October 7 Casts a Large Shadow Over Israel’s October 27 Election

The shadow of Israel’s trauma on October 7, 2023, is looming large as the October 27, 2026 national elections get in high gear and as calls increase to assign responsibility for leadership failures on that fateful day. Elections to determine the next Israeli premier will enter a new phase on Tuesday, the last date for parties to hand over their official lists of its candidates for Knesset seats. Last minute jockeying for position might see unity between small parties that risk a failure to clear the legal threshold of four Knesset seats, which would disqualify them. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is attempting to consolidate his political bloc in an effort to ensure that votes for fractions of right-leaning parties don’t go to waste by failing to enter the Knesset. His opponents, led by an Israel Defense Forces chief of staff between 2015 and 2019, Gadi Eisenkot, are also retooling party lists, and could reconfigure party structure. Meanwhile, questions about the momentous events of three years ago are becoming the focus of the current campaign. Memorials for the October 7 dead will fill the air in the lead up to the election, and the press will interview former hostages, Nova festival survivors, and Kibbutzniks on the front line of the Hamas massacre. A significant component of Mr. Netanyahu’s current coalition, the orthodox parties, are struggling to convince many Israelis that as a three-year war rages, they should be exempt from military conscription. Now, though, the origin of that multi-front war is taking center stage on the campaign trail. Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents accuse him of blocking an official investigation into the largest massacre of Jews since the holocaust. They claim that the premier was responsible for failures of that day, including a late and inadequate IDF response. “Bibi is the leader. He’s been prime minister for many years, so he is responsible,” the president of Middle East Media Report, Yigal Carmon, tells The New York Sun. In a new deeply-researched paper on the lead up to the October 7 massacre, Mr. Carmon — who almost alone predicted a Hamas attack a month before the massacre took place — also accuses the entire security system under Mr. Netanyahu of failing to recognize what was brewing in Gaza. Until recently Mr. Netanyahu all but ignored the events of October 7. Instead, he highlighted his leadership in the catastrophe’s aftermath: occupying Gaza, killing the massacre’s perpetrators, the beeper operation in Lebanon and killing Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, last June’s 12-day war in Iran and this year’s follow-up that obliterated the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei. This week, though, Mr. Netanyahu started talking about October 7, shifting all blame to the leaders of the army and other security officials. “If they only woke me up in time, this wouldn’t have happened,” he told an interviewer Mr. Netanyahu’s argument is that as the first signs of attack emerged in the hours before Hamas launched the massacre, the army leadership literally kept him in the dark. They feared that he would order sweeping counter measures that would escalate the war.On Thursday Kan news published a time line, indicating that Mr. Netanyahu’s military aid alerted him of the events on the Gaza border at 6:30 am. The first security consultation led by the premier occurred three hours later. Mr. Eisenkot’s campaign produced a video this week, riffing on what the opposition sees as Mr. Netanyahu’s attempt to shift responsibility. In it, a list of perceived failures are superimposed over an image of Mr. Netanyahu as he sleeps in his bed, indicating that Israel would only wake up after a new government is elected. “They needed to wake Bibi up years earlier, on the first day that he started doing business with Qatar,” Mr. Carmon of Memri says. Even as the strip boasted 17 high education institutes, 34 hospitals, shopping malls, a beachside boardwalk, residential towers, and riding clubs, the received wisdom in Israel was that if only suffering in Gaza eased, Hamas would moderate and end its militancy. Israel turned to Qatar to deliver cash to Gaza.In a 2018 visit to Doha, a top Qatari official told the Sun that all Israeli-authorized cash deliveries to Gaza went to humanitarian purposes. In reality, the funds were channeled to building tunnels, purchasing arms, and preparing the October 7. “Israel’s army chiefs of staff, the heads of Mossad, Shabak, the academia, the press — all of them subscribed to the lie that Gaza was in a humanitarian crisis,” Mr. Carmon says. “In reality, Gaza didn’t need any Qatari money.”

October 7 Casts a Large Shadow Over Israel’s October 27 Election

October 7 Casts a Large Shadow Over Israel’s October 27 Election

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