From the Liveblog of
Thursday, March 7, 2024
Government repeatedly rejected proposals to kill Sinwar, former Shin Bet head says
Lazar Berman is The Times of Israel's diplomatic reporter
Former Shin Bet chief Nadav Argaman says the intelligence organization had been pushing for a surprise attack on Hamas’s top echelon for years, but Israel’s political leadership repeatedly shot the idea down.
“Sinwar lives, unfortunately, because Israel does not want to engage in military adventurism,” he says at the INSS conference in Tel Aviv. “If we had launched a surprise attack on Hamas, we would be in a completely different situation.”
He says the idea was pushed by both his predecessor and the current head of the Shin Bet.
“Yoram Cohen, the head of the Shin Bet, brought it up with me and I, as the head of the Shin Bet, brought it up more than one time and Ronen Bar also continued along this line after me,” he says.
Argaman was head of the domestic intelligence agency under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from 2016, and for several weeks under Naftali Bennett in 2021. He joins others in criticizing the government’s tacit policy of viewing Hamas as a rational adversary that Israel could live alongside uneasily rather than seeking to destroy it long ago.
“Israel decided that it will buy calm even if it came with a very high price later on,” he maintains, adding that Israel “has become addicted to calm.”
Argaman calls for the resignation of Netanyahu’s “disastrous government,” and blames it for preventing the creation of an American-led coalition of Sunni Arab countries.
Touching on ultra-Orthodox and Arab draft exemptions, he says citizenship in Israel should be conditioned on military or national service.
