The question Netanyahu must answer: What did he know before October 7? - opinion

On June 29, 1973, Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tennessee), the vice chair of the Senate Watergate Committee, asked White House Counsel John Dean a question that began the final unraveling of Richard Nixon’s presidency.

“What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

Benjamin Netanyahu was living in the United States at the time, studying architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he very likely watched the hearings on television, like the rest of us. He knows that it was the cover-up that destroyed a presidency.

As Israelis prepare to go to the polls later this month, they are asking the same thing about their prime minister. What did he know, and when did he know about the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led assault that left some 1,200 dead in Israel, thousands more injured, and 251 people taken hostage?

Why is he working so hard to prevent an independent commission of inquiry, the Israeli equivalent of the bipartisan Watergate investigation, from examining the events leading up to that horrific day?

This has become a central issue in the October 27 Israeli elections, especially since Haaretz revealed that Netanyahu was personally warned by the leader of the United Arab Emirates of a possible Hamas attack about 10 days before it occurred.

Netanyahu secretly flew to the UAE Sunday to ask President Mohamed bin Zayed to back up publicly his insistence there had been no such advance warning. As of this writing, that hasn’t happened.

Other news outlets have added even more revelations.

The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and Haaretz have reported that Egypt’s intelligence chief Abbas Kamel secretly went to Israel 11 days before October 7 to warn Netanyahu, after previous efforts about the volatile situation in Gaza had gone unheeded.

Haaretz broke the original story. It revealed that bin Zayed phoned Netanyahu in late September to warn him that Hamas was planning a major attack, but apparently offered no specific details of time and place.

Yoav Galant, then the defense minister, said Netanyahu never informed him or the IDF chief of staff of these warnings, and that they learned of them only recently from media reports.

According to The New York Times, Netanyahu did not pass the warnings on to security chiefs. He had earlier rejected their alerts of a Hamas threat, and their suggestions that Israel target Hamas leaders who were fomenting West Bank violence, the Times noted.

Netanyahu believed another conflict with Hamas at that time could sabotage US and Israeli efforts to normalize diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. That turned out to be prophetic. It subsequently came out that one reason behind Hamas’s timing was to derail the Saudi move, which is what happened.

Haaretz also said that “a former senior Palestinian official” told Israeli intelligence weeks before the attack that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar asked him to let Israel know he was planning to “cause an earthquake… in the prisons due to the prisoner issue.”

Intelligence officials may have misread Sinwar’s “earthquake” message, thinking it was related to the case of an Israeli kidnapped and held in Iraq, not the larger assault, reported i24 Israel news. “In retrospect,” i24 added, “it was Sinwar’s way of extracting additional benefits from Israel while postponing the attack he had planned.”

Israeli and Egyptian intelligence officials are reported to have told the prime minister in September that they had separately learned that Qatar was also funding Hamas’s military wing prior to October 7.

Netanyahu dismissed that information as well, calling it “a collection of recycled lies” and insisted that the money was for humanitarian purposes, as Qatar was saying, even as it was funding the terror group’s military wing.

Qatar, those generous folks who gifted US President Donald Trump with a $400 million jetliner, had been funding Hamas’s military wing for several years while Washington and Jerusalem turned a blind eye for their own political purposes.

Hubris and deception helped pave the road to the tragic failure to prevent a massacre and a war that has led to the deaths of tens of thousands, more than twice that number injured, over 2.2 million displaced, a widespread health crisis, and the massive destruction of Gaza’s homes and infrastructure, not to mention the unprecedented plunge in Israel’s international standing.

Israeli leadership fooled by Hamas

Israeli leaders were the target of a sophisticated Hamas ploy to fool them into believing that the terrorist group was more interested in governing than making war. Qatar was helping sell that message, and Netanyahu apparently bought it, allowing Doha to send millions of dollars to Gaza.

Netanyahu was more focused instead on threats from Iran and Hezbollah, and feeding the friction between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

That internecine warfare was his key to making certain there would never be a Palestinian state, at least not on his watch. With the two largest Palestinian factions at war with each other, Israeli leaders had an excuse not to pursue a deal with them, especially if that could lead to statehood.

The opposition’s demand for an independent Gaza inquiry is a central issue in this campaign. Netanyahu and his allies insist none of these meetings or warnings ever took place, and have persistently sought to point the blame at security and intelligence officials.

What did Netanyahu know about Hamas’s war plans, when did he know it, and why is he so frightened of the truth coming out?

The Israeli people need and deserve to know. So do the rest of us. This prime minister’s conduct of the Gaza war has done enormous damage to Israel’s standing around the world – witness last week’s walkout at the United Nations General Assembly – and particularly in the United States, in the once solidly supporting Democratic party and across the Jewish community.

As one who lived through the Watergate saga, he should know the cover-up only magnifies the damage already done. This cover-up can do for his legacy what it did for Nixon’s.

A commission of inquiry won’t repair that, but it is an essential first step toward healing the nation at home and abroad.

The writer is a Washington-based journalist, consultant, lobbyist, and former legislative director at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.