Netanyahu’s October 7 ‘generals’ revolt’ conspiracy runs into a contradiction

This was supposed to be a special, energizing week for Netanyahu’s election campaign. Several flashy campaigns had missed their mark over the previous month, their origins unclear but their beneficiary obvious: the false quote attributed to a senior Revolutionary Guards official about an Iranian nuclear weapon, the Turkish invasion of Syria that never happened, the accompanying stories about assassins at the doorstep surrounding the real threat to Yair Netanyahu, and a series of attempts to smear Gadi Eisenkot. Now the moment had arrived when all the material collected over nearly three years was supposed to come together: Netanyahu’s 55-page document, the book and television series “The Generals’ Revolt,” orchestrated appearances on Channel 14 and a flood of document excerpts, some of them genuine, though even those had undergone surgical treatment. The message was supposed to move up a level. No longer merely: the military and Shin Bet were wrong, negligent and believed Hamas was deterred they were wrong and misled Netanyahu. From now on: they knew, and nevertheless deliberately decided not to wake Netanyahu because they feared he would order an attack and cause a miscalculation. In other words, not failure but intent not a misconception but a conspiracy and revolt. But someone in the campaign made a miscalculation of his own, misjudging the public response to Sara Netanyahu’s remarks about Yair Golan and how the attempt to contain the damage, prepare for a defamation suit and distance her from the word “betrayal” would expose the contradiction between her story and her husband’s. At the same time, instead of debating what Netanyahu would have done had he been awakened, the discussion focused on what he actually did from the moment he was awakened. “There’s a name for that,” said a security official with a cynical smile. He is deeply familiar with the workings of ministers’ and prime ministers’ offices and furious over the blood libels against his colleagues. “It’s called a miscalculation,” he said, using a word from the Likud campaign. The ‘generals’ revolt’ enters the campaign Already about a month ago, someone warned civil society figures that the blood-libel campaign about “betrayal” and “revolt,” centered on responsibility for October 7, was about to reignite with enormous force ahead of the election. Its flagship is Erez Tadmor’s “The Generals’ Revolt,” a book turned into a four-part Channel 14 series in which Tadmor is the author, presenter, interviewer, interviewee and expert validating his own conclusions. Data from the Movement for Public Journalism show that since publication of the book and the television series’ debut, someone has been making an enormous effort to inject the term “generals’ revolt” deep, deep into all our minds, and not merely as promotional content. On Channel 14, the phrase was uttered 267 times over 46 broadcast days. Some of that total comes from broadcasts of the series, but, for example, the term was used 131 times in panels and interviews, independently of it. That is still the simple figure, which can be linked to the series or the book. The point is that on channels and stations that amplify the Netanyahu machine, there has been a curious increase of many hundreds of percent in the use of “general” or “generals” outside the phrase “generals’ revolt,” while other channels saw no change. Netanyahu uses this manipulation himself: instead of referring to “the major generals on the General Staff” in an interview this week, he suddenly speaks of the IDF’s “generals,” an expression he had never used. The word “coup” also appeared in 71 segments. People monitoring the amplification networks of Netanyahu’s propaganda pointed to a curious phenomenon. The label was attached to every disagreement between the political and professional leadership: the Shin Bet chief, police commissioner, Supreme Court, Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, an appointment or a leak. If an officer objects, it is revolt. If he obeys and fails, it is the rebels’ misconception. If he expresses his opinion, he should be fired, perhaps tried as well, preferably live on “The Patriots.” A theory that every outcome confirms is not research. It is religious faith with a promotional department. The word “generals,” which suddenly appeared in Netanyahu’s interviews this week, was also carefully chosen. In the IDF, the rank is called aluf. “Generals” imports the image of a South American junta surrounding the palace with tanks. It is not a rank but a stage direction. Netanyahu rejects ‘betrayal’ but keeps the story Netanyahu approached the story in stages. In October 2023, he published and then deleted a post stating that “under no circumstances and at no stage” had he been warned and that the heads of the security establishment had said Hamas was deterred. Later came the “thousand SIM cards,” the question of who ordered the Air Force not to attack, and the claim that he was not awakened. He was careful to leave himself an escape route: to ask, amplify and share, without saying the dirty word himself. On February 9, 2026, almost all room for denial disappeared. Netanyahu did not settle for a like or a hint. He copied into his own Twitter account Tadmor’s assertion that “Ronen Bar decided that Benjamin Netanyahu was an illegitimate prime minister... and chose to appoint himself the de facto prime minister on the night of the massacre.” This is not a discussion of negligence. It is an indictment for revolt that the prime minister chose to distribute under his own name. On August 31, 2026, Netanyahu himself said that generals had decided “not to anger Hamas, not to wake me and not to strike preemptively.” Then, when the uproar over Sara erupted, he added verbal body armor: “Failure, not betrayal.” But if the heads of the security establishment understood that an attack was about to begin and deliberately concealed that from the prime minister to prevent him from acting, that is not a good-faith failure but revolt and betrayal of the worst kind. And so, in his predicament as he tries to defend his wife, Netanyahu rejects the word while preserving the story. Sara Netanyahu creates the contradiction In an interview with Channel 14, Sara Netanyahu said of Yair Golan: “You claim you were fighting on October 7. You were already there early in the morning, already dressed and ready, at a very, very early hour, when others did not know, such as the prime minister.” The attempt, born after Golan’s warning letter, to argue that Sara was merely complimenting his neatly pressed uniform and criticizing those who failed to update her husband is, with respect, bullshit that contradicts the syntax. “You claim” casts doubt on Golan having gone out to fight and saved many people that cursed morning “already” and “dressed and ready” depict preparation that preceded the event “when others did not know” attributes to him an informational advantage and “such as the prime minister” explains why that advantage is supposed to incriminate him. The insinuation is not hiding between the lines. It is the line. Netanyahu received his first call just as the firing began, perhaps a second earlier. If Golan received, before 6:29 a.m., a concrete warning of a day of fighting, widespread fire or a raid, the meaning Golan attributes to Sara Netanyahu’s remarks in his warning letter is that she accused him of being part of a conspiracy that, at minimum, possessed advance intelligence about the attack that was concealed from the prime minister. Because she did not deny the theory of betrayal from within, her remarks can also be interpreted as connected to an even worse accusation. Sara Netanyahu says she accused him of nothing, perhaps of using too much starch. To save Sara, the information has to be innocent. To save Benjamin, that same information must be serious enough to wake a prime minister and send an army into action. Both versions cannot be true at the same time. Three conspiracy theories around October 7 All the conspiracy theories surrounding October 7 are branches of one false and malicious blood libel: not a systemic collapse but a plot to overthrow Netanyahu or at least take away his powers. The first conspiracy is called “betrayal from within”: Israelis knew, opened a gate or helped Hamas. The collapse of the blood libel about Brothers in Arms and the spy from the south, alongside other false allegations, makes this theory very difficult to use, certainly in a Likud campaign. The second is that “refusal to serve opened the gate”: Yahya Sinwar saw an army unfit for combat and decided to attack. The problem is that Hamas military intelligence concluded in July 2023 precisely the opposite: that the protest had not harmed readiness, that the chance of that happening was negligible, and that it strongly recommended not attacking because Israel would respond with enormous force. Ultimately, Netanyahu himself apparently became convinced that this theory harmed him, because he had been warned about the consequences of the coup against the system of government and had not acted. In February this year, Netanyahu published what he described as the “documented version” he submitted to the state comptroller. According to Netanyahu, the state comptroller asked him: “Did Hamas choose the timing of the October 7 attack because of the internal situation in Israel?” Netanyahu answered that “subsequent intelligence demonstrates unequivocally that the answer is negative and provides a detailed explanation of why Hamas chose the timing of the raid.” The rest of the page is blacked out. But the rest of the blacked-out page contains nothing secret. It does contain something that could embarrass Netanyahu further, which is why he and his people both use that document and conceal it. Unidentified actors continue to conceal many other documents, including a major effort currently underway to remove documents of dramatic importance to understanding the war from public databases. The third conspiracy is the “generals’ revolt”: the system did not join forces with Hamas, God forbid it merely decided to run the country in Netanyahu’s place and keep him in the dark about the final night before the massacre. This is the most convenient version. It allows Netanyahu to transform himself from the man who headed the system into its victim, a superhero who would have saved Israel if only someone had woken him, tugged at the hem of his phone. How an article became a ‘doctrine’ For the third theory, the propaganda machine needed to prove three components: first, that the IDF and Shin Bet knew something bad was about to happen, or at least concluded there was a reasonable chance of it second, that the intelligence was not passed from the IDF and Shin Bet to the prime minister and third, most importantly, that the information was deliberately withheld. And here comes a simple intellectual trick: take a genuine article, quote a few passages from it using quotation marks, and then use the credibility of those quotation marks to smuggle in facts that were never written and conclusions the article never reached. That is how an article published in Maarachot in 2019 by the late Brig. Gen. Amit Saar, later head of Military Intelligence’s Research Division, about unintended escalation in past cases became the “doctrine of maximum containment.” It is doubtful that the article was a bestseller on the scale of Harry Potter when it appeared. Forgoing the surprise advantage of an Israeli strike became consent to absorb a Hamas surprise attack, and military thinking from 2019 became, without a document or testimony, IDF strategy and the secret motive of Ronen Bar and Herzi Halevi on the night of October 7. This is the conceptual sausage machine of the two creators, Erez Tadmor and Jonathan Dahoah-Halevi. The latter formerly served as an officer in the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, has lived in Canada since 2005 and works for a right-wing institute close to Netanyahu. He is another figure whom the pro-Netanyahu propaganda apparatus uses, along with his publications, as research validation: feed an Amit Saar text in one end, and a “deep-state government” comes out