What precisely might be the “day-after” solution? International peacekeepers? We saw how well that worked out in southern Lebanon, where their presence has failed to deter Hezbollah in any respect from establishing total control. A revived Palestinian Authority, leading to a two-state solution?

Since October 7, there has been a never-ending chorus of voices calling for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to accept responsibility and resign or call for new elections. Those calls have reached a crescendo since the resignation last month of the head of the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate, General Aharon Haliva.

At the outset, it is important to note that the nature of the responsibility taken by Haliva and that being urged upon Netanyahu, as head of the government at the time of the horrors of October 7, are very different. As Haliva admitted in his letter of resignation, he and the intelligence directorate under his command failed with respect to the most important part of its mission: to warn of an impending attack. His responsibility was operational, not ministerial — i.e., he failed in a clearly defined task.

In a similar vein, the commission of inquiry likely to be established when the current war ends will focus, in part, on why it took the army so many hours to confront the terrorists who crossed the border into Israel, and why it was left to so many private citizens to grab their rifles and head south long before there was any military response. That is a clearly defined failure.

Netanyahu’s responsibility is of an entirely different nature. It is ministerial responsibility for things having gone awry while he was prime minister. True, other prime ministers have resigned in similar circumstances, most notably Golda Meir after the Yom Kippur War. But it is not required. Netanyahu has not been found incompetent with respect to a clearly defined and crucial task.

Netanyahu, like Aharon Haliva and a long line of chiefs of staff and defense ministers, fell prey to the conceptzia that Hamas was largely deterred and would not launch any major attack on Israel. He did not, however, ignore specific warning signs as Haliva did, or threaten the Cassandras bringing him concerning information he did not wish to hear.

A strong argument can be made that Netanyahu erred in facilitating Qatar’s funding of Hamas, as a means of placating them and keeping them docile. But even if Netanyahu was completely mistaken about Hamas’s long-term intentions, there is little he could have done prior to the heinous attack on October 7.

We have witnessed how Israel has been anathematized for responding forcefully to one of the most horrific attacks in living memory. Imagine what the world response would have been had Netanyahu or any other Israeli leader ordered an attack on Gaza to uproot the terrorist infrastructure without a preceding Hamas attack.

Not only would such an attack have unleashed international condemnation, it would have brought down the government in Israel as well. Netanyahu would have been accused of being a warmonger guilty of irresponsibly shedding Jewish blood. Everywhere he went, he would have been hounded by bereaved parents blaming him for their children’s “unnecessary” deaths in Gaza combat.