Why would Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spend a precious day of campaigning – just 30 days before the election that will seal his fate – on a secret trip to Abu Dhabi? Because the cats are scrambling out of the bag.
Following Haaretz's recent dramatic exposé of United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed warning Netanyahu a week and a half before October 7 that Hamas was planning a major operation against Israel, the New York Times confirmed the report, citing a source who spoke to the Emirati leader.
Meanwhile, both The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal just reported that Egypt, too, sent warnings; its intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel, even flew to Israel 11 days before October 7 to communicate how dire the Gaza situation was and that it could "blow up in everyone's faces."
Netanyahu's point-blank refusal to accept an iota of accountability for the failures leading up to the Hamas attack, and his extraordinary efforts to block an independent inquiry into them, are a critical theme in the election campaign. The teeming reports signaling his culpability are an existential threat to his chances of winning, to his dark, dystopian vision for Israel and, as Defendant Netanyahu, for his own personal freedom.
Naturally, then, Netanyahu's secret meeting on Sunday triggered a storm of responses, especially from the opposition bloc, contending that the prime minister flew to the UAE in a desperate attempt to align alibis with MBZ. Some reports suggest he even pleaded with the Emirati ruler to deny the reports of pre-October 7 warnings and asked, somewhat pathetically, for "moral support."
Emirati warning: First reported by Haaretz and later confirmed by The New York Times, UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed warned Netanyahu about 10 days before October 7 that Hamas was planning a major attack and urged him to take it seriously.
First Egyptian warning: First reported by The Atlantic, Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel secretly visited Israel on September 26, 2023, and warned that Hamas appeared to be preparing a major assault.
Additional Egyptian warnings: Reported by Yedioth Ahronoth and The Wall Street Journal, Kamel called Netanyahu days before October 7 to warn of signs of an imminent attack from Gaza.
The UAE president did not publicly play ball, just as U.S. President Donald Trump failed to offer Netanyahu a photo-op in New York last week and declined to denounce unprecedented settlement sanctions announced this month by the U.K., Canada and France.
But there's an equally compelling explanation for Netanyahu's trip, and it also feeds into his election calculus. If the premier can't win the October 7 narrative, then he can override it with a different national crisis: restarting the war with Iran.
And his pitch for renewed conflict falls on receptive ears: The UAE is frustrated by the simmering stalemate with Tehran and with the wildly erratic Trump. The U.S. president threatens to obliterate Iran after the midterms, but that's too late for Netanyahu, who is only eyeing October 27. The prime minister is trying to plaster over the opposition's moniker for him – the October 7 "Massacre Prime Minister" – with his own invention, the Terminator of Tehran.
Notably, according to contemporaneous polling, the last two-and-a-half years of war with Iran have never really moved the electoral dial for Netanyahu. And no matter how many far-right parties he midwifes, how many toxic AI videos he publishes, how many global leaders he gaslights, his coalition just can't seem to break through to a ruling majority in the polls.
The UAE trip signals not only Netanyahu's trenchant denialism about responsibility for the Hamas attack; it also indicates that he is strategizing his doomsday option: a national state of emergency that would suspend campaigning – and the election. Let's see if MBZ, so far reluctant to join in the October 7 revisionism, is willing to collaborate with him in a high-stakes project to save Netanyahu's political skin.
