Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid went public yesterday with revelations about the narrow political actions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the afternoon of October 7, 2023, and Netanyahu’s refusal before October 7 to heed the intelligence warnings. Lapid told the Times of Israel that the attack never would have happened had a normal prime minister had been in office, and that Netanyahu should have resigned.
First, Lapid also made the immediate point that Netanyahu must now make a deal to free the hostages. “For eight months, you didn’t think the Philadelphi Corridor is the most important thing. All of a sudden, this is the only thing that matters. I’m not saying that the Philadelphi Corridor is not important. It is important. [But] it is way more important to finalize the hostage deal. And this [hostage deal] is also the only path towards the regional coalition that is essential” to dealing with Iran. (The Philadelphi Corridor separates the length of south Gaza from Egypt’s Sinai.)
Lapid claimed that Netanyahu “should have resigned on October 8. If I was the prime minister on October 7, I wouldn’t be the prime minister on October 8. That’s the responsible thing to do. That’s the human thing to do.” When asked what should have happened, he explained: “I assume that if he had resigned, we would have had a unity government within two days.” Then he related: “On October 7, I had a meeting with him at 4:30 in the afternoon and I said to him: ‘Listen, get rid of the lunatics. Let’s create a new cabinet.’ I told him, ‘You won’t be able to handle this with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich [in your government]; let’s have a unity government.” Settler radicals Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich are respectively Netanyahu’s National Security Minister and Finance Minister.
But Netanyahu refused. “He said, You can join—with them. And I said, No, there will be no way of managing this” with those two in the government. “That’s where it ended. At 6:30 the same day, October 7, I had a press conference and I said we have to have a unity government; they have to go, because they are part of what brought us here and because we won’t be able to manage a war with them.”
Further, he explained some of what Netanyahu knew, and had ignored, before Oct. 7. Lapid recalled that well before Oct. 7, he had warned that something big was coming. “And I did this not because I had a sudden vision, but because I was at the Prime Minister’s Office for the security briefing, and Netanyahu was there. So he heard the same things I heard, from [the prime minister’s military secretary Avi] General Gil. And then I read the intelligence materials that he saw.”
This led Lapid to give a press conference on Sept. 20 [Sept. 24-25, 2023] to issue his warning to the Israeli public. The Times of Israel reviewed what Lapid had declared at that time: “Ahead of Yom Kippur, I am compelled to warn the citizens of Israel: We are drawing close to a multi-front confrontation. According to the security establishment, the number of alerts in Judea and Samaria [Zionist term for West Bank] is unprecedented. And the recent events at the Gaza border are precisely of the kind that in the past have led to rounds of fighting.” Times of Israel added: “He went on to charge that Ben-Gvir and Smotrich were repeatedly ignoring the recommendations of the defense establishment to act in a careful and responsible manner, including as regards to policies relating to Palestinian security prisoners, and accused Netanyahu of having lost control of his ministers.”
Returning to yesterday’s published interview, Lapid emphasized: “I’m telling you, it was out there—all the signs, all the red flags, all the warnings—and he ignored them all. This is why it wouldn’t have happened on our shift—and this is why he shouldn’t have been prime minister since October 8.”
