In “The Failed Concepts That Brought Israel to October 7,” Shany Mor identifies four factors that made Hamas’s attack on Israel possible: (1) the failed concept of the status quo, (2) the settler movement’s state capture and its pernicious influence on Benjamin Netanyahu, (3) the failed concept of the peace processors, and (4) Hamas’s rule in the Gaza Strip and Hizballah’s in southern Lebanon as unprecedented experiments with “anti-sovereign governance.” The third thesis mostly rehashes ideas familiar to those who read Mor’s excellent Mosaic essay, “The Return of the Peace Processors.” I agree with everything he writes there. And the reconceptualization of Iran proxies as “anti-sovereign” statelets, allowed to exist by NGOs, Arab states, the Western establishment, and also by the peace-processor mindset, is fascinating and insightful. I will focus instead on Mor’s first two points, which I think are the analytically weakest links in his otherwise excellent piece.
Mor describes Netanyahu as skeptical of the intentions of both Israel’s foes and its ostensible friends, as a procrastinator who prefers deferral to making difficult strategic decisions, and as overly reliant on messaging at the expense policy. I will return to the issue of procrastination, which in some cases is part of a certain kind of strategic thinking, albeit one whose premises are alien both to Mor and to the settler lobby. But first, I want to begin with an aspect of this part of the piece that I found puzzling. The article’s tone is critical of Netanyahu’s skepticism and of his tendency to defer decisions, but to my mind, almost everything else in the article justifies these mental habits. Most importantly, Netanyahu predicted that both the Oslo process and the Gaza disengagement would have disastrous consequences, and they did—much as Mor himself concedes.
This raises the question of where, exactly, Netanyahu erred. What was his part in the flawed conception that led to October 7? I can discern two arguments in Mor’s article. The first is that because Netanyahu is beholden to the settlement movement, the army was too busy protecting settlers in Huwara and Homesh. As a result, it redirected manpower from the southern border and thereby left the Gaza envelope insufficiently protected. While I have heard this argument several times over the past year, it strikes me as very weak. It may be a technically correct description of how troops were deployed on that particular fateful day, but it focuses on an easily fixable logistical problem, not some massive strategic miscalculation that inevitably flowed from a failed conception of the Israeli-Arab conflict.
In the late 1980s, when Israel held under direct military occupation the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and southern Lebanon, it had to station a few thousand soldiers in each, up to around 10,000 at times of heightened tensions. The notion that the Israel of 2024—with a significantly larger conscription-eligible population and ten times the per-capita GDP that it had in the 1980s—lacks the resources to guard settlers in Huwara and the southern border simply beggars belief.
If one is looking for a conceptual failure here (other than the peace-processor delusion, aptly noted by Mor, that Hamas has no interest in staging an attack because its primary commitment is the governance of the Gaza Strip), one might instead point to the paradoxical situation that Israel’s population—including its conscription-eligible non-haredi Jewish population—grew over the past 30 years, yet the army kept shrinking. But this failure is hardly attributable to Netanyahu; it was the result of a broad consensus in the security establishment that the era of major wars has passed, and that in order to neutralize the threat from Iranian proxies, the IDF would have to transform into a “small and smart army.”
Mor’s second criticism of Netanyahu is the frequently repeated trope of the “Qatari cash,” which the prime minster used to bribe Hamas into periods of relative quiet. This criticism is correct so far as it goes. Here, Netanyahu indeed went along with the konseptzia, allowing Hamas to take what many of his critics mockingly called “protection money.” But the question is whether he had a choice, given that, when he returned to the premiership in 2009, Hamas was already in power in the Strip. Mor insinuates that since Netanyahu has always been unenthusiastic about Palestinian Authority rule in the Gaza Strip, this situation was convenient for him. This may well be true, but it’s still worth asking whether he could have taken a fundamentally different path vis-à-vis Gaza even if he had found PA rule there desirable.
The answer is clearly “no.” There was no diplomatic way of dislodging Hamas from power in the Gaza Strip, so the only alternative was violently overthrowing it by means of a ground invasion. This was completely unrealistic before October 7; not only has Netanyahu not seriously considered it, but the idea would also have been unthinkable to his opposition. To be sure, there were some lone voices who advocated for reoccupying the Strip before October 7, ostensibly on the basis of the security threat posed by Hamas. These voices, however, came not from Netanyahu’s center-left opposition, but instead from the hard right—or, if you prefer, from the settler lobby. Before October 7, those who called for invading Gaza and overthrowing Hamas included Orit Strook from the Religious Zionism party and Moshe Feiglin from the hard-right/libertarian Zehut. If the “Qatari cash” talking point isn’t an endorsement of their position, I don’t know what to make of it.
It hardly needs saying that the diplomatic cost Israel is paying for its war with Hamas, steep as it may seem, is nothing compared to what it would have been without the casus belli of the October 7 massacre. In short: before October 7, the much-derided Qatari cash had no realistic alternative. Unsurprisingly, the 2021–2022 “change government,” headed by Naftali Bennett and then Yair Lapid, didn’t make any meaningful change to Netanyahu’s decade-old Gaza policy, either.
Mor also criticizes Netanyahu’s policies in the West Bank. He provides an overview of the settler lobby and claims that it has been carrying out state capture, but as far as I can follow Mor here, he only makes two points that are relevant to evaluating Netanyahu’s security policies. The first one is that the settlements are bad for security in the West Bank, thus Netanyahu’s dependence on the settler lobby harms the security of Israelis from terrorism that originates from the West Bank. Mor relies on a case study to demonstrate this point: Jenin, he argues, was remarkably quiet between 2005 and 2020, but it again became a hotbed of terrorism when the settlers began to stream back to the area. In Mor’s view, this case suggests that in the short to medium term, the best model of Israeli engagement with the Palestinians is the “Jenin model”: military occupation without civilian settlements.
I would be cautious about drawing far-ranging conclusions from a single case study. More importantly, it’s unsurprising that there are fewer attacks against Israelis in areas where there are fewer Israelis; one is hardly compelled to draw from this the lesson Mor does. After all, if the kibbutzim of the Gaza envelope had been uninhabited, the October 7 massacre wouldn’t have taken place in them either; it would have taken place further to the north.
Either way, even if Mor were technically right, and the Jenin model were superior from a security perspective both to the maintenance of civilian settlements and to unilateral disengagement, Netanyahu’s reluctance to implement it more widely wouldn’t necessarily be proof of his lack of strategic thinking. There is reason to doubt that the Jenin model can be implemented at scale. When there is no civilian presence in a large area, pressure always begins to build up to remove the army as well. Much of this pressure comes from the U.S., which sees any Israeli concession as a reason to demand further concessions; thus the evacuation of any settlement will likely increase appetite for demanding the army’s withdrawal.
The reason for this is the same “peace-processor” mindset that Mor aptly criticizes: the U.S. sees the Israel-Palestinian conflict as having only one possible, pre-determined, final outcome (the two-state solution), and sees no reason to punish the Palestinians for sabotaging this outcome. Civilian settlements force the army to be present in places where otherwise it might not be, and those of us who consider army presence a must in the foreseeable future see that as the lesser of two evils.
I have one more comment on Mor’s piece. While he skillfully detects the flawed thinking of various actors, he himself also exemplifies a certain way of thinking that is very common among two-state advocates, and which, in my view, causes him to mistake genuine strategy on Netanyahu’s part for mere procrastination. I will quote this passage because its rhetoric so typifies this Weltanschauung. After Mor points out that Netanyahu has been reluctant both to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority or to pull out of the West Bank, he asks rhetorically:
But what then is the alternative? To wait for a more moderate Palestinian leadership willing to affirm Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state? A collapse of the Hashemite regime in Jordan and an entirely different Palestinian interlocutor? A generational shift toward moderation in the Palestinian public pushed along by pro-American Gulf monarchies making separate peace deals with Israel? A future war? A change in international norms? A wave of Jewish immigration that upends the demographic balance?
There is a hidden assumption underlying these rhetorical questions, which perhaps strikes Mor as so obvious as not to need stating: that the status quo in the West Bank is, as it’s often put, “unsustainable,” and therefore there must be some rational end game that is preferable, even if it justifies the ongoing maintenance of the status quo in the short term. Mor himself doesn’t use the word “unsustainable,” but the idea has to be read into the text in order to yield the conclusion that Netanyahu’s opposition to withdrawing from the West Bank is irrational.
We need to be very precise here. The claim that a certain status quo is “unsustainable” borders on triviality unless we add that there is some other state which, once reached, will be sustainable. We can call the faith that there is such a state “end-of-history-ism.” Most critics of Netanyahu, both from the left and from the right, assume some version of end-of-history-ism. Left-wing critics assume that the history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict will end when there are two states peacefully living side-by-side. Incidentally, Netanyahu’s right-wing critics, who envision annexation, a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation, or population transfer, also exhibit end-of-history thinking. But here I will focus on critics to his left.
Someone with Netanyahu’s skeptical predisposition to the Palestinians, the peace processors, and the international community, and also with his secularism, will naturally be unsympathetic to end-of-history-ism. This means that what look like deferral, hesitancy, and publicity stunts to Mor may just be the symptom of a fundamental disagreement about the proper view of history. Netanyahu, a staunch opponent of end-of-history-ism, probably doesn’t believe that history has an arc. He doesn’t believe that human societies naturally converge toward certain kinds of arrangements, and that those arrangements are inherently more stable than those they replace. Human history is just one war after another, one system of alliances after another, one economic crisis after another; history is, usually, long-term chaos with intermittent grace periods of quiet and stability.
Rhetorical questions of the kind that Mor asks about the status quo—“and then what?”; “what’s the end game?”; “can we forever occupy another people?”—have bite only if the proposed alternative (be it a two-state solution, annexation, or unilateral withdrawal) doesn’t lend itself to the exact same questions. Two-statists rarely ask themselves questions like, “can we forever avoid war with an independent Palestinian state?”, and “For how long will that state remain demilitarized?”, even though there is nothing self-evident about the answers to these questions. Israel was at war with Egypt until it wasn’t, but it was also at peace with Iran until it wasn’t.
Opponents of end-of-history-ism don’t see a peace treaty or unilateral separation from the Palestinians as inherently any more stable or sustainable than the status quo. And here, too, Netanyahu has a point. After all, the supposedly unsustainable status quo has held in the West Bank for 30 years (or 57, if we count the pre-Oslo and the post-Oslo periods together), while in the Gaza Strip, the paradigm of unilateral separation collapsed after eighteen.
Netanyahu, Mor argues, rejects all proposed solutions, and his modus operandi is similar to that of someone who parked in the no-parking zone, periodically checking to see if he got a ticket. The comparison is witty, but the behavior Mor derides isn’t inherently irrational. After all, sometimes there really is no parking, but you still need to leave the car somewhere. When every available cure has catastrophic side effects, many people find it reasonable to prefer chronic illness. In light of his astute critique of the peace processors, the international community, and the nature of Palestinian national aspirations, I’m surprised that Mor isn’t one of them.
More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Gaza War 2023, Israeli Security