I Worked With Netanyahu. It’s Time for Him to Step Down.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s days as prime minister of Israel are numbered. He can either accept responsibility for the political, intelligence, and operational failures that were evident on Oct. 7, when Hamas massacred more than 1,400 Israelis—or he will be forced out by the commission of inquiry that will follow the war. He should leave now, while some small measure of respectability is intact.

Netanyahu has served longer than any other Israeli leader, a reflection of his astute political skills and the image he created of himself as Mr. Security. Hamas burst this image in dramatic fashion, in a barbaric attack that will tear at Israel’s soul for many years to come.

Responsible leaders follow former U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s dictum that the buck stops at the desk of the boss. On Oct. 7, Netanyahu was no novice in the prime minister’s office. He was elected to a second term in 2009 and has governed since then, except for a short break when an alternative coalition was formed.

His record has been decidedly mixed. Israel’s high-tech sector blossomed in recent decades, but this was driven largely by the Israeli army as incubator, not by him. Ties with some Arab countries expanded under the Abraham Accords, but this had very little to do with Netanyahu’s diplomatic acumen. Most notably, he has preferred to expand settlements in the occupied territories at the risk of spoiling the prospects of peace with the Palestinians.

Diverting funds to settlements and to institutions of the ultra-Orthodox community helped Netanyahu cement his political base and get himself reelected. But it also came at the expense of Israel’s public institutions, including its education sector. A 2021 report argued that 50 percent of Israeli children were receiving a “third-world education.” Israel’s Gini coefficient—measuring how equal a country is based on income distribution—stood at 52.2 in 2019, placing the country at the low end of the global scale, between Mauritius and Senegal.

During Barack Obama’s two terms in the White House, Netanyahu jeopardized Israel’s most important strategic relationship, almost driving U.S.-Israeli relations off the rails. The Israeli leader focused intently on the threat that Iran would acquire a nuclear weapons capability. This led him into a bitter confrontation with the Obama administration in the run-up to its nuclear deal with Iran—the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Netanyahu during this period threatened to bomb Iran; made vituperative comments aimed at Obama and his senior aides; and, behind the president’s back, arranged to address a joint session of Congress.

Long before the JCPOA, Netanyahu had a habit of lecturing American presidents. He did it publicly to Obama in 2011, in the presence of journalists in the Oval Office. And he lectured Bill Clinton more privately in 1996, prompting Clinton’s expletive-filled reaction to the meeting.

In fact, Netanyahu’s rocky relations with the United States began well before the Obama administration. I first met him in 1989, when he was Israel’s deputy minister of foreign affairs and I was a deputy assistant secretary of state, visiting Israel as part of Secretary of State James Baker’s peace team. We arrived in Jerusalem in mid-May, just as Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir unveiled a four-part peace proposal.

At a luncheon at the prime minister’s residence, I was seated next to Netanyahu, and we talked at some length. To my surprise, Netanyahu made clear that he was not happy with his own prime minister’s policy, resulting in an awkward situation: The U.S. administration was more supportive of an Israeli peace plan than one of its top officials.

Sometime later, Baker’s assistant summoned me to the secretary’s office. A fuming Baker was waving a press release with a shocking headline: “Netanyahu: The United States is built on lies and fabrications.” I tried to reassure Baker this could not possibly be accurate.

The quote was, indeed, incorrect, but not by much. Netanyahu had blasted the administration by saying “U.S. policy was built on lies and fabrications.” From that day until the end of the Bush administration, Netanyahu was persona non grata in the Department of State.

Years later, I served as the U.S. ambassador, while Netanyahu was finance minister in the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu was willing to take tough decisions urged on him by the International Monetary Fund and the United States to straighten out the Israeli economy. In response, with my strong urging, the U.S. government offered a number of incentives as a kind of safety net for the belt-tightening that Netanyahu imposed.

During this period, I saw Netanyahu regularly to discuss both economic and policy matters, in particular Sharon’s 2003 decision to disengage and withdraw from Gaza. Netanyahu’s position on the disengagement was telling. He voted for it but resigned a few days before the actual withdrawal.

This experience and others taught me a great deal about the man, validating what I had written years earlier in an informal note to Secretary of State Warren Christopher: Netanyahu is a man of significant intellect but without a “policy GPS” on how to get where he wants to go. He could articulate big ideas but sometimes struggled to translate them into action.

Netanyahu’s ambivalence about peace and the question of the occupied territories stymied Israeli policy for decades. On the one hand, his 2009 Bar Ilan speech signaled his willingness, with important caveats, to pursue peace with the Palestinians. On the other hand, his relentless support for settlements in the occupied territories, his government’s active neglect of violence by settlers against Palestinians, and his policy of weakening the Palestinian Authority exacerbated the situation on the ground while cementing Israel’s grip over the territories it occupied.

All of these things have made Netanyahu a conundrum, both in policy and personality. He has made security his priority but undermined Israel’s vital strategic partnership with Washington. He is more skillful politically than anyone else in the country but has partnered with the most extreme right-wing and ultra-Orthodox figures on the political spectrum. His own military chiefs have opposed him on Iran and raised questions about his approach to the Palestinian issue. And his alleged personal indiscretions have led to multiple indictments for corruption. In the past year, Netanyahu has divided the country with a contentious judicial overhaul plan, motivated in part by his own drive to avoid prosecution.

These distractions contributed to the systemic failure of the Israeli government before Oct. 7. To be very clear: Hamas and Hamas alone is responsible for the massacre that it perpetrated in violation of every human moral imperative. But Netanyahu orchestrated a policy of appeasing the group, believing it would be satisfied with a long-term hudna, or truce, rather than fulfilling its original charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel. That policy has led Israel to its deadliest war in decades.

The war in Gaza will end eventually. But when it does, Israelis and Palestinians will have no political horizon to look to, no peace process to rekindle, and little hope for a better future. That, too, is a legacy of Netanyahu’s long years in power.

Netanyahu tried to shirk responsibility several days ago by blaming the intelligence and military chiefs for the security failures that led to the Hamas attacks. The angry backlash should have convinced him that Israelis will not let him off the hook. Indeed, in a survey published this week by the Israel Democracy Institute, a significant majority of Israelis expressed more trust in the heads of the Israel Defense Forces than in Netanyahu. Most of his countrymen understand that he has placed his own interests above those of the state and its citizens. To avoid a legal reckoning surrounding his indictments, he jeopardized an entire nation. Having lost his aura as protector of Israel, and having failed thus far to define Israel’s war aims in Gaza beyond the hyperbole of destroying Hamas, Netanyahu is now clinging to power for the sake of power itself.

The Hebrew language has no specific word for accountability. Instead, Israelis use the word achrayut, which translates as “responsibility.” Netanyahu has avoided accountability in the past, most notably following the 2010 Mount Carmel fire disaster that killed 44 Israelis or the 2021 stampede during a religious pilgrimage that killed 45 people. And he is trying to avoid it now. It is time for him to bear achrayut—responsibility and accountability. It is time for him to step down.