On 7 October, Bibi was asleep, he says. The surreal campaign to shift the blame

It was a foregone conclusion that 7 October would be at the centre of the election campaign in Israel; it was expected to be painful; and it was surmised that it would lead Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara to spout dangerous nonsense, even though until the very last moment there was hope that they would not. During an interview, Sara Netanyahu insinuated that Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats, had arrived so early at the kibbutzim on 7 October – the day of the massacre – because he evidently knew something in advance. The Prime Minister, on the other hand, claimed that senior officers in the IDF and the Ministry of Defence had deliberately chosen not to wake him a few hours before the Hamas attack, because “they knew I would immediately have given the order to put the entire army on alert”, which would have triggered a strong reaction and prevented the invasion. Obviously, the army is in a position to demonstrate when contact with the Prime Minister’s team began.

The reaction from Gadi Eisenkot, Bibi’s main challenger in the 27 October elections, was a video showing Netanyahu asleep, accompanied by a voice repeating “Bibi, wake up”, but the years go by, tragedies occur, and the Prime Minister continues to sleep. Netanyahu’s attempt to shirk all responsibility is constant, in a situation where the army, the political establishment and the secret services are almost entirely to blame for a tragedy that could have been avoided had they not underestimated the situation. The Prime Minister, however, continues to claim that he simply did not know and had nothing to do with it. On the other hand, particularly within the IDF, there is a persistent effort to make an issue out of this that clearly cannot be purely political. Netanyahu is behaving as if he were being boycotted and ostracised; he even tried to convey this message in a video from his election campaign in which he compares himself to a bullied child, but the figures tell a different story: no one is boycotting him; the targets of this election campaign are elsewhere. The fact that he continues to treat 7 October as a matter beyond his responsibility is a sign that the Prime Minister has still not woken up.