JEFF STEIN
Legendary former Mossad boss Efraim Halevy says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is living in a world which is not real” and cannot stay in office much longer.
“I do believe there are many people in his own party who have reached a conclusion that it's very dangerous to allow him to continue for any long period of time. He is living in a world which is not real. It's not reality,” Halevy said in an overlooked interview Thursday with PBS Newshour.
“Let's imagine we win the war and Mr. Netanyahu will get up and say, ‘I won the war,’” Halevy told Newshour Special Correspondent Leila Molana-Allen. “Maybe it's true he won the war, but what will people say the day after?”
A longtime critic of Netanyahu and policies encouraging rightwing nationalist Israeli settlers to encroach on Palestinian lands in the occupied West Bank, Halevy also said the failure of Israeli intelligence to detect and deter the Oct. 7 Hamas assaults on Israel would have long lasting effects.
For one thing, Netanyahu shifted blame for the catastrophic attacks onto his military and intelligence agencies—which alone added impetus for his removal. Millions of Israelis had been demanding his resignation in mass street protests for months before the war. Biden also now thinks his days are numbered, “and the president has conveyed that sentiment to the Israeli prime minister in a recent conversation,” according to Politico, citing anonymous “top aides.”
The Israeli policy of periodically killing leaders of the fundamentalist terror group has failed, Halevy said.
“You're also changing the character of the movement. And you are reaching a point where, each time you succeed in damaging the leadership, you find a new leadership, which is probably more extreme than the leadership that you cast aside,” he said.
As for Netanyahu’s vow to “decapitate” the current Hamas leadership, Halevy said he didn’t “want to be a prophet and to say it's impossible, but I think it's extremely difficult to do.”
He also rejected the notion of a hostages swap between Israel and Hamas, saying a previous lopsided exchange freed Palestinians now running the terrorist group.
“[I]f the price would be to go through the same kind of exercise again and know that, by doing so, you are preparing the next round, for all intents and purposes, that is not a good deal.”
Tremors in Tehran
As for the conflict ballooning into a wider regional war, Halevy said that despite the increased tempo of conflict in southern Lebanon, Iran is not “interested in having a major confrontation at all, because Iran wants to take what it gained with the relationship with Saudi Arabia, and it wants to capitalize on it, and it wants to solidify this. And, probably, they know that Saudi Arabia, for reasons of its own, would not be interested in a big flare-up in the north.”
Ironically, Halevy, now 89, was picked to run Mossad by Netanyahu in 1998 after an assassination mission against a Hamas leader in Jordan turned into a humiliating disaster.
He has long argued that Israel would never know peace unless it treated Palestinians with dignity and respect, a policy consistently rejected by Netanyahu and his rightwing base.
Similar comments were made a decade ago by six former heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli counterintelligence and counterterrorism service, in a documentary film, The Gatekeepers. "All six argue— to varying degrees—that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is bad for the state of Israel," CNN said, describing the “stunning revelations.”
The current Israeli leadership, Halevy said, is not particularly interested in preventing civilian Palestinian casualties in Gaza.
“We're now intent on winning the war. So, we are going to try and win the war. And for us to win the war is to decapitate Hamas as much as we can. What will happen in the future, what will happen in 40, 50 years from now, well, we won't be around to have to deal with it. People don't think so much into the future, as I have been trying to say and talk about.
But that’s exactly what Israel’s wartime “unity” government should be thinking about now, he said.
“Is it simply going to be a military victory, period?” he continued. “And what happens next? What I am very, very concerned about is that, in the end, we don't have a viable solution for Gaza.”
The British-born and educated Halevy, often likened to John LeCarré’s famous spymaster George Smiley (as played by Alec Guinness), said that a peaceful, post-Gaza future will depend on Israelis overhauling the way they think about their country, not just the Palestinians.
“In the end,” he said, “we will have to change the disk in your brain and think differently on different terms in different ways.”
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