When Hillary Clinton appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe this week, she didn’t mince words about the man leading Israel through its most painful chapter in decades. Responding to an explosive investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the former Secretary of State offered two deeply unsettling explanations for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s alleged reaction to a warning ahead of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack. “Either he didn’t believe it,” Clinton said, “or, it’s horrible to say, he wanted to see what they could plan so that he could come down hard and enhance his position.” She admitted she doesn’t know what Netanyahu was thinking, but she drew a firm bottom line: “This was a failure of leadership. This was a failure of protecting the people of Israel.” Her comments are striking not only because they come from one of America’s most experienced diplomatic voices, but also because she framed the issue in intensely human terms. “I love Israel, and I hate Netanyahu’s government and his policies,” she said, echoing a sentiment many critics of the prime minister have struggled to articulate. For Clinton, the alleged warning is not merely an intelligence failure or a policy miscalculation—it is a betrayal of trust, a moment when a leader may have failed to protect his people, either through disbelief, arrogance, or something more calculated. That distinction matters enormously to Israelis still mourning the dead, to families waiting for hostages, and to a region scarred by war. It also raises a universal question about how leaders handle warnings when the stakes are life and death, and why sometimes the most obvious signals are ignored until it is too late.
The report that triggered Clinton’s reaction comes from veteran Haaretz journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, whose book Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment delves into the failures surrounding October 7. According to their investigation, Netanyahu received a direct phone call from United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, known as MbZ, roughly ten days before Hamas’s devastating assault. The Emirati leader reportedly warned Netanyahu that Yahya Sinwar, then Hamas’s leader in Gaza, was planning a “major operation against Israel.” Bin Zayed did not speak in vague terms. The report says he expressed real fear that the coming attack would not only cause bloodshed but would also destabilize the entire region and undermine the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements that had been a centerpiece of Israeli and Emirati diplomacy. It was, by any measure, a warning that should have triggered urgent consultations, threat assessments, and preparation at every level of Israel’s security establishment. Instead, the report alleges, Netanyahu reacted calmly, did not inform senior security officials—including the heads of the Shin Bet and Mossad and the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff—and made no meaningful changes to Israel’s military posture or defense protocols. If true, the implications are staggering. Imagine the weight of knowing such a warning had been delivered and then lost in silence, while thousands of Hamas fighters were preparing to breach the border. The human mind struggles to reconcile the image of a seasoned prime minister hearing such a concrete warning and simply filing it away. But that is exactly what the investigation suggests, and it is why Clinton called the report a “bombshell.” It is also why, for many Israelis, the question is no longer merely about what happened on October 7, but about what was known before it, and who decided—deliberately or passively—to look away.
Netanyahu and his allies have pushed back hard against the allegations, dismissing the report as “a wicked fabrication” with “clear political timing.” The prime minister has said he plans to sue Haaretz over the claims and has called for an investigation—though he has resisted calls for an independent inquiry into the broader failures surrounding the attack. His defensive posture has done little to quiet his critics. In fact, it has intensified the political firestorm. Several Israeli opposition figures reacted with fury, describing an unfit leader who endangered the country. Yair Golan, head of the center-left Democrats party, accused Netanyahu of putting Israel at risk. Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief and current opposition lawmaker, said Netanyahu had ignored the warnings of a potential attack. Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister and political rival, went even further, declaring that Netanyahu bore “personal and direct responsibility” for the deaths on October 7 and therefore “cannot continue to serve in his position for even one more minute.” The backlash is not just political; it is deeply personal for a society that expects its leaders to treat every threat with absolute seriousness. Haaretz has stood by its reporting, and an Emirati source familiar with the conversation reportedly confirmed the account to The Times of Israel. Yet not everyone has accepted the story at face value. Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was in office during the attack, dismissed allegations involving him as “false” and “complete fiction,” adding a layer of ambiguity to an already murky situation. Still, the report has landed at a particularly delicate moment—just weeks before Israelis head to the polls on October 27—and it has reopened wounds that had barely begun to heal)Skip? Need check: “wounds that had barely begun to heal” okay.
The wider context of Clinton’s remarks is impossible to ignore. The October 7 attack was one of the deadliest days in Israeli history. Around 1,200 people were killed, many of them civilians in their homes and at a music festival, and 251 others were taken hostage into Gaza. The ensuing war has been catastrophic by nearly every measure. According to Gaza’s local health authorities, more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed, and the territory has been reduced to ruins, with millions displaced and facing famine-like conditions. The alleged warning from the UAE president, if true, gains enormous weight because it suggests a missed chance to prevent—or at least prepare for—an attack that changed the trajectory of the entire region. For Israelis, the question of whether Netanyahu believed the warning is almost beside the point: the outcome was the same. For Palestinians, the consequences of October 7 and the war that followed have been equally devastating, with families shattered, homes obliterated, and no clear end in sight. Clinton’s suggestion that Netanyahu may have wanted to see what Hamas could plan “so that he could come down hard and enhance his position” is a chilling thought, and she was careful to say she doesn’t know his thinking. But the very fact that such a theory is being discussed seriously in Washington and in Israel reflects the depth of distrust surrounding the prime minister. The human cost of that alleged miscalculation—or worse, calculation—is not abstract. It is measured in funerals, in hostage family vigils, in children who have lost parents, and in a generation of Israelis and Palestinians who have learned to expect the worst from each other. That is the tragedy of intelligence failures: they are not just bureaucratic mistakes, but human catastrophes with names and faces and stories.
Clinton’s comments also pointed toward the broader relationship between Israel and the United States, and how the upcoming election might reshape it. She suggested that if Israelis decide to re-elect the same kind of leadership, Washington should take a very tough position, while also expressing hope of working with a new government. “If Israelis want to vote for that again, then I think the United States has to take a very tough position,” she said. “I think we could work with the new government.” Her words reflect a kind of love-hate relationship between Washington and Jerusalem that has existed for decades, but has become more strained under Netanyahu’s government. Clinton also raised the issue of settler violence in the West Bank, calling for a crackdown. “I would hope a new Prime Minister would crack down on settler violence in the West Bank,” she said, adding, “there should be no impunity for that kind of violence.” She spoke of the corrosive effect such unchecked violence has on society at large: “Anytime you let people have that level of violence in a society that you don’t stop, that creeps into the whole society. It’s unfair, bad, wrong for the Palestinians, and it’s also very dangerous to Israel.” This is a reminder that the moral health of a nation is not measured solely by how it treats its own citizens, but by how it treats those under its control, particularly in occupied territories. Clinton’s humanized critique refuses to separate security from democracy, or justice from survival. For her, strong leadership means not only defending borders but also upholding values—so that the lengths a nation goes through to protect itself do not end up destroying the very character it claims to defend. That message carries weight when the world is watching how Israel responds not only to external threats, but to internal injustices as well.
Now Israelis are preparing to vote in the country’s next parliamentary election, scheduled for October 27, with all 120 seats in the Knesset up for grabs. Polls suggest a tight and highly competitive race, and coalition-building will likely determine who forms the next government. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, is leading the Likud Party into the election, seeking another term. His political history is remarkable: first in office from 1996 to 1999, then returning in 2009 and serving until 2021 before reclaiming the premiership in late 2022 at the head of a right-wing coalition. But this election is taking place in an atmosphere of profound distrust and unresolved grief. The reports about the alleged warning, the ongoing war in Gaza, the hostage crisis, and the deeply personal accusations from figures like Clinton and Israel’s own opposition leaders have created a moment of reckoning. Voters are facing not just a choice of candidates, but a choice about what kind of leadership they want: one that closes its eyes to warnings, or one that takes every threat seriously; one that lets violence spread unchecked, or one that upholds the rule of law; one that isolates Israel from its allies, or one that preserves the bonds of friendship with the United States and others. Clinton’s comments—even though they come from a foreign former official—speak to exactly what is at stake. She did not demand that Israelis vote a particular way. But she made clear that the world is watching, and that leadership means more than surviving political crises. It means protecting people, telling the truth, accepting responsibility, and refusing to let cynicism replace courage. As Israelis prepare to cast their ballots, the memory of October 7 is not just a historical event but a living presence. The question is whether that memory will lead to a renewed sense of accountability, or whether the cycle of failure and denial will continue. Whatever happens, Clinton’s words will echo in the debate, reminding both Israelis and Americans that leadership is not a prize to be held, but a trust to be honored.
