The Left’s October 7 Revisionism

Faced with the collapse of their two-state dream, Israel’s left wing and ‘The New York Times’ have turned the Hamas massacre into a weapon against Netanyahu

by Gadi Taub | Tablet | Aug 20, 2025

October 7 presented the Israeli left with a daunting challenge: how to prevent the Hamas massacre from sounding the death knell of its most cherished dream, the so-called two-state solution. Having witnessed the vast majority of the Palestinian public cheer Hamas’ savagery, the last thing Israelis wanted to hear was plans for future partition of their land, never mind a peace agreement. Faced with this popular rejection of its central platform, the left first had to focus on preventing the right from consolidating its growing majority, to avert total collapse.

But how could the left leverage an event that showed its side was wrong in its fundamental assumptions about Israel’s neighbors against the right, whose position was vindicated? The answer is simple: Lay Oct. 7 at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s feet.

And so, the left launched a campaign to blame the man who had presciently warned that Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005 would give rise to a terrorist “Hamas state.” Netanyahu’s accurate understanding of Israel’s neighbors didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Oct. 7 happened on his watch.

The campaign required a new narrative that tailored the historical record to suit the left’s political objective. A recent example of this revisionism is an 11,000-word New York Times Magazine piece by Patrick Kingsley, Ronen Bergman, and Natan Odenheimer, titled “How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power.” The piece presents itself as a work of investigative journalism, with new revelations and intimate details “reported here for the first time,” along with scores of interviews and documented sources.

The piece puts forward a neat storyline that echoes the Israeli left’s articles of faith: Netanyahu could have ended the war with a hostage deal in April 2024. However, he keeps prolonging the war to satisfy the radical, irrational hawkish wing of this coalition, all to stay in power. The real reason Netanyahu is desperate to remain in office, the piece argues, is so that he can appoint a new attorney general and thereby quash his prosecution on corruption charges.

Only, there isn’t a single true link in this imaginary chain of political logic. Netanyahu never wanted to end the war with a hostage deal. While the prime minister has pursued a deal for the release of the hostages, the caveat was his absolute refusal to end the war short of achieving all of Israel’s declared goals: the dismantling of Hamas as a military and governing force, the return of all hostages, both the dead and the living, and the assurance that Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel’s security. Meanwhile, Hamas never agreed to anything other than a complete Israeli surrender with the full withdrawal of the IDF from every last inch of Gaza, along with funds to reconstruct the strip under its rule, and internationally binding guarantees for the survival of its regime—conditions the overwhelming majority of Israelis would never agree to.

The truth is, nothing would serve Netanyahu politically better than ending the war, so long as it ends in victory. The longer the war drags on without victory, the more support he bleeds, especially among his base. In other words, both The New York Times Magazine’s depiction of Israel’s interests and its assumptions about Netanyahu’s political calculations are wrong.

The same goes for the assertions about Netanyahu’s coalition partners, which the piece gets backwards. The so-called radical wing of the coalition has been pressing for a swift end to the war through a decisive victory. The criticism it has leveled at Netanyahu has been over his prolonging the war with endless negotiations over yet another temporary deal that prioritizes the hostages over Israel’s victory. Had Netanyahu moved to satisfy his coalition partners, we would now be in the final leg of this war, single-mindedly focused on crushing whatever remains of Hamas. Of course, Israel did not take this course of action during the period described in the magazine’s alternative history.

The imaginary account of The New York Times entirely distorts how Netanyahu has had to struggle to make sure Israel doesn’t end the war prematurely, before achieving its objectives. From the moment it began, Netanyahu came under overwhelming pressure to shut down Israel’s military campaign. He faced the combined, and often coordinated, efforts of the Iran-appeasing Biden administration, Israel’s peacenik opposition, a leftist media obsessed with overthrowing him over any other consideration, the weaponization of criminal law designed to impair his ability to govern, and a reluctant IDF brass that preferred a compromise deal over the reoccupation of Gaza.

The many forces opposing Netanyahu, including those in his coalition, wanted to end the war even before the invasion of Rafah, which would have left Hamas in power in Gaza, Hezbollah perched ominously on our northern border with 150,000 rockets pointed at our civilian centers, and Iran with a clear path to a nuclear weapon and regional hegemony. Such an outcome would have put Israel’s very existence in a danger it has not experienced since the spring of 1948.

When all looked bleak and the whole country was still in shock, Netanyahu vowed to change the regional order. Against all odds, he managed to keep the war going, maneuvering patiently and skillfully toward this goal, which no one at the time imagined was possible. Now we sit with Israel in a far stronger position than it was in before the war, with the American alliance system reconstructed and poised to resist the ambitions of the China-Russia axis in the region. Sustaining the war effort to achieve all these aims was not driven by the prime minister’s personal considerations. Rather, it was the result of his dogged pursuit of Israel’s vital interest, which is also shared by the United States. That continues to be the reason why Netanyahu refuses to stop the war short of victory. What the Times portrays as the cynical prioritizing of his career is Netanyahu’s single-minded focus on securing Israel’s existential needs.

The piece’s assumptions only underscore that the authors are merely confirming the left’s cartoonish pieties, not providing serious analysis. The proposition that Netanyahu defied the will of the majority to satisfy the radical fringe of his coalition is pure fantasy. A leader who would drag his country through a needless war only to cater to a minority within his coalition would provoke the ire of the majority in his coalition and would be unceremoniously ousted. The simple truth is that Netanyahu has to win this war. He knows this, the majority of Israel’s voters know this, the coalition knows this, and so do Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, which is why they continue to urge him to push for a decisive victory.

Equally fantastical is the piece’s theory that behind all of Netanyahu’s maneuvering is his desperate need to appoint a more friendly attorney general who would help him escape justice. The article’s authors do not tell their readers that the “corruption trial” they’re hyping is a fiasco. Charges are collapsing in court daily, to the manifest discomfort of the judges, who had already suggested the prosecution withdraw the single serious charge in the indictment: bribery. Nor do the article authors explain that in the Israeli system, there isn’t a ghost of a chance that any attorney general would extricate Netanyahu from an ongoing trial without the approval of the Israeli Supreme Court, which, given its hostility to the prime minister, would be impossible for him to influence. In fact, the only way the court would approve halting the trial is if it suspects that Netanyahu’s lawyers might turn the tables on the prosecution and expose the weaponization of the law by the left—of which the Supreme Court itself is part. Last, the court’s retired president Judge Aharon Barak laid the cards on the table when he mused that Netanyahu could get a pardon in return for retiring from political life. And so, Kingsley, Bergman, and Odenheimer’s tale is an inversion of reality: Leaving politics, not staying in power, is the only path for Netanyahu to possibly avoid the continuation of his legal travails.

But the piece’s most egregious deception is its distortion of the historical record regarding the responsibility for the immense intelligence failure that led to the Hamas invasion. Kingsley, Berman, and Odenheimer exonerate the security officials directly responsible and blame the man whom these officials didn’t bother to brief until after the attack was underway.

In the authors’ rendering, military and Shin Bet intelligence saw the attack coming, but Netanyahu refused to heed their warnings. As they tell it, “In late July 2023, Israel’s military-intelligence directorate produced an alarming report that synthesized all intercepts gathered by Israeli intelligence in recent months.” The report’s bottom line—as Brig. Gen. Amit Saar, the army’s top intelligence analyst, told Netanyahu in a letter—was that “internal crisis,” resulting from the government’s proposed judicial reform, “exacerbates the damage to Israeli deterrence and increases the likelihood of escalation.”

But Netanyahu, in The New York Times‘ morality play, was hell-bent on pushing through the reform to limit the Supreme Court’s power in order to satisfy the “ultranationalist” flank of his coalition, which sees the court as a threat to further settlement in Judea and Samaria, as well as to Likud’s ultra-Orthodox partners. Even the growing number of reservists threatening to walk out on their posts did not deter Netanyahu from pursuing his judicial reform.

Israel’s responsible adults, such as former IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, the piece adds, “tried to reach Netanyahu, in a previously unreported effort to get the prime minister to read Saar’s findings,” to no avail. Netanyahu stubbornly ignored repeated, written warnings by the security establishment. Shin Bet head Ronen Bar also tried to convince Netanyahu that real danger was looming, the piece adds. Netanyahu turned a deaf ear to his warnings, too.

This is not a misinterpretation. It is a falsification of the record. Netanyahu was not exactly forewarned. He was threatened by the rebellious top brass and a rogue chief of the secret police to stop a judicial reform that they opposed. They refused to deny rumors that they will disobey the elected government in case of a constitutional crisis, and they did not work to enforce discipline among reservists, in the service of security. Instead, they attempted to leverage the mutiny to advance their political agenda, and they weaponized intelligence, as well as their institutional authority, to pressure the prime minister.

And yet, these same chiefs who warned the prime minister of the looming catastrophe mysteriously took no steps to prepare for a Hamas invasion they allegedly saw coming—which was why the surprise attack caught Israel off guard. These officials were so confident that no danger from Gaza was imminent that, even after the signs of an impending invasion were accumulating during the night between Oct. 6 and 7, they dismissed them and left the soldiers in the perimeter sound asleep to be slaughtered in their beds by Hamas.

The security chiefs’ mutiny against civil authority persisted until 6:29 a.m. on Oct. 7, as they did not inform the minister of defense or the prime minister of what was happening throughout the night. We now know from the little we can glimpse of their considerations that they seemed to have been more worried about “miscalculation”—a euphemism for their fear that their hawkish boss would overreact to intelligence and start a war—than they were about an impending Hamas attack.

As for Brig. Gen. Saar’s warning, which is the cornerstone of the piece’s theory about how Netanyahu ignored professional intelligence, the story seems to be very different from what the Times would have its readers believe. As Saar himself complained to Channel 11 in January 2025, far from trying to impress the prime minister with the seriousness of his report, his bosses in the IDF ignored it, including Halevi. The story about Halevi desperately trying to draw Netanyahu’s attention to the report seems to be a complete fabrication, possibly originating with Halevi himself.

In fact, the two chiefs specifically mentioned in the piece as urgently trying to jolt Netanyahu out of his alleged complacency—Halevi and Bar—have spent their long months in office after the disaster trying to cover their tracks and spinning yarn designed to exonerate themselves. The state comptroller accused Halevi of intimidating officers under his command so they wouldn’t cooperate with the investigation into the failures that led to Oct. 7, by forcing them to be chaperoned by members of his staff and secretly—not to mention illegally—recording their interviews with the comptroller’s office.

Halevi and Bar had their offices produce inquiry reports to shift the blame onto Netanyahu. The Shin Bet report was transparently dishonest. According to what was released to the press, it claims that Shin Bet saw the previous round of violence in May 2021, Operation Guardian of the Walls, as a success for Hamas—and, consequently, has been warning of a possible attack ever since. But this claim is belied by the testimony of the then-head of Shin Bet, Nadav Argaman, who, on video, boasted to the press in real time that Guardian of the Walls was a brilliant success for Israel, which resulted in a changed, chastened Hamas. A source in the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee told me that in the two years preceding the war, both Shin Bet and IDF intelligence insisted that Hamas was deterred. The source added that not a single report was presented to the committee during this period that warned about the possibility of a Hamas plan of attack.

The bogus Shin Bet report is further contradicted by Ronen Bar’s assessment of the situation in Gaza a mere week before Oct. 7, as reported by Israel’s Channel 12 News:

The renewal of understandings between Israel and Hamas regarding security calm in return for relaxation of restrictions will allow the preservation of stability in the long run. Hamas is continuing Sinwar’s strategy—advancing the organization’s goals without being drawn into fighting. [Israel should] strive for a framework that will include considerable dividends in return for calm.

We now know that IDF intelligence had the full Hamas plan of attack and that the intelligence brass dismissed it as “fantasy.” The women at the scouting centers watching the border up close, some of whom were slaughtered or taken hostage on Oct. 7, likewise warned of Hamas training in plain sight at the border fence. The confidence of the security chiefs in their mistaken assessment never wavered. They overruled this evidence, too.

It’s fitting that Kingsley, Bergman, and Odenheimer, who wrote this piece of propaganda masquerading as “investigative journalism,” are the recipients of a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Gaza war. Their prize is all too reminiscent of the one awarded to the Times team that parroted the intelligence services’ baseless Russiagate allegations against the U.S. president.

This story originally appeared in Tablet magazine, at tabletmag.com, and is reprinted with permission.