https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-05/ty-article/.p...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-h...
One take on this is that Netanyahu allowed them to happen because he needs to stay in power to delay his personal risk of going to jail, which would be compatible with his subsequent actions to prolong the war, but it’s also quite plausible that this simply reflects widespread arrogance: many reports say the intelligence alerts were ignored because senior officials didn’t believe that Hamas was capable of a sophisticated attack. Their tactical excellence would have fed into this, because they generally do outclass their opponents considerably.
But the idea that he actually knew about this and let it happen, is IMO very, very unlikely. I mean, just from that same pragmatic perspective in which he'd do anything to remain in power - he lost massive amounts of support because of October 7th. He's been able to claw some of that support back, but he's still polling far below where he was before October 7th, and it is very unlikely he will remain in office past the next elections.
That said, if I had to bet my money is on simple arrogance. When you’re that consistently outclassing your opponent it’s easy to assume that’s always true as opposed to to _mostly_ true. We had similar problems with 9/11 where FBI offices were playing internal political games because they just weren’t serious enough about major domestic attacks.
The fact that most of the IDF was busy finding ways to "liberate" land in the left bank while it happened to me is a reason why i mostly think it is due to stupidity. It's very plausible, and that's what IDF primary purpose was until last october. By removing people from their houses in the west bank, they allow settlers to take that land (as it is unused), and that's how Israel grow. It was like that that they took my father's (christian) orphanage and school: pretexted the building was too old and needed reparation, put the Sisters and the kids out, destroyed the orphanage, settled the place. Easy. They probably thought the warnings were given to prevent them to build new settlements fast enough, and choose to ignore them.
I'm sorry that happened to him.
That's a pretty crazy claim. There were very few Bedouins killed (and how the heck would Bibi know who Hamas was going to kill btw? Hamas could have tried driving straight to Ashkelon or could have focused only on Sderot). Nova party was not a left wing event, right wingers are just as likely to go to raves - I would say the rave was pretty much an ordinary representation of Israeli secular society. Other than that tons of cops got killed, tons of right / center leaning people in the towns near Gaza and so on. And yes quite a few left wingers.
I don't think this is a Netanyahu issue anyway, i think that most israeli leaders, whatever their political leaning would probably have made the same mistakes. Not at least acknowledging "discourse on colonialism" from Cesaire when you have settlers yourselves is to me a grave mistake of the Israeli society. I'm not saying you must agree with most of it, i don't, or that it apply 1 for 1, it doesn't, but acknowledgement this text exist and trying to draw parallels and do a self-criticism is a very good way to limit the impact of colonialism on your own population and (especially in this case) leadership.
Another take is somewhat between yours and that of the parent:
It's not that Bibi "knew" that an all-out massacre was coming on the scale that it actually did. Rather, that he chose to discount the signals he was receiving (that something "big" was in the works), and to downgrade the actual risk to his people. Thinking "Okay, so they might try something, but then we'll just hit back with some heaver-than-usual rounds of lawn mowing. Which will get the message across, and be lots of fun besides."
So in that sense he did "know", in that he could have known if he wanted but his ideology and his blind belief in his insane long-term strategy vis-a-vis Hamas prevented him from seeing what should have been staring him in the face.
Very much like with Bush II and the warnings he got about 9/11 -- but in Bibi's case, apparently the indications were much more specific.
The little we do know doesn't seem to point to him being a single point of failure - it does seem like there were many warnings, but for various reasons being uncovered now, it looks like several people in the establishment discounted these.
When having terrorist organisations shoot bottle rockets at you or have their members blow themselves up is a common occurrence and your tolerance of collateral damage in your military counter-attacks is so high that you've continuously killed an order of magnitude more people in your counter-attacks every year while maintaining a much higher ratio of civilians casualties per military target, you don't actually need good intel because your mode of response defaults to "just kill 10x as many of them as they killed of us".