How Sara Netanyahu’s October 7 remark successfully hijacked the Israeli election agenda - analysis

During an election campaign, the question is not only what the various candidates are saying, but rather what is being talked about, political strategist Moshe Klughaft said on Wednesday.

Klughaft was speaking on Kan Bet’s morning radio show, Kalman-Liberman, about dueling lawsuits that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, and Democrats party head Yair Golan have brought against one another.

And the fact that he was the first interviewee on the program proved his point.

Despite the flare-up between Iran and the United States, Israel’s unusual arrest of a Hamas leader in Gaza, rising gas prices, and broken-down desalination plants, the program’s top item was the conspiracy theories surrounding October 7 - specifically, whether Netanyahu’s wife had implied that Golan, who donned a uniform and rushed south to rescue people soon after the attack began, had been tipped off in advance.

She broadly insinuated as much in a Channel 14 interview, leading to Golan’s defamation suit against her for spreading conspiracy theories and her counter-defamation suit against him. And what was her lawyer’s argument? That she never spread conspiracy theories, but spoke only about solid facts that are undisputed.

Sara Netanyahu's remarks came after shown video of demonstration against her

Her remark about Golan did not appear scripted. It came after she was shown a clip of him cheering on protesters who demonstrated loudly outside the Tel Aviv hair salon where she was sitting in March 2023, at the height of the judicial reform protests, followed by another clip in which he dismissed as disingenuous her subsequent statement that she had felt threatened at the time.

Visibly perturbed, Sara said Golan should be embarrassed “by a situation in which you are throwing your weight around against a woman in a hair salon.” She then contrasted the image of a senior military man confronting a woman in a salon with his conduct on October 7.

“When you are a military officer of such high rank and claim that you fought on October 7, you were already there early in the morning, already dressed and prepared; at a very early hour, when others did not know, such as the prime minister.”

Then she added sarcastically, “In general, who is the prime minister who needs to know that a war is breaking out? Why inform him?”

She did not complete the thought, but the implication was difficult to miss, especially since her husband has repeated in recent days in various forums that had he been awakened at 3 in the morning, when senior security officials were discussing signs indicating a possible attack, then the outcome would have been much different.

And this is where the issue becomes muddled, because several very different claims are being bundled together under the emotionally charged words “betrayal” and “conspiracy.”

Sara was asked directly: “What do you say about the betrayal theory?”

“I don’t want to discuss it,” she replied. “I don’t subscribe to any theories, and I don’t know. I support a genuine commission of inquiry.”

Conspiracy: Golan knew an attack was imminent and conspired against Netanyahu

The more extreme version of the conspiracy theory is not that anyone actively conspired with Hamas, but that members of the country’s security elite - Golan somehow included - knew an attack was imminent and deliberately failed to wake Netanyahu because they wanted to damage or bring down his government.

No evidence has been presented to substantiate that allegation.

Following Sara’s interview and the ensuing brouhaha, the prime minister released a short video clip saying that he has repeatedly been asked whether there was a betrayal and has consistently answered that there was not.

“I don’t think there was a betrayal,” he said. “I think there was a failure - a major failure - reflected in what happened during the night and morning before the attack.”

He elaborated in another video, saying that there were numerous warning signs before October 7 and that then-IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi, Shin Bet head Ronen Bar, and Military Intelligence chief Aharon Haliva knew about them.

A consultation among senior security officials was held at around 3 a.m., several hours before the attack began at 6:29 a.m. Netanyahu was not awakened. The question he is now placing at the center of the public discussion is why.

Netanyahu said the answer could be found in a protocol submitted to the High Court of Justice. According to his account, Bar advocated maintaining a medium-level, covert state of readiness so as not to create a “miscalculation,” while refraining from broad action that might spark an unnecessary confrontation.

“This group believed that Hamas was deterred,” Netanyahu said. “They did not believe Hamas would attack. So they were concerned that if they woke the prime minister - excuse me, ‘that madman,’ me, right? - they knew exactly what I would do. They knew I would deploy the air force there, mobilize the entire IDF, and not allow anyone to approach the fences - they would be killed immediately.

“So they said that this would lead to an attack or to an exchange of fire with Hamas, and that had to be prevented. If they had awakened me, everything would have looked different. That is the story of October 7. That is the story.”

There is an important distinction here. To argue that the security establishment badly misread Hamas, failed to respond adequately to the warning signs, and did not wake the prime minister because it feared provoking an escalation is to make an argument about a catastrophic professional and conceptual failure.

To claim that officials knew Hamas was about to invade and deliberately withheld that information in order to damage Netanyahu is something else entirely. That is an allegation of conscious betrayal, and one the prime minister himself has not made. The question now is whether Sara Netanyahu implied it.

The political significance of the controversy lies less in whether Sara’s remark can withstand legal scrutiny than in what it has caused the country to discuss. And that brings us full circle to Klughaft’s observation. During an election campaign, what matters is not necessarily what is being said, but what is being talked about.

At first blush, Sara’s remark appeared to be an angry, unscripted response to an unflattering clip of Golan. But the ensuing uproar has placed a part of the October 7 story that many people were either not discussing or were unfamiliar with - the decision not to wake the prime minister - squarely in the public spotlight.

That does not validate the conspiracy theory. It does, however, ensure that the questions feeding it are now part of the pre-election conversation.