In an interview published Tuesday with New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, former prime minister Naftali Bennett said he believes Israel has failed to address the root cause of the regional threats it faces, and has become occupied with fighting Iran’s various proxies rather than tackling Tehran itself.
Employing his frequent comparison of Iran to an octopus — Tehran being the head and its proxies the tentacles — Bennett said that “the head of the octopus is much weaker, much more vulnerable and feeble, than its arms.
“So how foolish are we to engage in war with the arms when we could engage with the head?” he said.
Iran has built “an empire of rockets and terror” surrounding Israel, the former prime minister added, warning that the only way to prevent the threat of Israel’s extinction is to “topple the Iranian regime before it fully acquires a nuclear weapon.”
Further criticizing the strategy Israel has employed throughout the last 10 months of war with Hamas, Bennett told The Times that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise of “total victory” contradicts the reality on the ground as well as the prime minister’s repeated promises that he is committed to advancing a ceasefire-hostage deal.
“I see words that send one message and actions that are the contrary,” he said.
“I know there is a body count of Hamas combatants,” he said of Israel’s estimation that it had killed more than 15,000 terror operatives inside the Gaza Strip as of May. “When you count bodies, you are assuming a finite number of combatants, but you have a population of one million to draw on. They could have recruited another 10,000 in the meantime.”
Regarding Israel’s future steps in the war, Bennett said he saw two options without indicating which he believed was better: a sudden short surge of fighting against Hamas to deliver a decisive blow, or to cut a ceasefire-for-hostages deal and “fight another day.”
Hinting at a planned return to politics, Bennett said that “all the senior leadership of Israel, political and military, needs to be replaced.”
Bennett was Israel’s prime minister for one year in 2021-2022, before he resigned after his government fell apart, at which point he indicated that he would be staying away from politics for a while.
However, since the Israel-Hamas war broke out on October 7 with Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel, Netanyahu’s popularity has diminished while polls have indicated that Bennett could find success in the next elections.
During Hamas’s attack, thousands of terrorists burst across the Gaza border, murdering some 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages. In response, Israel launched a ground invasion of Gaza with the proclaimed objectives of dismantling Hamas and getting the hostages back.
Speaking to a conference on Wednesday held by the Israel Hayom newspaper, Bennett said that the government had failed on October 7, but that Israeli citizens, and particularly the generation of young adults currently serving in the military, had risen to the occasion.
“On October 7, the State of Israel failed in its basic mission — to be a safe state for the Jewish people,” Bennett said, adding, “For about a month, the state did not function properly.”
But, he said, “The heroism that was revealed on October 7 is at a level [that was] unknown to me,” calling young Israelis “a generation of lions.”
The former prime minister told the stories of several Israelis who rushed into combat on October 7 of their own initiative, and he noted that “all across the country, volunteering initiatives sprouted up, and the young generation made itself available again and again.”
Bennett noted predictions that artificial intelligence could surpass humans in various aspects within a few years. If that happens, he said, human attributes such as initiative, leadership and commitment will be critical.
“When I look at our trajectory 50 years forward, we’re going to succeed enormously,” Bennett said.
But, he added, “we need a change. Our leadership is neither good nor ethical. That’s a fact.”