On Thursday, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the startling suggestion that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might have knowingly allowed the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas in order to shore up his own political power. Speculation along this line, of course, is not new, but it was remarkable to hear it from a distinguished world leader like Clinton, who made the allegation on Morning Joe. 

Clinton cited what she called “a bombshell” report this week from the Israeli paper Haaretz alleging that Netanyahu had been warned of the impending attack by Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed (popularly known as MBZ), the president of the United Arab Emirates and a key Israeli ally in the Middle East who had himself been tipped off by a trusted and well-connected back-channel diplomat. (Netanyahu called the Haaretz report a lie and vowed to sue the newspaper.) Clinton offered this analysis of the Haaretz report: “Either [Netanyahu] didn’t believe it or he—it’s horrible to say—he wanted to see what they could plan so that then he could come down hard, and it would enhance his position.”

Netanyahu is the single figure most responsible for the Gaza genocide, so it is difficult to be unfair to him. But in this case, Clinton’s accusation went much farther than the evidence warrants. The actual claims of the Haaretz report are damaging enough, especially if it is read in conjunction with earlier reporting in The New York Times about the warnings Israel received about the impending attack and the role the Netanyahu government played in propping up Hamas’s rule in Gaza. 

These reports add up to a picture of imperial arrogance. For decades, Israel has kept Gaza as a giant open-air prison. This condition only intensified after Israel nominally disengaged from Gaza in 2005, while in truth keeping the territory under a ferocious siege. Hamas, founded in 1988 as a militant organization, was cynically nurtured from its early days by the Israeli state as part of a divide-and-rule strategy to keep Palestinian factions warring among themselves. 

From the Israeli perspective, which included but was by no means limited to Netanyahu, Hamas was a useful if nasty subcontractor. Particularly after Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007, it could serve Israel by doing the dirty work of governing Gaza while being contained by the Jewish state through periodic bombing campaigns and assassinations (euphemistically known as “mowing the lawn”).

Based on the Haaretz article, Netanyahu’s true crime was not ignoring the warning signs of the October 7 attack but rather his delusion that the status quo in Gaza could be maintained indefinitely. Netanyahu was confident that Hamas in Gaza (and indeed all Palestinian aspirations for self-rule) could be managed. Haaretz quotes him as saying, “In Gaza, we are in the picture, we are in control. Our problem is with the West Bank, and that’s where we are also diverting forces.”

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This led Netanyahu to ignore important overtures made by Hamas both before and after October 7 to reach a political settlement. 

In the Haaretz article, former CIA director William J. Burns offers an astute analysis:

The basic problem was that Hamas was looking for a “permanent end to the conflict,” as they called it…. Netanyahu was only willing to consider a “first phase” deal, but claimed he had to constantly reserve the option “to continue destroying Hamas later,” as he defined it. And that, for us, was always the challenge: How do we square this circle and manage to bring everyone back?

In other words, the core problem was that Netanyahu is fundamentally unwilling to negotiate a two-state solution. Nor is he alone in this. In the upcoming Israeli election, the main opposition leader, Gadi Eisenkot, also has no interest in negotiating a two-state solution in the near term. Neither do any other major contenders for Netanyahu’s job, including former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.

If that is the case, then why the focus on Netanyahu? Hillary Clinton’s harsh comments have to be seen as a part of a political whitewashing project. Clinton is a foreign policy hawk who values Israel as a US ally. She knows that the Gaza genocide has made the US-Israel alliance unpopular, so she is trying to channel anger at one bad man. The goal is to suggest that once Netanyahu is out of the way, the alliance can return to normal. As Clinton said on Morning Joe, “I love Israel and I hate Netanyahu’s government.”

But the problems of Israel go beyond one bad prime minister or one bad government. Since 1996, Netanyahu has been in power off and on for 19 years, making him Israel’s longest-serving leader. More to the point, his major policy objective of thwarting a Palestinian state is a near-consensus position in the Israeli polity. This week, the new documentary Naza, by the Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, premiered at the Venice Film Festival to wide acclaim. Reviewing Naza in Vulture, Bilge Ebiri notes that it documents that Israeli soldiers knew they were committing war crimes:

The term “NAZA” refers to the number of civilians that might be killed as collateral damage in a strike on a specific target. So, for example, 4 NAZA would mean four other people killed—women, children, elderly, the term doesn’t differentiate. Over the course of the film, we’ll hear of 15 NAZA, 20 NAZA, 200 NAZA. One officer recalls blowing up a building with 500 people in it to go after one target. They admit to knowingly wiping out entire neighborhoods, fully aware of the catastrophic human toll. These were not outliers, or accidents, or isolated incidents. The murders were, again, part of a system. “Do you think it’s a genocide?” Abraham asks one of his subjects. “Yes, absolutely,” is the response….

Interviewees describe hacking little girls’ phones to see when their fathers came home and then bombing their houses, listening while the people on the line screamed and pleaded for help, while mothers cried over their burning daughters. “I’d hear the final moments of a person’s life,” one man reflects. 

As against Hillary Clinton’s desire to scapegoat Netanyahu, works like Naza force us to confront the uncomfortable fact that the Gaza genocide had wide support in Israel. Any positive future has to offer more than the removal of Netanyahu from power. At a minimum, the ICC war crimes trial needs to be held. Politically, the best way to end the current killings is to isolate Israel with a sanctions program similar to the one used against apartheid South Africa. As vile as Netanyahu is, the crimes under his watch are too grave to be the work of just one man.