When Israeli army chief Herzl Halevi participated in a security cabinet meeting this past January, he was attacked by ministers allied with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his plan to open an internal probe into the army’s failures prior to, and during, the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas massacre. Odd as it may seem that government ministers chose to attack the nation’s top general in the midst of Israel’s biggest war in five decades, the incident was part and parcel of Netanyahu’s campaign to direct the blame for the debacle, as well as the subsequent failures in the management of the war, squarely on the security establishment, while avoiding taking personal responsibility that would cost him his job.
In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, senior Israeli security officials took turns offering mea culpas for their roles in failing to anticipate the assault. The director of the Shin Bet domestic security agency, Ronen Bar, announced that “as the one who heads the organization, the responsibility for this is mine.” Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzl Halevi acknowledged the military’s failures and, more recently, reiterated the responsibility he bears as the IDF commander during the war. On Oct. 17, the head of IDF intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, said he bore “full responsibility for the failure,” announcing his resignation six months later. In March, the head of the Intelligence Military Research Department, Brig. Gen. Amit Saar, declared his intention to eventually quit over his role, doing so the following month, after he was diagnosed with cancer.
In contrast to the repentant security and intelligence officials, Netanyahu has remained largely silent about his own role in the failures that led to Oct. 7. Only seven months later, when pressed in an interview with American television personality Dr. Phil McGraw, did Netanyahu vaguely acknowledge his responsibility, saying “I hold myself and everyone [accountable] on this,” but adding, “what was the intelligence failure?” — implying that the intelligence community bears the real culpability for Oct. 7. Yet for months now, officials from the military and special services have tried to push back against such scapegoating. In January, war cabinet member Lt. Gen. (ret.) Gadi Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff, reflected the view of the security community when he stated that Netanyahu “bears a sharp and clear responsibility” for the bloodiest terrorist attack in Israel’s history, which occurred under his watch.
Netanyahu’s campaign to pin the blame on the intelligence community is manifested in the outright hostility displayed toward the IDF and Shin Bet leadership by his right-wing cabinet members, his political loyalists in the media, and his elder son, Yair, who has long acted as an unofficial advisor to his father. Since Oct. 7, Yair Netanyahu has shared and “liked” social media posts highly critical of the security establishment, even going so far as to suggest that Lt. Gen. Halevi was trying to orchestrate a military coup.
Civil-military strains over Gaza war strategy and the “day after”
Tensions between Netanyahu and the security chiefs have not been confined to the question of who is responsible for failing to prevent the Hamas assault. While significant media attention has focused on the rift between the Netanyahu government and the Biden administration over Gaza war strategy, Netanyahu has also sparred with his own country’s military and intelligence leadership over the execution of the war. The security establishment has been deeply troubled by what it sees as Netanyahu’s indecisiveness on key aspects of the war, from a ground operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah to reaching a deal that would secure the release of the Israeli hostages. His vacillation, they believe, jeopardizes the war’s achievements, is causing strategic damage, and unnecessarily risks lives. Eisenkot, the former IDF chief, sent a letter in February to members of the cabinet warning them that the failure to make operational decisions was making it increasingly difficult to achieve the goals of the war.
Hampering clear decisions and further straining Netanyahu’s relations with the military and intelligence heads has been the prime minister’s practice of preventing them from meeting with his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, to discuss the hostage rescue efforts as well as military operations. Gallant, for his part, has confronted Netanyahu on this matter, telling him that by barring such meetings, the prime minister is harming national security. More recently, when Shin Bet Chief Ronen Bar mentioned he had held a meeting with Gallant, Netanyahu reprimanded Bar, telling him that “as far as I remember, the Shin Bet and the Mossad are subordinate to the prime minister.”
On May 15, Gallant publicly confronted Netanyahu in a televised address, in which he criticized Netanyahu’s “dangerous” indecision and demanded that he publicly rule out Israeli military or civil rule over Gaza — the future envisioned by Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners. Netanyahu’s political allies subsequently attacked the defense minister in a Likud party faction meeting. Three days later, fellow war cabinet member Benny Gantz, a former IDF chief of staff, gave his own news conference in front of the cameras, wherein he threatened to leave the government unless Netanyahu agrees to a plan that would address the return of the hostages and put in place a civilian administration that would rule over Gaza instead of Hamas. Netanyahu swiftly renounced both declarations. Responding to Gallant, he said he was “not ready to replace Hamastan with Fatahstan,” alluding to oft-cited proposals to hand the governance of the Gaza Strip over to the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority. Moreover, he accused Gantz of “issuing an ultimatum to the prime minister instead of … to Hamas.”
The frustrations voiced by the ex-generals in Netanyahu’s war cabinet match the sentiment in the security establishment. Since last December, the requests made by the heads of the Mossad, Shin Bet, and IDF to hold discussions on post-war arrangements have been rejected by Netanyahu. The security chiefs have reportedly formulated their own plan, which would replace Hamas rule with Palestinian clans that would temporarily administer Gaza; but Netanyahu has time and again refused to hold substantive deliberations over a post-war Gaza strategy. In security consultations with Netanyahu just days before Gallant’s declaration, Halevi, the IDF chief, decried the absence of a “day after” strategy, which, he argued, was harming the Israeli military’s war efforts. The IDF, he said, was operating in places from which it had already evacuated given Hamas’ reentry into these areas. Days later, when the IDF spokesperson was asked about the Israeli forces needing to return to areas previously cleared of Hamas, he responded candidly: “There is no doubt that a governmental alternative to Hamas will create pressure on Hamas, but that is a question for the political echelon.”
A long history of tensions between Netanyahu and the security establishment
Despite Netanyahu’s self-cultivated image as “Mr. Security” — an aura that has been shattered in the wake of Oct. 7 — the Israeli security establishment has long considered Netanyahu to be a security liability. To the military and intelligence community, he is a serial bungler; a man of words, not deeds; and, in recent years, a corrupt leader under indictment who is beholden to far-right extremists on whom he depends for his political survival. Long before the current Gaza war, Israel’s top generals and spymasters had routinely clashed with Netanyahu on key issues, from his handling of the Iranian nuclear program to his status quo orientation and lack of initiative toward the Palestinians, rejecting his purported ability to “manage the conflict” with them.
Netanyahu’s rift with the Israeli security establishment can be traced to his first term as prime minister in the 1990s. Viewing the top army brass as leftists who were too willing to make territorial concessions to the Palestinians, he distanced the generals from the Oslo peace process and routinely dismissed their counsel and that of the intelligence chiefs. In what began as a pattern that has lasted to this day, he fought with his then-defense minister, Yitzhak Mordechai, who, along with the outgoing IDF chief, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, challenged their former boss in his 1999 reelection campaign. Netanyahu lost his reelection to Ehud Barak, another former IDF chief, who had been Netanyahu’s commander in the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit.
That humiliating defeat led Netanyahu to see the generals as his fiercest rivals. To ward off future political challenges from popular army chiefs, most of whom enter politics upon retirement as a way to continue their public service, Netanyahu’s allies pushed through the passage of the so-called “Halutz law” in 2007. Named after the then-IDF chief, Dan Halutz, the law extended the cooling-off period for senior security officials entering politics from six months to three years.
Although the Halutz law has prevented retired top generals from joining the political fray at the height of their popularity, it has not stopped them from challenging Netanyahu’s leadership. In the past five elections, no fewer than five former army chiefs — three of whom ran together in an unprecedented joint ticket in three of these elections — entered politics with the goal of sending Netanyahu into retirement. Israel’s longest-serving prime minister has had an antagonistic relationship with every living IDF chief and nearly every Shin Bet and Mossad head with whom he has worked. Likewise, he has had a falling out with nearly all of his defense ministers.
Last year, the national security community was instrumental in the suspension of the government’s judicial overhaul, which would have weakened the Supreme Court. IDF reservists played a key role in the mass pro-democracy demonstrations, leading Defense Minister Gallant to publicly call for a halt to the contentious legislation in March 2023. Four months later, Netanyahu refused to meet IDF Chief of Staff Halevi, despite the latter’s concerns about the military’s operational readiness if Israel continued with the judicial overhaul. The IDF has now revealed that, during the spring and summer of 2023, the Military Intelligence Directorate sent four letters to Netanyahu warning him that Israel’s enemies, including Hamas, were looking to exploit the social upheaval caused, in part, by the government’s judicial overhaul agenda.
The struggle for Israel’s future
Today, as Israel seeks to crush Hamas and return its captives from Gaza, Gallant and his fellow ex-generals in the war cabinet, along with the army leadership and heads of the intelligence services, are determined to prevent Netanyahu from embarking on “the path of the zealots.” Beyond the Gaza war, it is a struggle for Israel’s future. Binding the community of active and retired security officials together is their conviction that Netanyahu is prioritizing his political survival above all else. In so doing, he has allowed the far-right religious parties, which he needs to stay in power, to dictate policy. Their agenda — Jewish supremacy, a weakened judiciary, the application of sovereignty to the West Bank (i.e., annexation), and resettling the Gaza Strip — strongly conflicts with the secular Zionist vision of a democratic, pluralistic Jewish state. Although not monolithic, the Israeli national security community by and large supports robust democratic institutions, such as independent courts, and a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. While it is premature to predict what a post-Netanyahu Israel will look like, the security community is eager to arrive at this era sooner rather than later.
Guy Ziv is an associate professor of international relations in the Department of Foreign Policy and Global Security at American University’s School of International Service and the associate director of the Meltzer Schwartzberg Center for Israel Studies. His latest book is Netanyahu vs The Generals: The Battle for Israel’s Future.
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