I agreed with almost every word of Shany Mor’s essay, which was characteristically insightful and enlightening. Nevertheless, I think it suffered from a fatal flaw, because it is pointless to blame certain policies for contributing to a disaster unless you can convincingly argue that better policies were available. On most of the issues he addresses, better policies were both self-evident and readily available. But on one of the four issues, though better policies were available in theory, I’m not convinced they were available in practice.

The third and fourth issues he discusses, both of which relate to the international community’s handling of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, fall into the self-evident category, so I won’t waste words on them. On the second issue, ideology, he and I have a fundamental disagreement, since I believe the settlement movement generally does serve Israel’s interests. (I explained one reason why in Mosaic in 2022, but there are others.) Nevertheless, I agree with him that many settler leaders focus single-mindedly on expanding settlements at the expense of all other issues, even when those issues deserve to be higher priorities. That isn’t a major problem when settlers are merely one of many single-issue interest groups trying to influence the government. But it becomes a problem when they are dominant players in the government yet still behaving like single-issue activists, which has frequently been the case with this government (the same is true of the Haredim). Like Mor, I think this has been to the country’s detriment, including by helping to divert attention from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank prior to last October.

To be clear, the main reason for the security services’ focus on the West Bank was an upsurge in terrorism there that began long before this government took power, coupled with the virtual consensus in these agencies that Hamas was mainly interested in improving Gaza’s economy rather than attacking Israel (talks on increasing the number of Gazans working in Israel had been going on for months), that the organization couldn’t pose a serious threat in any case, and that the Gazan border was adequately protected by physical and technological barriers. Consequently, I think settler ideology—or more accurately, some officials’ single-minded focus on this ideology, to the exclusion of all else—played much less of a role than Mor ascribes to it. Nevertheless, stunts like Zvi Sukkot’s sukkah and many more serious incidents certainly didn’t help.

It is in his analysis of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that I think Mor’s argument breaks down. I’m no fan of Netanyahu; I refused to vote for him in either of the last two elections. And I think Mor is right about Netanyahu’s (usually warranted) skepticism, right about his (not always warranted) habit of deferral, and right about his (frequently unwarranted) emphasis on messaging. All those traits undoubtedly contributed to the government’s Gaza policy. But Mor fails to explain what better policies Netanyahu could have adopted. And I’m unconvinced that there were any.

I can’t imagine Mor thinks Netanyahu should have adopted the Israeli left’s solution of trying to negotiate a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority; as he himself explained later in the article, not only has the PA consistently rejected every Israeli offer, but the international community’s consistent practice of rewarding its rejectionism means it never has any incentive to say yes. Nor can I imagine he would advocate the left’s idea of lifting the blockade on Gaza; as he himself noted, it is largely thanks to this blockade that Hamas’s arsenal is nowhere near as lethal as Hizballah’s.

Perhaps, since he mentioned it as one of the things Netanyahu didn’t try, he thinks Israel should have sought to appease the Palestinians by withdrawing from more territory in the West Bank? Given that Israel’s north and south are now both deserted wastelands because its withdrawals from Gaza and Lebanon enabled terrorist organizations to engage in massive arms buildups there, that the second intifada was possible because Israel’s withdrawal from parts of the West Bank under the Oslo Accords enabled terrorist organizations to do the same there, and that West Bank terrorism has never approached that level again precisely because the army returned to those areas, it’s hard to believe he considers that a serious proposal, either; it would merely have turned the West Bank into a more lethal front than it currently is.

Or perhaps, since he mentioned this as well, he thinks Netanyahu should have fostered reconciliation between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to “restore something like a legitimate government to Gaza”? Given that Hamas would have remained the dominant military force in Gaza under any such arrangement, leaving the PA unable to stop its military buildup and attacks on Israel even if it wanted to, it’s hard to see how that would have improved the situation. It would merely have replicated the situation in Lebanon, which he himself considers untenable—one in which the recognized government gives Hizballah free rein but is nevertheless protected and showered with aid by the international community.

But perhaps Mor would argue that Netanyahu should have taken more forceful military action against Hamas sooner? I’m all in favor of that; I’ve been advocating it ever since the first rockets flew following Israel’s unilateral pullout in 2005. The problem is that absent a provocation as massive as Hamas’s massacre in southern Israel last October 7, neither the international community nor the Israeli public would have stood for it.

Regarding the international community, only one country actually matters, but that one is critical. The United States is Israel’s main arms supplier, and without a steady supply of American weapons and munitions, no major operation like the one Israel has conducted in Gaza for the last year would be possible. That Israel has let itself be so dependent on American arms is itself an indictment of Netanyahu and many of his predecessors (an issue Mor doesn’t mention). But the fact remains that America’s airlift of weapons has continued almost unabated for a year only because the provocation of October 7 was so massive that, on some level, President Joe Biden considered Israel’s response justified, at least enough to resist pressure from within his party for an arms cutoff. And even so, American support has been fraying for months; it would have evaporated far sooner had Israel attempted a similar military response to a lesser provocation.

Even more importantly, however, the Israeli public wouldn’t have accepted a major military operation in Gaza prior to October 7. No politician likes adopting unpopular policies, but the truly insurmountable obstacle is that Israel’s army is based largely on reservists, and reservists vote with their feet. If they don’t believe a war is justified, they simply won’t show up. That means a major military operation is literally impossible without broad public support, as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon discovered during the second intifada. Following Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank in 2002, he wanted to launch a similar operation in Gaza to clean out nests of terrorists there. But he quickly backed down due to massive public opposition, including among reservists. Since the intifada’s lethal toll was caused mainly by West Bank terrorists, most Israelis saw no justification for risking a major operation in Gaza.

That same reluctance existed throughout the years between 2005 and October 7, 2023. Mandatory conscription and an extensive reliance on the reserves make Israelis risk-averse, because most have relatives or friends who serve. And any major operation produces casualties; according to Israel Defense Forces data, as of October 7, 2024, 347 soldiers had been killed and 2,299 wounded since the ground operation in Gaza began, the vast majority of them in Gaza. Consequently, even though Gaza had been causing Israel nonstop pain during those years, most Israelis considered the pain level too low to justify casualties on that scale. Only on October 7 did the pain become high enough for Israelis to support a major operation.

Incidentally, this also helps explain the cash that Israel allowed Qatar to funnel to Gaza. Like Mor, I consider the policy idiotic. And yet, the fact remains that Netanyahu was under enormous pressure from the international community to do something about Gaza’s self-inflicted (and largely nonexistent) “humanitarian crisis.” He didn’t want to lift the blockade for precisely the reason Mor noted; he couldn’t launch a military operation to oust Hamas; and nobody except Qatar was willing to throw money at Gaza while Hamas remained in control, understanding that any investment would simply be destroyed the next time Hamas provoked Israel to military action. In that situation, despite my loathing for the policy, I’m not sure what the better alternative was in practice, though in theory it would clearly have been better to starve Hamas of cash and let Gaza suffer the full consequences of its misrule.

More broadly, as neither a peace deal nor a major military operation was feasible, and as Hamas had no interest in any solution except Israel’s annihilation, deferral may well have been the best option available to Netanyahu on Gaza, even if better ones existed in theory. And that thesis is supported by the fact that during Netanyahu’s eighteen months out of power from June 2021 to December 2022, a government comprised almost entirely of parties that opposed him adopted virtually identical policies on Gaza. Indeed, as I argued in Mosaic back in 2015, deferral is the only tenable option when no others are truly feasible, which is the case with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in general. In that situation, a country can only do its best to survive and thrive while waiting for something to change that might make a solution possible.

The problem is that deferral only works if you take the precautions necessary to survive and thrive—and this, not the deferral itself, is where I think Netanyahu does deserve blame. One of the most noteworthy facts about October 7 is that even a relatively small number of armed security personnel often made a vast difference in the of number people Hamas managed to kill or kidnap; that is why some locales in southern Israel suffered much higher losses than others. The problem is that the IDF didn’t have even that minimal number of troops on the border, preferring to rely on high-tech gadgetry. And even many of the troops it did have were, shockingly, unarmed. (Female spotters weren’t issued guns, while kibbutz security squads were issued guns but forced to keep them in a locked arsenal that most couldn’t reach on October 7.)

Granted, local force allocation is usually left to the army’s discretion, and the army certainly bears much of the blame for this failure. But Netanyahu was prime minister, and he knew there was a monster on the other side of the Gazan border; indeed, he knew it better than most of the IDF brass, who are generally far more optimistic about Palestinian intentions than the ever-skeptical Netanyahu. Recall, for instance, that before October 7 the consensus opinion in the IDF was that Hamas was genuinely interested in improving Gaza’s economy rather than fighting Israel.

Consequently, it was the prime minister’s job to insist that high-tech gadgetry isn’t a substitute for boots on the ground, and his job to insist that enough soldiers be kept on the Gazan border to cope with any unexpected attack. Had he done so, Mor would never have written his essay, because October 7 would likely have been just another terror attack in a century-long string, the prelude to just another brief, inconclusive round of fighting in Gaza.