Netanyahu is the post-Oct. 7 war’s victor, not its scapegoat
His critics are determined to cast the prime minister as the villain of the war. But only his steadfast focus on denying victory to Hamas forced it to surrender to Trump’s demands.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Oct 9, 2025
Barring any last-minute reversals, the post-Oct. 7 war is finally about to come to an end. President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for ending the war in the Gaza Strip has been agreed to by both Israel and Hamas. That means that the remaining Israeli hostages should be coming home within days. Israel will pull back its forces to positions inside Gaza; however, the last remnants of the terrorist forces will still be isolated and in a position to be, as Trump says, “obliterated” should they not surrender their arms and give up their control of the enclave, as the plan demands.
This makes Trump the hero of the hour as he garners praise from even some of his most determined foes for achieving what everyone hopes will turn out to be peace. Yet accolades for the other person who made this outcome possible—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—are largely missing from the reactions to the news.
There are many reasons for this. Outside of Israel, it is mostly because Netanyahu is seen as a surrogate for Israel, a country whose actions and existence are the focus of a tsunami of biased coverage and ideological opposition largely rooted in antisemitism.
Slighting the prime minister
Inside Israel, he is, much like Trump in the United States, the focus of a relentless partisan campaign of defamation and delegitimization by his political opponents. They are sick of his long tenure in office and their inability to defeat him by democratic means. As a result, they are willing to blame him for everything that goes wrong in and for their country, including those things for which he does bear some or all of the responsibility, in addition to much that is not his fault.
In the long run, history will be the judge of both men, even if, at this moment, it’s hard to imagine any discussion of their merits not determined by the political positions and prejudices of those speaking. Though he is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and has been a major figure in Israeli politics for more than three decades before Oct. 7, it’s likely that Netanyahu’s place in history will largely be defined by the war that followed the tragic events of that dark day.
As such, before the debate about his role in the events of the last two years is obscured by the justified attention given to Trump or becomes merely a cudgel with which his foes can batter him in the lead-up to the next Israeli election, it’s important to lay out some clear facts about his conduct of the war and how it ended.
It’s crucial to restate that what will follow the release of the hostages and celebration of the end of the fighting will be a test of wills, with much of the outcome of this process resting on Trump’s resolve to insist that Hamas observe its terms of the deal. Regardless of the success of the next phases of Trump’s plan, the effort to depict Netanyahu as having failed is still completely wrong. Dealt a terrible blow on Oct. 7, his leadership was crucial to Israel’s recovery in the war and to eventually deal devastating blows not only against Hamas, but its Iranian backers and their Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.
Nevertheless, the trauma and wounds inflicted on Israel during two years of war will take many years to heal, if, indeed, they ever do.
Still, the war’s end leaves Israel in an incomparably stronger regional strategic position than it was on Oct. 6, 2023. It also leaves its enemies far weaker than anyone could have imagined either before the massacre or immediately afterward. And the person who is largely responsible for that is Netanyahu, albeit with the help of his American ally.
The blame for Oct. 7
It’s true that since Oct. 7 happened on his watch, Netanyahu deserves a share of the blame for the disaster. He had bought into the conceptzia that Hamas could not and would not ever attempt anything on the scale of what they pulled off on Oct. 7. He thought that allowing Qatar to send cash to Hamas in Gaza and allowing Palestinian Arabs to work in Israel would maintain the status quo with the terrorists. And he trusted the assurances of the country’s military and intelligence establishment that something like Oct. 7 was impossible.
He was wrong about that. Then again, so were his political opponents, almost none of whom advocated a change in policy toward Hamas and Gaza before Oct. 7. Though some of the blame for the disaster belongs to him, the lion’s share of it must be placed on the “experts” whose job it was to know better. The claims that he was warned of what would happen and failed to act fall flat when realizing that, like any political leader, he had no choice but to believe the generals and intelligence chiefs who were sure it couldn’t happen on their watch.
The test for any political leader placed in the sort of position that Netanyahu was in on Oct. 7 can’t rely on why he didn’t foresee what few, if any others, predicted, but on his reaction to the fiasco and the ability to turn the tables on multiple enemies. And on that score, Netanyahu succeeded far more than even his most ardent admirers could have imagined.
In the weeks and months after Oct. 7, he rallied the country to fight back and to begin the arduous task of dismantling Hamas—a task made incredibly difficult because of the way they had used billions in international aid to Gaza to create a massive, underground tunnel fortress the size of the New York City subway system.
Only Netanyahu could have done it
A weaker or less resolute leader would have faltered and long given in to the tidal wave of international criticism aimed at Israel’s counterattack. It’s inconceivable that any of the possible opposition alternatives to Netanyahu as premier—Naftali Bennett, Benny Gantz or Yair Lapid—would have had the backbone and sheer stubbornness to resist the demands of the Biden administration to halt the war before Hamas’s military formations were defeated and while it was still in control of much of Gaza.
Biden slow-walked arms deliveries and second-guessed Israeli efforts as he shifted from an initial position of support for the war to one largely determined by his desire to appease pro-Hamas elements of his Democratic Party as he sought re-election.
Would anyone but Netanyahu have had the patience and the thick skin to withstand the enormous pressure exerted against him not only from Biden but also from some of the families of hostages and his domestic political opponents, who wanted him to agree to a deal that would have granted victory to Hamas?
Instead, he hung on and waited for the right moment to successfully strike back at the other fronts banging on Israel’s door. Jerusalem launched a brilliant attack, exploding the beepers and pagers of thousands of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon in the fall of 2024—one that will go down in history. Israeli strikes methodically took out the senior leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah in moves reminiscent of the country’s past vaunted military prowess. And then, after Trump returned to the White House, he also ordered a decisive series of strikes in June against Iran’s nuclear program that culminated when—building on and dependent on earlier Israeli efforts—the United States delivered the coup de grace to Tehran’s ambitions to achieve a weapon.
When necessary, he engaged in hostage release and temporary ceasefire deals that were forced upon him by first Biden and then Trump. But he never deviated from pushing toward achieving what long appeared to be two mutually exclusive war goals: the release of all the hostages, and the decisive defeat and elimination of Hamas.
The Trump deal is far from perfect in that it forces Israel to release more terrorists with blood on their hands; gives immunity to the rulers of Qatar, who finance Islamist terror (and to whom Netanyahu was forced to offer a humiliating apology); and could well be reversed if the Americans don’t insist on the terms being fulfilled to the letter. Still, Netanyahu’s willingness to keep pushing for a resolution that involved both freeing all of the hostages, coupled with the demilitarization of Gaza and surrender of Hamas, which his opponents and even some of his friends said was impossible, amazed a world watching, analyzing and commenting on every move he made.
The idea that this could have all been achieved a year or more earlier and that Netanyahu prolonged the war to retain power is simply false. The current terms were not on offer before Trump’s embrace of them. If he refused to accept a hostage deal that would have let Hamas stay in place, it was not to appease right-wing coalition allies but because that would have contradicted his principles and what most Israelis wanted. The distinction between opinions about Netanyahu and the country’s war goals was blurred in the coverage of the war and the maelstrom of Israeli politics. But by ignoring personal attacks—in which some people seemed to speak and act as if he, rather than the Hamas terrorist organization, was responsible for the kidnappings and long-term holding of the hostages—the prime minister was able to eventually free the majority of them while not allowing the Islamist criminals to profit from their crimes.
Nor should we accept the narrative that Netanyahu’s effort to reform Israel’s out-of-control and far too powerful judiciary after he won a decisive victory in the November 2022 Knesset election was one of the reasons why Hamas attacked in the first place. It’s true that the divisions over that policy seemed to tear Israel apart in the first nine months of 2023. The responsibility for that belongs more to an opposition that sought to handicap Israel’s efforts to defend itself just to maintain their undemocratic grip on power via a juristocracy—while claiming to be defending the democracy they were actually undermining—than it does to the prime minister.
As we now know, Hamas had been planning Oct. 7 for years and would have eventually launched such an attack, no matter who was sitting in Jerusalem at the time or whether Israelis were arguing about judicial reform or anything else.
The information war
It’s also true that Israel has suffered great damage to its international reputation during the war and has lost a great deal of support in the international community, even in the United States. This is also blamed on Netanyahu. However, any Israeli leader would have been treated the same, including his political opponents.
The growing belief around the world that Israel was committing war crimes or even “genocide” was the result of the international press mimicking Hamas propaganda and not any failure on the part of the prime minister. The global surge of antisemitism wasn’t the result of Jerusalem’s mistakes but a function of the normalization of Jew-hatred enabled by the successes of the left in indoctrinating a generation in toxic theories that legitimized the demonization of Jews and Israelis.
Supporters as well as critics of Israel have faulted the failures of the Netanyahu government’s information policies. His team might have done better, and only a few in the Jewish world or in the media (like JNS) were willing or prepared to fight back against the drumbeat of lying coverage and commentary that falsely labeled Israel as committing “genocide.”
The prime minister’s laser-like focus on winning the war was, in the end, far more valuable to his nation than one that would have emphasized what would have likely been a futile attempt to justify Israel’s just war to international audiences. The reaction to the events of Oct. 7, in which the Israeli victims were depicted as the bad guys and the Palestinian murderers and their supporters the victims, was the result of a shift in opinion that happened long before the massacres. Israel’s war against Islamist terrorists is one that all Western nations should support. But too many in the press and among liberal opinion leaders have come to believe the Jewish state should be judged by double standards applied to no other nation and has no right to exist or defend itself. No amount of clever social-media posts or attempts to influence journalists that were already biased against Israel would have changed that.
The verdict of history
Only time will tell whether Netanyahu will survive a post-war reckoning in which a commission will likely be convened to assign blame for the Oct. 7 disaster.
My guess is that any commission assembled by Israel’s legal and political establishment will seek to pin all of the responsibility on Netanyahu—the one person in the country so many Israeli elites already hate—rather than focus on the generals and intelligence establishment that were so terribly wrong. Yet given the fact that, despite the trauma and suffering of the past two years, it was his war strategies that have made Israel safer and stronger, observers shouldn’t be surprised if the Israeli voting public’s verdict contradicts such a judgment. If he runs in the next election, expected to be held sometime in the next year, only an utter fool or someone who hasn’t realized that Netanyahu’s policies are popular (even if he is not) should be certain that he can’t win.
Whatever the verdict from a commission or the voters, the last two years should be considered his finest hour. Prior to Oct. 7, there were reasons to believe that he had hung around too long in office and needed to make way for a fresh face. Though no person is indispensable, it was only Netanyahu’s particular combination of stubbornness, courage, political skill and strategic insight that allowed the Jewish state to achieve a result that freed the hostages and decisively defeated their enemies. For that, he deserves the thanks of his country, the Jewish people and Western nations, which have just as much to gain from the defeat of the Islamists of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran as the Israelis.
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