Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war of accusations with an opposition leader is hitting a boiling point as the two politicians trade lawsuits and threats of government investigation over the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre.
Yair Golan, the chairman of the left-wing Democrats party, announced Thursday that he has filed a $843,000 defamation lawsuit against Sara Netanyahu after the prime minister’s wife implied that he intentionally withheld information from her husband about the terrorist attacks as they unfolded.
“This lawsuit is not only about my good name or what I did on October 7,” Golan said in a statement about the lawsuit. “It is a civil indictment by an entire political camp against a government that has lost all restraint.”
Sara Netanyahu asserted in an interview with outlet Channel 14 earlier this month that Golan, who previously served as deputy Israeli military chief of staff, was too prepared and too quick to act during the Oct. 7 massacre. Golan has been credited with driving to the Nova music festival venue and saving multiple lives as the terrorist attack was underway.
“When you’re a military man of such high rank, claiming that you fought on October 7 — already early in the morning you were there, already dressed and ready at a very, very early hour when others didn’t know, such as the prime minister,” Sara Netanyahu said.
Citing the Israeli police’s increased threat level for attacks against the Democrats’ leader, the lawsuit further accuses Sara Netanyahu of inciting violence against him.
Golan and Benjamin Netanyahu have been locked in a blame game over the outcome of Oct. 7 throughout the Israeli election season, which is set to conclude with a parliamentary election in late October.
The prime minister has characterized the former military official as part of a cabal that intentionally kept him in the dark as the massacre unfolded due to “intelligence failures” by the military.
“Why didn’t they wake me? Because they knew that I, as prime minister of Israel, would immediately have ordered to put the entire army on alert, to wake up all the towns [near Gaza],” he claimed in an interview earlier this month. “It’s so obvious that all of this could have been done. This has been hidden from the public.”
Golan, meanwhile, has hammered Benjamin Netanyahu for sleeping through the first hours of the attacks and rejected what he called the “they-didn’t-wake-me-up narrative.”
“He knew, he was warned,” the Democrats’ leader said in a recent interview, calling Netanyahu’s actions on Oct. 7 “not an error in judgment, but a conscious and criminal abandonment.”
A report published this week by Haaretz, citing the newly released book Kidnapped: 843 Days of Abandonment by Israeli journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, claims that Yahya Sinwar, then the leader of Hamas, instructed Emirati President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan to warn Netanyahu of an impending attack. Bin Zayed allegedly passed this message to the Israeli premier in late September 2023, reportedly conveying a sense of seriousness about the threat.
That report, which Netanyahu firmly denied, ultimately led the prime minister and his Likud party to demand an investigation into Haaretz, the reporter who wrote the piece, and Golan for “blatant foreign interference in Israel’s elections.”
“Likud demands the opening of a criminal investigation against Shlomi Eldar, Ruth Yuval, the newspaper Haaretz, Yair Golan, and the Democrats party, due to suspicion of attempting to disrupt the elections with foreign entities,” Netanyahu said, though he did not provide evidence of coordination between the parties.
Golan dismissed Netanyahu’s statement and threat as “desperate lies of a man who feels the ground slipping out from under his feet.”
“And the tighter the political noose gets, the more dangerous Netanyahu becomes,” Golan added. “When power slips from his grasp, there’s no line he won’t cross to deflect the fire from himself.”
Sara Netanyahu is not the only familial relation of the prime minister who has waded into accusations of treason. Her son, Yair Netanyahu, slammed the Israeli military in June after a planned investigation into the massacre was suspended by the Israeli High Court due to questions of purview.
“What are they trying to hide? If there was no treason, why are they so afraid for external and independent parties to check what happened?” Yair Netanyahu said. “To this day, no answer has been given for why they didn’t update the prime minister about the discussion held the night before 10/7.”
Yair Netanyahu was “urgently evacuated” from his home in Miami last month amid alleged threats from Iranian operatives in the area.