The horrific October 7 ‘betrayal’ libel is now central to Likud’s official election campaign

It is now abundantly clear: Conspiracy is the central message of Likud’s campaign regarding the events of October 7, 2023.

The party is cultivating the “betrayal” theory, and despite all official denials, it repeats it time and again. The narrative has been steadily making its way from the most junior activists all the way up to Likud’s most senior politicians and back again, including the prime minister himself and his inner circle.

With no way to escape responsibility for the terrible failure that enabled Hamas to invade southern Israel, massacre 1,200 people and seize 251 hostages, the political leaders who were culpable and their acolytes are casting blame on senior figures in the military and security establishment who supposedly engineered this disaster deliberately, as horrific as that sounds. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud has prevented the establishment of a state commission of inquiry into October 7 for three years, making it far easier for people within the party’s ranks to spread the betrayal narrative.

There is no truly effective way to confront such an elusive theory; it is like fighting ghosts and phantoms. It is worth noting that, according to recent polls, close to 40% of the public buy into the possibility that there was a conspiracy behind October 7; Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies intend to win next month’s election on that very basis.

This battle will continue until polling day, acquiring fresh layers all along the way.

On Sunday, in an interview with Channel 14 – Israel’s fiercely pro-Netanyahu, right-wing television network – the prime minister once again promoted the theme of a “miscalculation” on that blackest of days, which serves as a first cousin to the conspiracy thesis.

According to Netanyahu, the heads of the military and the Shin Bet intentionally chose not to wake him in the hours before the invasion because they feared his aggressive response would lead to a broader escalation and disprove their conception that nothing was going to happen. He repeated this doctrine on Tuesday in a live Instagram broadcast, declaring, “They knew that as prime minister of Israel, I would have given an immediate order to put the entire military on alert.”

The prime minister’s wife, Sara Netanyahu, echoed the message in an interview she gave to the same friendly network on Monday: “Who is the prime minister anyway that he needs to know a war is breaking out? Why inform him?” she asked sarcastically.

In that interview, she insinuated that Yair Golan, a former IDF deputy chief of staff and now the chairman of The Democrats party, who risked his life that morning to rescue people from the site of the Nova rave massacre, had put on his uniform very early that morning because he knew in advance about Hamas’s intention to invade the Gaza border communities.

“You, a military man of such a senior rank, were already there early in the morning, dressed and ready, at a very, very early hour, when others didn’t know, such as the prime minister,” Sara Netanyahu charged.

Those remarks added fuel to the all-out war that has been waged against Golan on social media for years, including baseless claims that he was not in the area of the Nova music festival at all, or that he was there but did not rescue anyone.

On Tuesday, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi added his own contribution to the accumulating conspiracy, telling the Kan Bet radio station, “We saw Golan in an ironed uniform, and we didn’t see him in any footage helping people. I believe anything about this man. Someone who said soldiers kill babies as a hobby is capable of anything.”

Karhi was referencing a comment Golan made in 2025 about the fighting in Gaza, which he later argued was taken out of context, saying he was referring to calls by some far-right figures for greater violence against Gazans and not accusing the military of killing innocents.

Golan has also long been under fire for his past warnings of ostensible moral decay in Israeli society – most notably his famous 2016 Holocaust Remembrance Day speech likening trends in Israel to 1930s Germany.

Karhi tossed out a barrage of statements and insinuations designed to reinforce the conspiracy theory advanced by Netanyahu and his wife. “Refusal to serve was encouraged here, and that led to the massacre,” Karhi asserted, referring to the highly controversial threats made by elite IDF reservists in 2023 to halt their volunteer duty if the government’s judicial overhaul was advanced. “I have no idea what happened there. So many failures.”

Karhi hid in his safe room on October 7 – as he himself recounted – and did not take up a weapon to go out and fight Hamas terrorists from his home in Moshav Zimrat near the Gaza border. Golan did the exact opposite.

In a defamation warning letter Golan sent to Sara Netanyahu on Tuesday, he detailed how he drove south in his private car, stopped at the Home Front Command headquarters, formally drafted into the reserves, picked up equipment and an assault rifle, and drove straight to the Nova festival site, where he rescued frightened young people who were hiding there, “at genuine risk to his life.”

Golan is demanding a full apology from Sara Netanyahu for the conspiracy theory she spread at his expense, which Karhi and his colleagues are now echoing. Netanyahu has announced that she has no intention of apologizing. This confrontation will undoubtedly continue and only grow in prominence as the election approaches.

Late on Tuesday night, following the major uproar, the prime minister published a video in which he clarified that “he does not think” there was a “betrayal” on October 7 and that the claim is “complete nonsense.” Yet, in almost the same breath, Netanyahu repeated the “miscalculation” narrative that shifts the blame entirely onto others.

“There was a major failure,” Netanyahu said. “It played out in the night and on the morning before the attack, when all the signs were there, and they [the security chiefs] decided — because of a fear of a miscalculation, so as not to annoy Hamas — not to wake me up, and not to attack beforehand. That’s a failure, but it’s not betrayal. It happened, to my sorrow, at terrible cost. But it’s not betrayal, and my wife also didn’t say betrayal. That’s just nonsense.”

Yair Golan, in response, demanded that Netanyahu issue a more definitive response. “You don’t ‘think,’ Bibi?” he tweeted, bitterly echoing Netanyahu’s choice of language. “You know full well that there was no betrayal. On October 7, we went out to save lives while you froze. A real leader does not stutter in the face of a blood libel. He apologizes to the warriors and condemns the lies that came out of his own home.”

The full, appalling conspiracy theory

This conspiracy theory trickled down from the very top. Cabinet ministers I spoke with two days after the massacre described the shock that had seized Netanyahu and were already placing all the blame on the IDF and, above all, on the Shin Bet.

The grave failure of the heads of the security establishment was transformed by politicians into a deliberate failure, in a narrative intended to help Netanyahu evade responsibility and blame for the terrible disaster. One of the most vocal figures still promoting the conspiracy is Tally Gotliv, who for the time being is still a Knesset member and still in Likud.

The theory, in a few words, is this, as appalling as it sounds:

Commanders in the military and the Shin Bet, left-wingers, and anti-government activists who encouraged draft refusal wanted to bring down Netanyahu at any cost. They thus reached a secret agreement with Hamas to open the border fence for them at one or two points so the terrorists could infiltrate and seize one or two communities. This localized terrorist attack would shock the country, undermine Netanyahu’s standing as “Mr. Security,” and force him to resign or call an early election that he would surely lose.

According to this conspiracy theory, Hamas could not resist the temptation, exploited the military’s planned absence, and sent thousands of terrorists into the Gaza border communities, where they massacred anyone in their path, burned and raped, and abducted 251 people.

These spurious claims will only grow stronger as the election approaches, and especially during the month of October, when various memorial events will take place – ceremonies, visits to the graves of those who were murdered, and commemorations for the soldiers who fell during the greatest disaster in the country’s history and in the ensuing war.

Netanyahu’s feeble denials will not be able to stop this wave. In a place where polarization is so extreme and consequential, where violence is rising, sensitivities are raw, and the overarching feeling is that this is a do-or-die election over the future of the country, the next eight weeks could be especially dangerous.