Netanyahu now maintains that, in the hours before the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, Israel’s security chiefs detected troubling signs and deliberately decided not to wake him. In his account, they feared that the Prime Minister would order an immediate mobilisation, put the air force on alert and instruct the military to strike anyone approaching the border. That, they believed, might trigger precisely the escalation they were trying to avoid.

Netanyahu goes further. He says that, had they woken him, the invasion would not have happened.

Perhaps one day the full records will allow us to know precisely what happened during those hours. Perhaps they will reveal grave failures by military and intelligence commanders. Perhaps they will establish that someone should have called the Prime Minister and did not.

But there is something that explanation does not resolve.

A prime minister does not begin to bear responsibility when the telephone rings at three in the morning.

Responsibility did not begin that night

For years, Israel operated on a strategic assumption that Hamas could be contained, managed, deterred. Under Netanyahu’s governments, the transfer of Qatari funds into Gaza was permitted and defended. The logic was familiar: preserve a measure of economic stability, avert a humanitarian catastrophe and buy, directly or indirectly, periods of quiet.

Even a few days before 7 October, according to information published afterwards, the priority remained to preserve calm and avoid escalation.

Now another reconstruction of the past appears: Netanyahu as precisely the man who never underestimated Hamas and who, had he only been woken that night, would immediately have grasped the scale of the danger and taken the decisions capable of preventing the catastrophe.

The two images collide.

It is not enough to reply that others also believed Hamas had been deterred. Precisely because that assumption was shared, the failure was systemic. And someone who for so........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)