The furious back and forth over whether Netanyahu was warned about October 7 is an irrelevant sideshow. What Israelis should be obsessing over are the current warnings coming from all directions.
As the Israeli election season enters the homestretch with under a month to go, October 7 is unsurprisingly dominating the conversation. What is more surprising is that the conversation is not looking back to the events of that terrible day itself and all that followed. It is instead going further back in time to the days and weeks preceding it, and furiously litigating whether or not Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was warned about what was to come. The central debate now in Israel revolves around whether or not Emirati leader Mohammed bin Zayed alerted Netanyahu to a potential Hamas attack and how specifically, whether or not the Egyptian intelligence chief secretly traveled to Israel, whether or not Shin Bet head Ronen Bar and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi spoke the previous night and how many times, and whether or not Netanyahu was woken up early enough to change the course of events. Every day brings new leaks about who warned Netanyahu and when, and new allegations from Netanyahu and his camp about the perfidy of the defense establishment and the warnings he claims they knew about and withheld, while Israelis consume it all and argue about whose version of October 7 warnings they believe.
This focus on what Netanyahu knew and when is misplaced for two reasons. First, what is more important for Israel’s immediate future is not what someone did or did not know in the past, but what should be done going forward. Second, and more saliently, Israelis should indeed be consumed by a set of warnings, but not the warnings from three years ago. The warnings that should command their attention are the ones coming at them now from every direction and from multiple critical actors.
As Netanyahu and his foes argue about what the defense establishment warned him about in the spring and summer of 2023, the defense establishment’s warnings right now are falling on deaf ears. Events in the West Bank—namely Jewish terrorism against Palestinians—are at a crisis level, and you don’t need to take my word for it. IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir warned in March that settler attacks “endanger the settlements, security, stability, and our values as a people and as a state,” and “create extraordinary strategic damage to the IDF’s efforts.” In August, Central Command head Avi Bluth warned Netanyahu directly that settler violence was liable to spark a surge in Palestinian terrorism. Former prime ministers, defense ministers, IDF chiefs of staff, Mossad heads, and Shin Bet heads wrote to Netanyahu in June warning of the severe consequences coming as a result of Jewish terrorism and the government’s inability—and in some cases, unwillingness—to stop it.
This should be creating a political firestorm in Israel. Instead, there was a literal firestorm in the Palestinian village of Jalud on Monday night, when over 100 Jewish rampagers prevented the IDF from fulfilling its mission of returning a Palestinian family to the home it had been chased from by Jewish terrorists in July, setting homes and cars on fire and blocking roads with burning tires. Despite the constant warnings about how this is actively harming Israeli security and risking a West Bank uprising—which would create challenges that dwarf October 7 given the size of the West Bank and the half a million Israeli Jews spread across it in over four hundred settlements, outposts, and farms—Netanyahu dismissed the latest attack as the work of a “small number of rioters,” and as of this writing, only three people have been arrested.
As Netanyahu and his rivals argue about what foreign countries warned him about in the spring and summer of 2023, foreign countries’ warnings right now are being waved away. European bans on settlement-produced goods and proposed sanctions over the development of E-1—a red line for both the U.S. and Europe dating back three decades—are chalked up to antisemitism and compared to pre-WWII efforts to boycott and ostracize Jews. Congressional concerns over extreme Israeli policies and behavior, expressed most recently in a Senate vote demanding an investigation into the deaths of nine American citizens in the West Bank that attracted unprecedented numbers of Democrats, are condemned as evidence that the Democratic Socialists of America have corrupted the party and turned all Democrats into Israel-haters. The precipitous drop in support for Israel from Americans of all ages, religions, and political persuasions is chalked up solely to nefarious Qatari influence and treated as a problem that can be solved through savvier PR campaigns or paying social media influencers to post pro-Israel sentiments. The sirens warning of a diplomatic and strategic disaster are blaring, but too many Israelis are putting their fingers in their ears on the assumption that if they prevent themselves from hearing, the negative consequences will somehow pass them by.
The warnings from the spring and summer of 2023 that are too irrelevant to Israelis to even fight about are those from American Jews, who are used to their concerns not even registering. American Jews during that period were nearly as captivated by the judicial overhaul as Israelis, identifying in large numbers with the Israelis protesting in the streets and warning Israeli leaders that the image of Israel as a democracy would be damaged in the U.S.—and along with it, the strength of the U.S.-Israel relationship—should the government severely erode judicial independence. But American Jews were also warning about the corrosive impact of making Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich two of the most powerful ministers in the government, of the ways in which Israeli policies were leading to spikes in anti-Zionist sentiment, of how younger American Jews were turning away from or tuning out Israel over their discomfort of how Palestinians were treated, and of how much harder it was to build support for Israel in the Jewish community when the way that most American Jews express and practice their Judaism was attacked or scorned by Israelis.
Today, the situation is even more dire. If this government, or one that looks like it, emerges on the other side of the October 27 election, the bottom is going to fall out with Democrats, with young American Jews, and with younger Americans writ large, and the crisis among Republicans and older Americans will only deepen. American Jews are going to feel immensely squeezed, caught between rising antisemitism at home and the prospect of an Israel from which many recoil. The promise of a Jewish state was never that it would respond to the political or ideological concerns of every Jew around the world, but that it would be a place that any Jew could call home should they choose, and American Jews may increasingly need that emotional, if not actual, security blanket. But rather than heed the warnings from these shores about the damage being done to Israel’s standing in the U.S. and take the obligations of a Jewish state—not just an Israeli state—seriously, instead Israeli ministers are dashing around between groundbreaking ceremonies for new settlements and unprecedentedly preventing Jews from making aliyah over their legal participation in efforts to prevent attacks on Palestinians, chilling the very notion of Israel as a Jewish safe haven.
Israelis are obsessing over pre-October 7 warnings. They should be obsessing over today’s warnings instead. Unlike the ones from three years ago, the current ones are all public, are not in dispute, are clear rather than amorphous, and are directly tied to things that are in Israel’s power to change. Netanyahu claims that he wasn’t warned and so there was nothing that he could do, but if Israel’s current and imminent future leaders do not act on what they are now being warned about, no excuse in the world will absolve them of the ramifications that follow.
If American public opinion does not reverse course, Israel has no hope of retaining the type of relationship it has been used to, irrespective of whether future administrations are predominantly Republican or Democratic. But public opinion is not permanent and inalterable, and there is one—and only one—way out of this quicksand. It is to absorb why Americans have soured on Israel, with one side focused on Israeli treatment of Palestinians and the other focused on Israeli militarism that appears to them divorced from, if not at odds with, U.S. interests and concerns, and to do what is possible within the constraints of Israeli politics and strategic assessments to correct course. That won’t happen before next month’s election, but if it does not happen soon afterwards, the vibes that now seem like background noise will be as loud as a Trump campaign rally playlist.