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How responsible is Netanyahu for Oct 7th? - with Amit Segal (Inside Call Me Back sneak peek)
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- [00:04]
A
You are listening to an art media podcast. How much responsibility, Monica asks, does Netanyahu bear for the October 7 war?
- [00:14]
B
More than 50% for three different reasons. One, he was the prime minister when it happened. Second, he had been the prime minister for almost 13 years prior to the attack. So he, he actually had shaped the Israeli policy that led to October 7th. And the third thing, in my opinion is there is no point in having an elected office if this office doesn't bear any responsibility for the most dramatic event in Israel's history. So Netanyahu bears the lion's share of responsibility. There is no doubt about it.
- [01:01]
A
It's 6pm on Saturday, December 20 here in New York City. Shavuotov it is 1am on Sunday, December 21 in Israel, where Israelis are beginning a new week. According to reports, Prime Minister Netanyahu is planning to brief President Trump on possible Israeli plans for new strikes on Iran when they meet in the US on December 29. This comes amid concern that Iran is rebuilding and even expanding its ballistic missile program in the wake of the Israel Iran war that took place in June of this year. As a reminder, during that war, Iranian ballistic missiles impacted multiple sites across Israel, resulting in a number of casualties and severe infrastructural damage. Meanwhile, over the course of this weekend, a meeting took place in Miami between US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, the Qatari Prime Minister, Egypt's Chief of Intelligence, and the Turkish Foreign Minister to, according to reports, pressure Israel and Hamas to officially agree to the second phase of Trump's Gaza peace plan. All parties expressed their support for the so called Board of Peace, which President Trump plans on leading. But a source told the Times of Israel that the meeting yielded little progress. On Wednesday, we learned that former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's smartphone was hacked by an Iranian linked group. The hackers published hundreds of chat messages and a 141 page contact list that included several world leaders. Bennett, who's campaigning against Netanyahu for future leadership of Israel's government, responded by saying, quote, israel's enemies do everything to prevent me from becoming Prime Minister again. It won't help them. Close quote now into today's episode. This week I sat down with ARC Media contributor Amit Segal for our weekly episode of Inside Call Me Back where we delved into some thought provoking questions from listeners. The questions prompted an interesting conversation, so we decided to share a sneak peek of Inside Call Me Back with the larger CallMeBack audience. If you enjoy this type of conversation or if you simply want to support our work. Please consider joining us on Inside Call Me Back by following the link in the show notes or going to arcmedia.org here's my conversation with Amit. Welcome to the inside edition of the Call Me Back podcast where we pull back the curtain and have the conversations we typically have after the cameras stop rolling. Thank you to our insiders for subscribing to Inside Call Me Back and supporting the callmeback show and everything we do here at ARK Media. Special welcome to our new subscribers, I think some of whom are beneficiaries of Hanukkah gifts from family, friends and colleagues. So thank you for that, too. Today, in the hot seat taking your questions is ARK Media's Amit Sehgal. Amit, you look surprisingly well rested, Amit, because you now have four children.
- [03:58]
B
Thanks for the compliment, but number four is economies of scale. Exactly. So, I mean, I mean, you know, with the first child, we woke up, both of us together, together for every cry at the middle of the night. And then we thought, there is no point. We should actually have a. How do you call it in war when you have to calculate how much ammunition have you have left? War economy or ammunition economy. So call me when he's three months old.
- [04:25]
A
All right, I want to tell you something. All right. All I will say to you is hang on to these moments because today my oldest baby turned 18 and we were totally fine with it and very excited for it. And it's a lot of buildup and excitement and, you know, very festive in the house and festive with his friends and the family. Everything was going great. Everyone was in good spirits. And then my wife this morning walked into the kitchen looking horrified. And I said, what's the matter? And she said, I woke up to all these notifications from different accounts that Eli has telling me I no longer have access to the account. Like all his different accounts because he was under 18. So the parent gets access to the accounts and the day you turn 18, you're officially an adult and it pushes the parent out of all these accounts. We didn't know that this would happen. And she's like that sense of just losing control, you know what I mean? That it's all probably innocuous, but it's just, it was so unsettling. And I was just like, there's got. We need to change the rules. It's gotta be like, she has access to the accounts until he's like 40. All right. I mean, I got a bunch of questions for you that's come in. I will Just start rattling them off. The first one is Bill from Minneapolis writes, I remember reporting about the migration of large numbers of Gazans to other countries like Somaliland and Albania. Whatever happened with that?
- [05:47]
B
Okay, so here's the question. What happened for a plan orchestrated by President Trump, the strongest man on earth, and Prime Minister Netanyahu, the one who runs the show in Israel, how come that almost one year after this summit in Washington, I think the number of immigrants over the last 11 months is something like 10,000.
- [06:09]
A
Gazans, emigrants, people emigrating, leaving immigrants.
- [06:13]
B
Yes. One thing is the Israeli bureaucracy, in order to make Gazans live, there are something like 25 government bureaus having to talk to each other via landlines. And of course, the attorney general that thinks it might be against international law. This is one thing, and I have to say Prime Minister Netanyahu is very good at moving things diplomatically, but not that good in moving things domestically. And this is more of a domestic issue bureaucratically. Exactly.
- [06:46]
A
And you're saying he has a history of that, that he's never been great about moving the bureaucracy. Right.
- [06:50]
B
I think even after 37 years in the public service, he's still a private sector sort of person and he never got adjusted to it. If you have 35 seconds to watch a YouTube clip, you should watch a video clip for 2012 in which Prime Minister Netanyahu desperately, while he has the flu, desperately asking the cabinet secretary to lock the door, but no one finds the keys. So there is noise and wind coming and Netanyahu, pissed off, tells him, I told you to have the keys. Everything in this country is bureaucracy and processes. So I'll send the link at the end of the episode. It's a must watch. The second thing which is more important is the fact that there hasn't been a single country interested in the Gazans, not a single country. A very, very senior American US Official who spoke to me told me that the worst op ed ever printed in the US about Israel was written by the Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Danone, to the Wall Street Journal offering the US to take some 20,000 Gazan refugees. And he said, no, you don't understand Americans. I think the same app for each and every Western country and each and every Muslim country. The Gazans are the pariah semi state of the Arab world. No one wants them. So now Netanyahu and Trump are talking about sending workforce from Gaza to Indonesia, but it's not in the scale that everyone talked about only a year ago.
- [08:26]
A
But wasn't this entirely predictable? I mean, which country did anybody think would be lining up to take Gazan refugees?
- [08:34]
B
So the idea was that almost everything is better than living in Gaza. By the way, if you watch the news, I don't know if anyone in the US Is interested anymore in Gaza after the war, but the footage is. It's very sad indeed. There was a very cold week in Israel, of course, in Israeli terms, something like 49 degrees Fahrenheit. But in Gaza, it's very unpleasant, to say the least, when you live in tents who are actually dragged half a mile from where you went to sleep. So the idea was that everything is better than Gaza lying in ruins. I guess many, many Gazans would prefer to live at least temporarily.
- [09:14]
A
But again, who would have thought. I just don't understand this. Who would have thought people would be lining up to take Gazans? Absent, I guess, U.S. government pressure. If the U.S. government had put huge pressure on certain countries, maybe it would have happened like during the Afghan withdrawal in the summer of 2021, where there was this mad rush of getting Afghan citizens out of Afghanistan. When the US Pulled out, the US Put pressure on certain countries to take them. Now, it wasn't on the numbers that we're talking about here, but still, it just seems like absent pressure, no one was going to line up for it.
- [09:43]
B
I guess President Trump wanted something really, really big and impressive. And once all he got was 100,000 people emigrating to Indonesia and 50,000 more emigrating to Somaliland, he understood that it no longer works. I'll give you just one example. There was a secret debate between the US And Eritrea that in exchange for recognizing something, they would take 400 Gazans. Now, Americans thought it's 400,000 in Eritrea, they meant 401 plane, give or take.
- [10:16]
A
Okay, next question is from Mark, from it looks like Charleston, but doesn't say where it looks. Probably Charleston, South Carolina. Anyways, Mark asks Dan, in a recent episode, you said that Israel must launch a real commission of inquiry like it did after the Yom Kippur War. But the government is clearly going in a different direction. I'm curious what Amit thinks about your position, Dan. So do you think the commission of inquiry should look like the commission of inquiry after the 2006 Lebanon war, after the Yom Kippur war in 73, why is the government going in a different direction and what's your reaction?
- [10:50]
B
So there is this old Greek phrase saying, you can't swim in the same river twice. The river changed the Supreme Court changed the country changed the Supreme Court in 1973 and 1974 was a neutral branch of the government of the state. And it enjoyed support from both sides of the aisle in the Parliament. And this is not the case today. So if the Chief Justice, Yitzhak Hamid nominates the members of the State Commission, it won't enjoy a lot of support from the right wing. And on the other way, if Netanyahu selects the members, the center left would justifully say, I can trust this committee. What Netanyahu really wants to earn is time. Because each and every commission, even a commission that Netanyahu is going to select, like what Olmert did following the Second Lebanon War, would say that Netanyahu was in charge. He was in charge for 16 bloody years. And that's why he is responsible for what happened. There are maybe more people who were in charge, of course, the Shin Bet, the idf, et cetera, et cetera. But Netanyahu is the one to bear the not the full responsibility, but the lion's share of responsibility. And that's why what Netanyahu really wants to earn is time. Because if we are now two years after October 7th, and then it's going to take another year to actually decide which commission is to actually investigate, and then it's going to take at least four or five years. So once the conclusions are to be published, Netanyahu will be in retirement and we will be in retirement and our grandchildren will be in retirement. It will no longer be valid for Netanyahu's career.
- [12:34]
A
But the way you're speaking, Amit, it's almost like even the Commission of inquiry is subjected to the gamification or the gamesmanship of pop politics. And it just feels to me that some things should just be above politics and political implications. And I may be being naive, but.
- [12:49]
B
No, you're not naive. You're not naive at all.
- [12:51]
A
Leave Netanyahu out of this just for a moment. There are layers and layers and layers beneath him. Also that Israelis need to understand. What the hell happened? How was this intelligence that was clearly identified by certain low level officials? Why didn't it move up the food chain? And the intelligence community? I just think it makes Israelis less safe to not know what they missed.
- [13:13]
B
I couldn't agree more. But I think that the commission of inquiry in Israel is the least, and no matter, by the way, which method you decide on is the least efficient way to actually dive in the details. Like you mentioned, I mean, the expectation by Israelis is to say you're in charge, you're fired, you are not in charge, you can stick to your job. This is what Israelis really want. And that's why if we want the real conclusions to emerge from all those secret papers and testimonies, etcetera, we are going to be quite disappointed. I'll give you one example. Following Yom Kippur war, there was a state commission of inquiry, right. Following a failure that happened on a Jewish holiday began in the south in a full surprise as a result of a failure of the Prime Minister, the Defense Minister and the idf. Right. So they gave a few recommendations that were implemented in the IDF, in the government, etc. However, it didn't help to prevent 2023 massacre. How come? So it didn't help. So you might say, okay, it happened 50 years before. No, but it was the very specific things that they actually talked about. They talked, for instance, about the intelligence thinking as a whole, okay? A guided thinking, okay. That everyone thinks the same. So they recommended there will be another body that always depicts the opposite picture for the Defense Minister and the Prime Minister to rethink their position. Right, right.
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A
Like someone to Red Team it to challenge the conventional wisdom.
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B
Exactly. In ibu, it's called IBR Mistaba. The other way around, Tim, did it help? No, because no one listened to them. Because when you are the Defense Minister or the head of the Shin Bet and you have the Red Team coming to you and saying, no, Hamas does want to attack, so you say, okay, but they are the Red Team, okay? You have it in your mind, you expect it to happen. So this is just one example. What I'm trying to say is that the combination, the toxic cocktail of overusage of law and legal procedures on one hand, and the Israeli confusion between manhunt and structural recommendations created, in my opinion, the collapse of these commissions.
- [15:36]
A
But the problem is, Amit, there's no what many think of as the commission of inquiry. What I think of is that its value is that it's independent. There are no sacred cows. There are no political actors that are protected or military actors, whatever. And so it's truly independent. If you're saying that it won't work now because nobody is fully independent and everyone is sort of politicized, then what is the way to do it? You say there's it's not the way to do it. So what is the way to do it?
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B
Okay, so one option is for the Chief justice, who is very politicized and portrayed as a center left figure, to actually delegate his authority to his deputy Chief Justice, Noram Solberg. He's a conservative religious settler, by the way. Very respected judge. For him to nominate the members. This is one option. The second is that the president is to elect the members. There are many, many options. But I think time.
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A
Are any of those in the mix as an option?
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B
It was discussed in the president's residence. And another thing, which is crucial because time works against us in this respect. So these commissions must say, we are not going to send anyone home because everyone went home already, save Netanyahu. We can't actually force the public not to elect Netanyahu again as a prime minister. So we are not going to focus on blaming specific public figures in responsibility for the failure. We are going to try and implement recommendations that would prevent it from happening again. By doing it, you cut something like a year and a half of the need to send letters of warning to different specific figures and then waiting for the lawyers to react, et cetera, et cetera.
- [17:20]
A
But, Amit, this whole thing, the way you're laying it out and the way Netanyahu's approaching it, at a minimum, even if they can get the right configuration, right. Or that's acceptable to all the parties, it's a dramatic delay in the process, which you basically say Netanyahu's rooting for.
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B
It's a feature, not a bug.
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A
Okay. The feature, fine. It's intended to delay. Right. As time passes, as more and more officials have less and less proximity to the events and what led up to the events, the value of their testimonials, no matter where they stood, whether they are in the shrinks, you know.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Whether they're on the bottom of the bureaucracy and in the intelligence community, or whether they're senior officials in the prime minister's office, their value, their memory, their insights just starts to wither. That is, to me, irresponsible to allow all these people who have firsthand knowledge of what happened and how Israel got here to just kind of fade. That's invaluable information. That's just going to, like, drift for what?
- [18:18]
B
I couldn't agree more. You're absolutely right. It's very sad. And I hope we're not going to omit it in the next war.
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A
All right, well, so your prediction is, at least in the traditional sense, how Israel's done in the past. It's not going to happen. There's not going to be a commission.
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B
Of inquiry like that unless Netanyahu loses the election and then the opposition wins the prime minister's office and form a commission. Yeah. But who knows?
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A
Yeah, okay, we will keep going here. By the way, some of the officials who could be in the coalition government, in a post Netanyahu government also would possibly be implicated. Naftali Bennett, Yair Golan, I mean, Lieberman. Yeah, okay, well, Lieberman, actually, interestingly, not to digress, but he was like, 2016, 2017, wasn't he warning of Hamas launching some kind of October. He didn't know it would be October 7th or what exactly it looked like, but something like an October 7th war.
- [19:11]
B
And then he became a senior cabinet member and did nothing. And when asked about why didn't he do anything? I mean, Netanyahu was the leader of opposition back then. You could have done whatever you wanted. So he said, no, my partners were too leftist to do anything.
- [19:27]
A
So this is when he was in the Bennett government.
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B
Yes, but. And then I told him, yes, but when you were Netanyahu's defense minister, you shouted out loud that Hamas is getting stronger, but you didn't do the same when Bennett was a prime minister. So he said, I was busy dealing with the fire. Treasury Ministry.
- [19:48]
A
Okay, well, the next question relates to this question, which is Monica, not only from New York City, but Monica specifies that she's from the Upper west side of Manhattan. How much responsibility, Monica asks, does Netanyahu bear for the October 7th war? Now, I know this is a question you answer all the time in Hebrew on Channel 12, but I don't think our English listeners have heard you talk about. Netanyahu's responsibility for happened on October 7.
- [20:12]
B
More than 50% for three different reasons or accumulative reasons. One, he was the prime minister when it happened. He was in the room where it happened. Second, he was the prime minister. He had been the prime minister for almost consecutively, 13 years prior to the attack. So he actually had shaped the Israeli policy that led to October 7th. And the policy said, we are going to deal with the head of the octopus, which is Iran. So the arms of the octopus are just annoying, but it's not an existential threat. And the third thing, in my opinion, is that there is no point. I mean, from a structural perspective, there is no point in having an elected office if this office doesn't bear any responsibility for the most dramatic event in Israel's history. So Netanyahu bears the lion's share of responsibility. There is no doubt about it, the idea of the Shin Betanyahu's predecessors, many other people bear responsibility too, but Netanyahu, first and foremost was the man in charge.
- [21:23]
A
Okay, last question for you. Esther from Toronto asks, and this is for. She says it's for Amit. Why Are leaks so prominent in Israeli media? And how does one know that they're not getting played? From the leaks. So why are leaks the coin of the realm? They work very well for Amit.
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B
Right? A lot of info.
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A
I don't want to have you, you know, get rid of your. The source of your drug addiction, since.
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B
We are between friends. So there are two reasons for it. First of all, I'm not sure this is the phenomenon in the United States, but in Israel, if you are a senior, not even a senior journalist, you have each and every phone number of each and every politician. I mean, you text them, you get answers. They are mailed to you via WhatsApp. Only last night, the Naftali Bennett phone was hacked and conversations were leaked. If you read Hebrew, you can see that. I mean, at least one third of them belongs to, you know, to text message exchanges with journalists.
- [22:23]
A
And can you actually read the actual conversations or just know that they occurred?
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B
No, no, you can read it. To be honest, curiosity is one of my virtues. I mean, I felt so unpleasant to read it because, I mean, it's someone's personal life and it's illegal, by the way, so I skipped it. But. But from what I'm hearing, it's very interesting. This is one thing. And the second thing is that Israel is a very small country. And that's why if I am a journalist and I cover the Wall, for instance, I have many, many friends in reservists, in various places, in the army who know a lot. I got amazing footage from Gaza way before the IDF spokesperson, because people just texted me, I'll tell you something, when you reach the age of 40, all of a sudden your friends are no longer those secretaries and interns, etc. They can be CEOs. And all of a sudden your friends are very important people. And they text you and they tell you things. So it's almost unstoppable, okay, so it will continue.
- [23:30]
A
It really doesn't matter who's in power.
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B
I think it's going to be even more severe. Netanyahu, for instance, doesn't have a cell phone, right? He kept to have only landlines with those outdated 1995 sort of stuff phones, because they cannot be hacked. He once showed me, he told me, this is plastic. You can't hack it. I mean, you can't wiretap it, you can do nothing with it. Now Netanyahu has a cell phone. It's a smartphone, I think it's an iPhone. But he never texts. He just make a WhatsApp phone call.
- [24:03]
A
Got it. All right, Amit, we will leave it there. Thank you for this as always.
- [24:08]
B
Thank you so much.
- [24:09]
A
I look forward to seeing you soon and hopefully you get some sleep.
- [24:11]
B
Ah, no worries about it.
- [24:22]
A
That's it for the sneak peek. In the rest of the episode, Amit and I dove into Israel's upcoming elections, how European recognition of a Palestinian state affected the Gaza ceasefire deal, and whether the US sale of F35 jets to Saudi Arabia disrupts Israel's military qualitative edge in the Middle East. Also, what, if anything, could Israel have done to better execute the Gaza war? If you're interested in these topics, join us on Inside. Call me back by following the link in the show notes or go to ark media.org.