an Op-Ed by Shira Miller

Naftali Bennett has a gift for dramatic rhetoric. On Sunday evening, the former Prime Minister launched a blistering attack on Benjamin Netanyahu, comparing him to Forrest Gump — “a weak, pitiful, helpless nebbish who just happened to stumble into events.” It was a clever sound bite, delivered in a slick, pre-recorded video statement timed to maximize media impact. It was also breathtakingly hypocritical, coming from the man whose own political choices helped set the stage for the very catastrophe he now decries.

Before we address the substance of Bennett’s critique, we must address the critic himself.

This is the man who, in June 2021, made a coalition deal with Ra’am — the political wing of the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, an Islamist party whose platform supports the creation of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Right-wing voters who had trusted Bennett felt profoundly betrayed. He had won just seven Knesset seats with their votes and leveraged those seats into a coalition with ideological adversaries spanning the entire political spectrum — from the hard-left Meretz to the Islamist Ra’am. Bennett himself praised Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas as “courageous” and later, in a New York Times op-ed, called him “a mensch.” Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, by contrast, publicly denounced Abbas as “Abu Righal” — a legendary traitor in pre-Islamic lore — for propping up an Israeli government.

Then came the defections. First Amichai Chikli. Then Idit Silman. Then Nir Orbach. Bennett’s own party disintegrated beneath him. He was forced to announce he would not seek re-election, and his Yamina party effectively ceased to exist as a political force. Polls showed the party hovering near or below the 3.25% electoral threshold. His former partner Ayelet Shaked ran the remnants under “Zionist Spirit.”

She was wiped out at the ballot box.

Bennett served as Prime Minister for just 381 days — Israel’s shortest-serving Prime Minister in history. This is the man now lecturing Netanyahu about leadership.

But the betrayal was not merely symbolic. It was operational. And it was lethal.

Bennett’s coalition government dramatically expanded the number of Gazan work permits — a policy with devastating consequences. Under Bennett’s direct authority, the number of permits tripled from roughly 5,000 to 15,000, a decision he personally made as Prime Minister. Defense Minister Benny Gantz assessed and approved the expansion. By late 2022, the number had swelled to approximately 17,000, and monthly exits from Gaza into Israel skyrocketed from 7,500 in 2021 to over 35,000 by July 2022 — more exits than at any point since 2005. On the eve of October 7th, some 18,500 Gazans held active Israeli work permits according to COGAT, the Defense Ministry body that coordinates Palestinian civil affairs.

These workers gained intimate knowledge of Israeli border communities — the very communities that were devastated on October 7th. Reporting after the massacre revealed that Hamas attackers carried detailed maps and building layouts. One survivor whose husband and son were murdered testified:

“The Hamas terrorists knew the names of the people, how many children they had, and even which of them owned dogs.”

Among the debris left by dead Hamas terrorists — alongside guns, Qurans, and maps — were green Gaza IDs with Israeli work permits. Read that again. Green Gaza IDs. With Israeli work permits. Issued under Bennett’s government.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken himself acknowledged at a J Street event that the Biden administration had pushed Israel to issue “thousands of work permits for Palestinians in Gaza.” Bennett’s government enthusiastically complied. As Lapid boasted at the time:

“We are telling our Palestinian neighbors, ‘When it is quiet you will enjoy the economic flourishing.’ That’s the case in Gaza.”

It was not quiet. It was reconnaissance. If Bennett wishes to assign blame for the security failures that preceded the massacre, he might start with a mirror.

And then there is the matter of what happened when Bennett stepped aside. He handed the premiership to Yair Lapid during the transition period — a man who then signed the Lebanon maritime agreement on October 27, 2022, just five days before a national election in which neither he nor his party had a public mandate.

This caretaker government ceded approximately 840 square kilometers of disputed Mediterranean waters to Lebanon, effectively handing Hezbollah’s patron state access to the potentially hydrocarbon-rich Qana gas field while Israel received only a 17% royalty share. The deal was rushed through without a Knesset vote, despite the Attorney General’s own recommendation that it be brought for parliamentary approval given that the government was merely a caretaker administration and the agreement was irreversible.

Lapid rejected the Attorney General’s advice.

Professor Eugene Kontorovich of the Kohelet Policy Forum called it what it was:

“A lame duck government agreeing to give up the country’s sovereign territory to an enemy state days before an election.”

Four petitions challenging the deal reached the Supreme Court. The Court dismissed all of them. One might contrast this with the Court’s track record of intervening aggressively when right-wing governments attempt far less consequential actions during transitions. As MK Itamar Ben Gvir noted at the time:

“For a right-wing government — intervention on every step. For a left-wing government, no intervention in state policy.”

Former National Security Adviser Yaakov Amidror questioned whether the final agreement “was a result of an American decision to have Israel make concessions” or “an Israeli decision to completely surrender for the sake of an agreement.” And today, after the war with Hezbollah, the verdict is clear: the deal failed to buy quiet. It whetted Hezbollah’s appetite. Bennett enabled this entire chain of events. He set the dominoes in motion. Then he walked away.

Now, to Bennett’s actual argument. He accuses Netanyahu of being passive, addicted to containment, and of paying “protection money” to Hamas via Qatari cash transfers to Gaza. He claims that Netanyahu “did nothing other than build walls, fences, and concrete barriers” for 12.5 of the 14 years preceding October 7th. These are serious charges. But context matters enormously.

The policy of managing Hamas through economic incentives rather than military confrontation was not Netanyahu’s private invention. It was the consensus recommendation of the IDF, the Shin Bet, and the Mossad across multiple security cycles. The international community reinforced this approach at every turn, threatening diplomatic consequences for military escalation. The Biden administration actively pushed for more work permits and economic engagement with Gaza. And the Israeli public overwhelmingly preferred quiet on the Gaza border to the costs of war — casualties, reservist call-ups, international condemnation, and economic disruption. Indeed, Lapid himself publicly championed the work-permit strategy as a path to peace.

Was the containment policy ultimately a catastrophic miscalculation? Yes. But it was a miscalculation shared by virtually the entire Israeli security establishment and political class — emphatically including Naftali Bennett, whose government expanded the very work-permit program that gave Hamas its intelligence windfall. Bennett’s framing — that Netanyahu alone was responsible while everyone around him urged action — is a convenient fiction. The intelligence community failed to predict October 7th. The IDF’s Southern Command was unprepared. These were systemic failures. Not the failures of one man. And the man now pointing the finger presided over the single most consequential expansion of Gazan access to Israeli border communities in the years immediately preceding the attack.

Bennett boasts of his own record during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, claiming he single-handedly pushed the IDF into an offensive posture and caused the destruction of 30 cross-border tunnels. “Everything is documented in the State Comptroller’s investigative report,” he says. Let us grant him that claim for the sake of argument. He was a cabinet minister at the time — one voice among many. Being an energetic cabinet minister is admirable. But it is a fundamentally different challenge from leading a nation through decades of complex, multi-front security threats while simultaneously managing coalition politics, economic policy, and relentless international pressure.

Bennett served as Prime Minister for 381 days. Netanyahu has served for over 16 years. Bennett’s government collapsed from within, undone by defections from his own party. He did not face a fraction of the sustained pressure that Netanyahu has navigated — however imperfectly — over more than a decade and a half.

The Forrest Gump comparison is also revealing in ways Bennett did not intend. The film’s protagonist, for all his apparent simplicity, consistently ends up in the right place, survives every crisis, and achieves extraordinary things through persistence, loyalty, and an unshakable moral compass. If Bennett meant to diminish Netanyahu with this analogy, he chose poorly.

Netanyahu personally lobbied Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla through 17 phone calls to secure Israel’s world-leading COVID-19 vaccination deal, making Israel the first country to vaccinate the majority of its adult population in early 2021 — while Bennett’s government later took credit for the booster program that Netanyahu’s procurement had made possible. Netanyahu guided the Abraham Accords — normalization agreements with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan that reshaped the strategic landscape of the Middle East. He managed the Iranian nuclear threat through a combination of covert operations, international diplomacy, and military preparedness. He led Israel through multiple wars and military operations.

Passive bystander? The suggestion is laughable.

Bennett concludes his attack by calling for Israel to “part ways” with Netanyahu “with dignity.” One wonders: part ways in favor of whom? Bennett himself?

The man who is now forming “Bennett 2026,” a new party structured so that he will maintain personal control as chairman until 2034 and serve as permanent faction leader — apparently having learned from his last party’s implosion not by developing better political judgment, but by ensuring no one can defect? The man who couldn’t hold a coalition together for a single full year? The man who allied with the Islamist political movement and whose previous political party no longer exists as a viable electoral force? The man whose own New Right party missed the electoral threshold by fewer than 1,500 votes in April 2019, who was saved only by the political chaos that forced yet another election?

The voters have already rendered their judgment.

There is a deeper irony in Bennett’s timing. His attack came in response to Netanyahu’s submission to the State Comptroller regarding October 7th. Bennett seized on the document to portray Netanyahu as someone who merely reacted to events rather than shaping them. Yet Bennett’s own record is one of the most consequential case studies in Israeli history of a leader who shaped events — catastrophically — and then disclaimed all responsibility for the outcome.

He formed an ideologically incoherent coalition. He dramatically expanded Gazan access to Israeli soil. He handed power to Lapid, who gave away maritime territory to an enemy state without parliamentary approval. And then he walked away from politics entirely, only to return now as a self-appointed moral authority.

No accountability. No self-reflection. Just ambition.

Israel deserves a serious reckoning with the failures that led to October 7th. That reckoning must be honest, comprehensive, and must hold all responsible parties accountable — including the security establishment, the intelligence community, and yes, the political leadership of the past two decades, across all governments. What Israel does not need is a failed former Prime Minister — whose own 381 days in office helped create the precise conditions for catastrophe — using selective outrage as a vehicle for his own political rehabilitation.

Bennett’s critique would carry far more weight if it were accompanied by even a hint of self-reflection about his own role in the chain of events that left Israel vulnerable. Instead, he offers a polished video, a clever movie reference, and zero accountability.

Netanyahu has much to answer for. But the person asking the questions should not be Naftali Bennett.