Ahead of Israel’s election, media stories have proliferated claiming that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been warned ahead of time about the Oct 7 attacks. But are they actually true?
The stories lack quotes from anyone actually going on the record. Instead, there are anonymous references to “people familiar with the matter" in the Wall Street Journal, a vague term that could mean virtually anything, and references to assorted anonymous government officials. The WSJ and Atlantic stories do not feature even a single anonymous quote describing the details of an actual warning. Instead, there are quotes from ‘experts’ responding to the story itself.
This is the hallmark of an artificial media narrative rather than an actual expose based on facts.
The slop feed of stories began with a since-disproven story about a UAE warning by Haaretz: a far-left paper whose publisher has falsely accused Israel of apartheid and whose former editor had told former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Israel was a “failed state" and urged her to “rape" Israel.
A story about the supposed warning at the Wall Street Journal was actually co-written by Anat Peled: a Haaretz writer whose previous contributions included “Resign or Resist Netanyahu’s Judicial Coup" and “The Man Who Helped Bring Down Serbia’s Dictator Has Some Lessons for Israel." The agenda is not hard to spot nor are the Haaretz fingerprints.
The New York Times published its own article ‘corroborating’ the supposed UAE warning co-written by Ronen Bergman, also formerly of Haaretz, citing as its source, “a person who said they had spoken with Sheikh Mohammed and another person who said they had been briefed by someone on the call between the two leaders". We’re beyond hearsay at this point.
More importantly the less credible stories about a UAE warning and the more credible stories about an Egyptian warning depend on retroactively misrepresenting the context before Oct 7.
There had been repeated clashes between Israel and Islamic terrorists in Gaza over the years. The Egyptians and some other Arab Muslim countries that Israel had limited relations with would regularly warn of an explosion unless a temporary ceasefire was reached. The Egyptians would then typically claim that they had offered warnings that could have averted the violence. Such warnings would often be phrased in grandiose Middle Eastern “Mother of all Battles" rhetoric where everything is an “explosion" and leads to endless “blood" and “devastation".
The Egyptians had offered similar warnings about the dangers of escalation in 2008 and 2014. According to The Atlantic article, the message of an Egyptian spy boss visiting Israel was: “If you don’t change course, Gaza is going to blow up in your faces." This would be more impressive if the Egyptians hadn’t been issuing that same generic warning for two decades.
Much has been made in the media of the visit by Abbas Kamel, the head of Egyptian intelligence, to Israel before Oct 7. The majority of the warning stories rest on the simple fact of the visit itself. According to The Atlantic, “officials from seven different countries I spoke with said that Kamel’s visit should have set off alarms across the top ranks of the Israeli government" and that “‘the messenger was the message,’ a former Israeli official told me."
But The Atlantic leaves out the fact that this was hardly the first such visit.
For example, Kamel had visited Israel in 2018 to address the Gaza border clashes and push his government’s plan for Israeli concessions in exchange for reduced violence by Hamas. Another such visit was planned but canceled later that year. Kamel visited Israel twice in 2021 to discuss violence at the time and the return of the Israeli hostages then being held in Gaza.
He canceled a planned visit in 2022 and an Israeli figure instead met him in Egypt.
Kamel’s visit wasn’t the shocking change of pace that media stories portray it as, but the latest in a series of visits to discuss Gaza that had been going on for years. The media doesn’t actually deny that, but it uses narrative tricks to make the 2023 trips by Kamel seem startling.
The Atlantic opens its narrative with language worthy of a suspense thriller. “a chartered Cessna jet linked to Egypt’s intelligence service had touched down at Ben Gurion Airport, about 30 miles away. The jet rolled to a stop in an isolated section of the airport used for sensitive diplomatic and security missions. Abbas Kamel, Egypt’s intelligence chief and one of the region’s most influential security officials, had come to Israel on a most sensitive mission."
(The magazine’s past editors might have flagged the use of “sensitive" in two sentences in a row, but the current ones don’t seem to have a copy of a good thesaurus.)
Reading that, you wouldn’t think that Kamel had been routinely making these visits for years.
Media stories play up the refusal by Israel to confirm Kamel’s visit, but considering Israel’s complicated relationship with Egypt, which is still an enemy, these are routinely kept secret.
The warning stories exclude the context of what was behind all of these Egyptian visits.
In 2018 and 2019, Hamas staged border protests to test Israel’s security. These border clashes were misrepresented as civilian protests against Israel. An Egyptian delegation met with Hamas and Israeli government officials to negotiate Israeli concessions in exchange for an end to the riots. The riots resumed in 2021-2022 along with military clashes and the Egyptian negotiations.
In September 2023, border clashes seriously picked up in part to pressure Israel into allowing sizable infusions of cash from Qatar into Gaza, and the Egyptians once again got involved. The Egyptians began pressuring Israel to make concessions to Hamas in order to avoid a conflict.
The Egyptians would later tell the media and members of Congress that they had ‘warned’ Israel, but what they were actually doing was warning Israel to make concessions or there would be more clashes: they were certainly not warning about an Oct 7 level invasion.
As The Atlantic article, written by Vivian Salama, an Egyptian journalist, admits, the visit by Egypt’s intelligence boss to Israel “didn’t provide Israeli officials with a date or specific information on what turned out to be a multipronged attack on Israel less than two weeks later, on October 7. And it’s not clear exactly with whom he met" and all the Egyptian official did was recommend “that the Israeli government grant Hamas economic concessions to avert conflict."
Does that jibe with a warning that Hamas was preparing to launch a full invasion of Israel?
Reports about this warning first appeared days after Oct 7 when Rep. Michael McCaul claimed that “Egypt has warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen." But Rep. McCaul was repeating what the Egyptians had told him. Left unsaid was the vagueness, “an event like this". Warnings about imminent clashes were commonplace in the conflict.
As evidence of its claim that “the Israeli government was repeatedly told of threatening activity by Hamas in the lead-up to October 7", The Atlantic cites “a United Nations envoy who was in the Middle East at the time" and had “publicly warned of a latent conflict that could bring ‘grave consequences’ while privately scrambling to defuse tensions between Israel and Hamas."
The ‘warning’ by UN envoy Tor Wennesland was on Twitter. It wasn’t some inside information, but a generic statement about the need to avoid conflict. This is vastly different from an actual warning about Oct 7. The difference is much the same as warning about the dangers of war between Russia and Germany or America and Japan, and warning about the threat of an Operation Barbarossa or Pearl Harbor. One is a general warning about conflict, while the other warns about a specific threat manifesting in a previously unexpected way.
Media accounts of the ‘warnings’ that Prime Minister Netanyahu was supposed to have received repeatedly conflate the former with the latter. There is no actual evidence that any of these warnings conveyed anything like the threat of an Oct 7. If anything, they helped lead to Oct 7.
Israeli governments, including that of Prime Minister Netanyahu, had been assured by the Egyptians and others that the best way to avoid a conflict was by making concessions to Hamas. Now some of those same players are pretending that they had warned about Oct 7.
What made Oct 7 so shocking wasn’t that Hamas attacked Israel. Everyone knew that would happen at some point. What made it so devastating was the scale and ambition of that attack. Everyone had been expecting rocket attacks and a few terrorists infiltrating from Gaza. No one had been expecting thousands of terrorists and a plan to push onward into Israeli cities.
None of the ‘warning’ stories actually claim that such a specific warning was ever issued. They rely on vague claims of a big explosion or attack in a region where everyone talks that way. “Mother of all Battles" discourse is commonplace in the Middle East and not a substitute for specific intelligence. The media has revived the Egypt story, now three years old, and paired it with a highly dubious UAE story, in order to help a leftist coalition win in Israel’s election.
This coalition would almost certainly ally with an Arab Muslim Brotherhood coalition to maintain its majority in Israel’s Knesset. The Muslim Brotherhood is the parent organization of Hamas.
Electing Hamas out of outrage over a Hamas attack would appear to be quite backwards.
Israelis have every right to be angry that their government failed to anticipate the Oct 7 attack and to respond to it rapidly, much as Americans had every right to be angry about Pearl Harbor and the Tet Offensive, but the anti-Netanyahu coalition’s leaders are every bit as much to blame for that failure. That’s why the ‘warning’ stories focus on claiming that Netanyahu had special knowledge and failed to act while implying, insanely, that he did it to politically profit from a disaster that he would naturally take the blame for.
Many Israelis would be happy to replace Netanyahu if not for the fact that the alternative to him continues to be the same motley crew of puppet generals and their disposable reform third parties, Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, whose previous government was responsible for coddling Hamas, and Labor leftists who loathe Israel.
Many Israelis aren’t thrilled with Netanyahu, but the members of his security conscious coalition of Mizrahi Middle Eastern Jews, Russian immigrants and Orthodox Jews living in terror zones don’t trust the Left.
And they’re right not to.
One of the reasons Hamas decided that the time was ripe for Oct 7 was that the Left decided to tear apart Israel over reforms to the unlimited authoritarian powers of the radical Supreme Court. Even now, in the middle of the biggest threat that Israel has faced in generations, the leftist coalition remains obsessed with unserious personal attacks on Netanyahu and his wife, protecting the unlimited power of its judiciary and demonizing Orthodox Jews in crude terms.
Their only solution to the war is to go back to building a state for the terrorists. Since the vast majority of Israelis have rejected this, the Left now operates as a shadow government, wielding foreign-funded NGO, media slime campaigns and fake third parties fronted by former generals.
Is it any wonder that no one outside Tel Aviv trusts it or wants to see it back in power?
Netanyahu has a record of profound successes and failures, but what successes can the anti-Netanyahus claim? The Rabin and Peres deal that created the entire ‘Palestinian’ crisis? Barak’s decision to turn over Lebanon to Hezbollah? The Sharon/Olmert expulsion of Jews from Gaza thereby paving the way for a full Hamas takeover? The Lapid-Bennett gas deal with Hezbollah?
There’s a reason that Netanyahu has been Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and it isn’t because he’s a perfect leader, but because the alternatives have been nothing but a disaster. And more seriously, they’ve refused to learn any lessons from the past and remain in the same incestuous bubble, mired in contempt for Israel and most of its electorate, to the point where, like many western leftists, they’re actively destroying the country and its reputation abroad.
The ‘warning’ stories are just the latest sign that rather than offering a vision for a safe and secure future, all they have are more smears and lies funneled through their allies abroad.
They’ve presented no evidence that Netanyahu was warned about Oct 7, but they were warned over and over again about the consequences of a deal with Arafat, and the consequences of the withdrawals from Gaza and Lebanon, and they chose to ridicule and dismiss those warnings.
There’s no need to resort to supposed secret meetings and phone calls to document any of this: it’s been a matter of public record in Israeli political discourse over the last 40 years. It would have taken special intelligence to anticipate a sophisticated attack like Oct 7: it took only common sense to understand that no deals with terrorists could or should ever be made.
Netanyahu has his share of blame in that regard, but the Israeli Left has far more of it. The Israeli Left chose to deal with Arafat, chose to give him a state, chose to arm his terrorists, chose to stop Israelis from living on land claimed by the terrorists, chose to do nothing to stop the terrorists, chose to smear their own country abroad and have not repented for any of it.
It didn’t take an Egyptian spy boss or the head of the UAE to warn them that the PLO would turn its guns right back on Israelis. Every shopkeeper in Machane Yehuda screamed it at them at the top of their lungs when Laborites would stop by to pretend to make nice with the working class.
They didn’t listen and they still refuse to listen now.