Why ex-Mossad chief says Binyamin Netanyahu must resign

The phone rang just as Efraim Halevy was about to discuss the state of Israel’s war. On the other end of the line was the Israeli intelligence service, calling to convene a meeting with the director of Mossad, which is charged with bringing back hostages still held in Gaza’s tunnels.

Halevy, a veteran spy and diplomat who directed the secret agency for four years until 2002, ended the call with a twinkle in his eye. David Barnea, the present Mossad chief, has called on him “several” times since the outbreak of war on October 7, as a dangerous game of chicken is played on the northern front and Hamas is still holding firm in the south.

He said negotiations were “stuck” due to the “other considerations” of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, who is reportedly using hostages as human shields. “They’ve not lost the will to fight,” he added.

The Hamas chief is thought to be batting away potential offers of ceasefire deals from his bunker deep under Gaza’s scorched earth. “He holds the cards, the hostages, but that would not be enough — I think he also holds his own survival and the survival of his forces, up to a point,” Halevy said. “And we are suffering losses, all of them very painful.”

Halevy spoke as Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, arrived in Israel trying to hold together the last threads of diplomacy and avert wider regional war. Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia group backed by Iran, and Israel have been trading increasingly perilous blows across their shared border, an exchange Halevy believes will be restrained by the US deterrence which has been relatively successful so far.

“We do want in some way to indirectly negotiate with Iranians on what will happen in the north. I think that Iran does not wish for war now with Israel, because they believe, and rightly so, that if they went to war with Israel, they have to contend with the possibility that there would be war with the United States,” said Halevy.

“On the one hand, it gives us a sense that we could go up to a certain level of confrontation there if Hezbollah raises the ante in the north. If we feel that we have to take military steps against them, the Iranians would try to restrain them.”

Halevy, 89, emigrated to Israel from London as a teenager before being tapped up to join Mossad in 1961, working his way up to deputy director and heading efforts to bring Jews from across the Middle East and Ethiopia to Israel in often dangerous and clandestine operations. His era harks back to a golden age for the Israeli secret service and their undercover operations abroad.

Halevy, who answered only to Binyamin Netanyahu during his term as spy chief, said the prime minister had failed to bring Hamas to its knees in a “whirlwind victory”.

He suggested that it was unlikely that, under Netanyahu’s leadership, the rest of the Hamas leadership would be pursued abroad.

However, in the past week, two Hamas figures have been assassinated in Lebanese and Syrian territory. Israel took responsibility for the Syrian killing, a rare move.

“When it all began, Netanyahu said we will chase Hamas to the end of the world. Now, he’s not repeating this statement,” Halevy said, adding that the focus was likely on the newer fronts that have opened up since.

However, the former EU ambassador who once called for negotiation with Hamas now says that time will never come, and Israel will “never recognise” the Islamist movement as the “animosity is too high”. Still, he added, the prime minister did not seem keen on propping up the Palestinian National Authority for them to take over the helm in Gaza either, a solution floated by the Biden administration but firmly ruled out by Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the authority.

“You must refrain from entering the situation of occupation. We have enough on our hands in the West Bank and everything it symbolises. I think the recipe for the West Bank which he [Netanyahu] has should not be a recipe for anywhere,” said Halevy — but added that there was no other existing blueprint other than delaying tactics.

“Ultimately, there has to be an element of self-rule by the population,” he said. “I don’t think we have the capacity to dictate to them how they’re going to run their affairs once we are no longer there.”

Halevy has been a vocal critic of Netanyahu and his proposed reforms to the supreme court, which sparked widespread protests across Israel. He still says Netanyahu “must go” and is a member of a large WhatsApp group of senior retired army generals who shared disparaging memes of the leader. He does not see a way that Netanyahu can stay and lead the nation to peace.

“The problem is that this present government does not accept the two-state solution, because we deny them the right to sovereignty,” he said. “There’s the question too of the West Bank and this mixture of Palestinians and Israeli settlers. This set-up, this system, has not been proven successful. And now we have many, many other things which we have to take care of.”

Before returning the call to Mossad headquarters to set up a meeting, Halevy brought out a book written by two former military officers, one a former Nato commander, entitled 2032, about a war between the United States and China.

“A lot depends on China, who have stepped up their activities enormously in the last decade,” Halevy said of China’s fairly recent defensive agreement with Iran. “The story of Hamas is one story, then the story of Iran and Iraq, of the Houthis, of the question of Saudi Arabia’s future policies … everything is, I won’t say up for grabs, but it’s a very volatile situation at the moment. And this could really create unexpected and unforeseen results.”