10/7: Netanyahu’s Final Solution to the Palestinian Question

READ: My latest for The New Arab is now up, How Netanyahu’s lies at the UN lost the world but won Israel

For Netanyahu and the rest of his Brownshirt government, 10/7 offered them the opportunity to enact the Final Solution to the Palestinian Question.

Like the Nazis, Israel has historically promoted and implemented various strategies to deal with Palestinians: occupation, ethnic cleansing, mass murder, land and resource theft. But these were half measures. As Israelis say after every operation in Gaza or Lebanon: mowing the grass.

The genocide in Gaza and West Bank represents not a solution, but the solution. The final solution. The answer to the question: what do we do with them? How do we finally eliminate them and the “problem” they represent?

Netanyahu recognized the opportunity he had. Though the attack itself was a national tragedy, it also offered him a chance to solve the Palestinian “problem” once and for all.  To deal a final fatal blow to Hamas that would lead to a final solution: the physical elimination of Palestinians from Gaza, and eventually the West Bank.

The invasion was, in that sense a godsend. His strategy was Machiavelli and Bismarck rolled into one. Not only did the Hamas slaughter offer the chance to eliminate Palestinians, it offered him a clear path to victory in the October national elections.  He would become the first Israeli leader to solve a “problem” that had persisted from the founding of the state; unfinished business which started with the Nakba and persisted up to 10/7.  The final solution would guarantee him victory.

Defense minister, Israel Katz,  and police minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, have offered their own “contributions.” They would be the equivalent of the Nazi generals who approved the Final Solution at Wansee. They urged the full expulsion of all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. They would be Palestinianrein. Yet somehow this would be a “voluntary transfer” of the population to some as yet undetermined country.  But the current boa-like occupation of 70% of Gaza by the IDF, the confinement of 2.5-million to the 30% remaining, and the coordinated expulsions on the West Bank, indicate there would be nothing voluntary about it.

Recall the history of the Nakba and how the Haganah “encouraged” Palestinians to leave by looting, raping, shelling and murdering them in their villages: 400 of them were eradicated.   That, in turn led to the eventual expulsion of 750,000.  Today’s would be a slightly larger operation. Unfortunately, as Benny Morris has noted, Ben Gurion left the job undone, as 250,000 Palestinians remained in Israel after 1948.  That has grown to 4-million.  It would be a large operation. But where there’s a will there’s a Zionist way.

10/7 was a national catastrophe Bibi brought on himself, and for which he was fully responsible. There is a saying: “Victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan.”  In Israel’s case there are at least 100 “fathers” of Israel “defeat” on that day.  Besides Netanyahu himself, the IDF command was woefully unprepared. It received multiple warnings from surveillance and intelligence units that should have rung alarm bells.  Yet they remained silent, because the IDF smugly believed in its power of deterrence. It had built a multi-billion dollar surveillance network to detect attempts at such incursions.  Hamas dismantled them easily on that day.

The blowback from the catastrophe was severe. The army chief of staff resigned, as did the Shin Bet southern district commander, responsible for Gaza. The agency’s chief also resigned.  Netanyahu, on the contrary, doubled down. He refused to appoint a commission of inquiry as happened following several other Israeli disasters.  He knew it would point the finger at him and most likely destroy his election chances. He remain obdurate up till today, three years later. And he has gotten away with it.  One of the many tragedies of Netanyahu-era Israeli history is that there is never any accountability for such disasters.  No one is to blame or everyone is to blame, which is one and the same thing.

The Shin Bet was caught with its pants down. It had numerous red flags, but apparently was color-blind.  As a result, scores of Shin Bet agents were killed on 10/7, along with several hundred IDF personnel.  It was the worst intelligence failure in Israeli history. It ranks closely with the surprise 1973 Egyptian-Syrian attack, as the worst military failure in the country’s history.

Returning to the Israeli prime minister: he received multiple warnings of a planned Hamas attack. Two different warnings were offered by IDF units.  The UAE Emir and Egyptian intelligence chief also issued separate warnings.  Also, he lied about when he received word of the attack early on the morning of the 7th,  in order to conceal that he wasted 30 precious minutes before he directed orders. In fact, he claims that no one woke him up on that fateful morning: ““Had they woken me up, everything would have looked different. That is the story of October 7th—that is the story.”

Actually, no it’s not. The story is that he is a liar who has gotten away with this for his entire career. It remains to be seen if, in this month’s election, Israelis will continue to let him get away with it.

These reports published by multiple Israeli and foreign media–based on scores of knowledgeable sources–have ignited a firestorm against the Israeli leader. In response, he’s mounted his own counter-offensive: a half-million dollar defamation lawsuit against multiple Israeli outlets and journalists, charging the accounts are fabricated and politically motivated.  Even in an Israeli legal system gamed in favor of the wealthy and powerful, this will go nowhere. It is a gesture–a ploy to counter the damage of the scandal. It is transparent, even desperate.

This is an account of Netanyahu’s catastrophic malfeasance in the months and weeks leading up to 10/7:

10/7 morning phone alert: Netanyahu received an alert from his military attache at 6:30AM.  Yet, he did not order a full-scale mobilization until eleven minutes later.  Even those few minutes could have meant life or death to some of the soon-to-be victims.  But that was only part of the scandal: one of his aides doctored the time in official records to eliminate this gap, in order to protect his boss’ reputation:

The allegation is that [Netanyahu chief of staff] Braverman altered the time, in order to give the impression that the prime minister had acted more urgently and more decisively.

Egypt warning: Egypt’s intelligence chief flew personally to Israel in late September, two weeks before the strike, to issue a stark warning to Israel about Hamas’ plan:

Hamas…appeared to be mobilizing for a major attack, Kamel said…The window to prevent a disaster was closing…His message, according to one former Israeli official later briefed on the visit, was: If you don’t change course, Gaza is going to blow up in your faces.

…Kamel’s visit should have set off alarms across the top ranks of the Israeli government…The mere presence of the Egyptian intelligence chief in Israel should have demonstrated the urgency of the issue. “The messenger was the message,” a former Israeli official told me. “There is no world,” this official said, where top Israeli officials meet with the head of Egyptian intelligence “and Bibi is not aware.”

…Israeli, Arab, and U.S. officials tell me that they all experienced the same phenomenon in 2023: an arrogance on the part of Netanyahu bred by the deep-seated belief that Israel had the upper hand against Hamas.

Kamel didn’t have to guess at Hamas’ intentions: it told him so directly.  Hamas, it turns out, wanted a deal. Yahya Sinwar, its leader, repeatedly reached out to UAE and Egypt to warn them of the path he would choose if Israel chose to ignore  him.  That’s precisely what happened.

Yet the Israeli leader held a security meeting of the cabinet a few days later and none of this was mentioned.

IDF surveillance Unit 414: an IDF unit tasked with monitoring the CCTV cameras observing Gaza noticed unusual military training activity inside the enclave:

In the months leading up to Oct. 7, Lifshitz said she started noticing unusual activity. Truckloads of Hamas militants, which appeared to be special forces units because they were all dressed in black, were driving within 300 yards of the fence, in a “combat patrol,” she said. After they stopped, she said they would carefully scan Israeli position…

…She saw militants using a “model of an Israeli tank they had built to train to kidnap soldiers. They were actually practicing scenarios that happened on Oct. 7,” she said.

They passed their findings to their superiors. But the unit was composed of young low-ranking female soldiers. Their commanders didn’t consider their findings significant and didn’t pass them up the link of command:

Lifshitz said she reported all of these events up the official chain of command, but was met with silence. “No one updated me. No one told me, ‘Roni, what you reported is being handled,’ or ‘Just so you know, they’re doing something about it, they’re dealing with it, they heard about it.’ No one said anything to me,” she said.

This rendered the IDF blind in the lead-up to the attack.–a self-inflicted blindness.

The army unit was stationed less than half a mile from Gaza. As a result, it was one of the first military facilities attacked and many of the female soldiers were killed or captured by the invaders.  The IDF chief of staff later apologized to them for the army’s dereliction of duty. It is yet another in a series of blunders that led to the massacre.

IDF: gender apartheid

But this failure sheds light on another glaring weakness: its derogation of female soldiers.  They weren’t believed by their male superiors because they were women.  The bosses thought they knew better.

This explains why there are few women in senior combat roles in the IDF.  Those that there are were appointed only in the past three years.  Only one-quarter of lieutenant colonels are women and 15% of colonels.  Nor are women generally integrated into combat units. At least in part because male Orthodox units will not serve with women.  In addition, the male commanders do not trust women in such roles.  They relegate them to lower level assignments. Thus the army observes a form of gender apartheid, which is also reflected in many areas of Israeli society.

IDF Unit 8200 warning: Israel’s SIGINT intelligence warning prepared a report weeks before 10/7 documenting Hamas training for an attack:

IDF’s Gaza Division less than three weeks before October 7 warned that Hamas was training for a large-scale invasion of Israel during which hostages would be taken en masse, the Kan public broadcaster revealed Monday.

Titled “Detailed raid training from end to end,” the document was circulated on September 19 and was reportedly brought to the attention of at least some senior intelligence officials, but apparently ignored.

Less than two months after the Gaza attack on Israel, the BBC published an extensive account, replete with online videos, documenting in meticulous detail Hamas training for such an attack months before 10/7. It reveals that as early as 2020, the group’s leaders had laid out plans for such an operation and began disseminating the training sessions via online videos.  It was all in plain site.  The IDF certainly knew of the activities, but minimized their significance because they had expectation bias. They determined Hamas wanted quiet and would not engage in offensive activities.  Thus, they refused to believe the evidence right before their eyes.

Jericho Wall: Two months after the Hamas invasion, the NY Times noted yet another major warning sign which Israel ignored.  It reported that a year before 10/7 IDF intelligence had received a detailed Hamas plan:

…The…document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined…exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people. The…document,…described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters…Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision.

The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities, according to documents and officials.

Once again, Israel lost an opportunity which, if they had recognized it, would have likely avoided the catastrophe that followed.

UAE warning: Three weeks before 10/7, Netanyahu received yet another warning. This came from outside. The Emir of UAE, which joined the Abraham Accords and had established a security alliance with Israel, became extremely worried about intelligence he’d received about a possible Hamas attack:

A week and a half before October 7, 2023 the Emirati ruler called Netanyahu from…Abu Dhabi and spoke with him for 45 minutes.

…Bin Zayed warned that Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was planning a major operation against Israel. Bin Zayed expressed concern that the event in question would not only lead to bloodshed but also destabilize the entire region…

“The emir explained that…Sinwar was preparing for a major event. He told Netanyahu that Israel should be ready. Concurrently, he recommended trying to find an economic solution for the Strip and calming the West Bank to prevent escalation.”

Bin Zayed urged Netanyahu to take the situation seriously. To his surprise, however, the prime minister reacted with relative calm. Netanyahu said that, in his assessment, Hamas intended to operate in the West Bank area, and he reassured bin Zayed that Israel was prepared for any scenario…

Famous last words.

In the months before 10/7, Israel and Hamas had secretly been negotiating a wide-ranging plan whose provisions would provide economic relief to Gaza and also involve a prisoner exchange leading to the return of fallen IDF soldiers whose bodies the Palestinian group held.  Despite the agreement between the negotiators on the deal, Netanyahu dithered, worried that his extremist ministers would balk.  As a result, Hamas leadership grew frustrated. This is likely what led to its decision to proceed with the attack. If Netanyahu had carried out the plan, the invasion would never have happened.

One of the Palestinian negotiators grew alarmed at this development and reached out to UAE, hoping that a high-level warning would move Netanyahu to finalize the deal. That’s how the phone call came about:

“The emir hoped… Netanyahu would take… action,” the adviser says. None of them imagined that the prime minister would hear the message but wouldn’t brief the heads of the defense establishment. The head of the Shin Bet, the head of the Mossad, the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff – none of them knew about bin Zayed’s warning.

Abba Eban’s disparaging saying about Arab so-called intransigence was: “they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”  It seems far more appropriate for Netanyahu.

Of course, the original cause of 10/7 was not Israeli malfeasance, but rather Israel’s ongoing slaughter of Palestinians. Before 10/7, it was in the West Bank, where scores of villages and thousands of residents had suffered mass expulsion by settlers and the army. It sparked a sense of desperation on Hamas’ part, that it must do something–anything to resist. This is the real cause of 10/7. The historical fact that all media reporting and Israeli genocide hasbara ignore. They each offer a bi-causation, an action and a reaction.  But there were three key factors at play, not two. And by far the most important was Israel’s pre-genocide in the West Bank, along with its ongoing siege and strangulation of Gaza.  Without that precursor, there is no match.

By excluding that third factor, the media erase Israeli culpability.  Give it an out it does not deserve.  But one which it exploits to the hilt.