The War to Erase October 7: What ‘The Atlantic’ leaves out about Netanyahu and the US-Israeli assault on Iran

Benjamin Netanyahu’s most important motives since October 7 are not a mystery. He is trying to stay in power, stay out of jail, and rewrite the meaning of the worst security failure in Israel’s history. The war in Gaza, the campaign against Hezbollah, and now the assault on Iran all serve those goals. Yair Rosenberg’s Atlantic article, “The Israel of October 6 Is Never Coming Back,” manages to tell the story of Netanyahu’s “transformation” while ignoring this basic reality. It takes a ruthlessly political operator and repackages him as a tragic figure “radicalized” by trauma, and it turns a long-prepared ideological project into something that supposedly just happened to him and to Israel on October 7. Even the famous Obama-era description of Netanyahu as a “chickenshit” is quietly inverted: that label was about his refusal to risk his position by making peace, not about some deep reluctance to use force. Rosenberg treats the same record as proof that there was once a cautious, responsible Netanyahu whose moderation was destroyed by October 7.

On October 6, 2023, Netanyahu was already in existential trouble, both politically and personally. He faced mass protests over his judicial overhaul, collapsing approval ratings, and ongoing criminal trials. October 7 should have finished him. A normal political system would have forced his resignation within days. Instead, he discovered that a permanent emergency could protect him. The larger and more open-ended the war, the more easily he can say that now is not the time for elections, now is not the time for commissions of inquiry, and now is not the time to talk about his failures. The point is not just to survive the present; it is to turn October 7 from the day that damned him into the opening chapter of a different epic, in which the leader who presided over a disaster then “had the courage” to destroy Hamas, defang Hezbollah, strike Iran, and transform the Middle East to Israel’s advantage. Rosenberg never admits that this is what the war is also doing for Netanyahu; he prefers to psychologize rather than politicize.

Seen from this angle, the pattern since October 7 is straightforward. In Gaza, Netanyahu launches the full-scale ground operation he had avoided for years, despite his own prior warnings about the cost, because after the massacre he cannot appear cautious, and because a huge war makes it harder to remove him. In the north, after months of hesitation, he eventually chooses escalation against Hezbollah in a way that locks the country into his leadership in the name of “unity in wartime.” With Iran, he presses for, and finally gets, a direct campaign against the regime he has spent his entire career presenting as the new Nazis, the new Amalek, the new existential enemy. The more “historic” enemies he can claim to have confronted, the smaller his original culpability is meant to look. Rosenberg dutifully narrates this as Netanyahu and Israel being “radicalized” by trauma, but he erases the more obvious reading: these escalations are designed to change the verdict on October 7 itself, from Netanyahu’s unforgivable failure to his “necessary breaking point,” and to rescue the man at the center of it.

Weaponizing Holocaust memory

We have seen this pattern of obfuscation and obscurantism before, and this is where the James Fallows / Jamie Kirchick episode linked above matters. In 2015, during the fight over the Iran deal, Fallows said something almost no one in the “Jewish” pundit world ever forgives: he described Netanyahu’s Iran posture as political. He argued that Netanyahu did not literally believe Iran was about to wipe Israel off the map the next day, but was invoking 1938 and the Holocaust “for chauvinistic reasons having to do with Israel’s place in the regional power hierarchy”—using apocalyptic rhetoric about Iran to keep it isolated and preserve Israel’s regional edge, and to box in an American administration he opposed.

That is very close to what is happening now. Netanyahu’s attack on Iran is presented to the world as a last-ditch move to stop an existential threat, but it is inseparable from his need to demonstrate that his lifelong warnings were “right,” that he alone saw Amalek clearly, and that only his style of politics can protect Israel. It is also inseparable from his need to keep himself at the center of Israeli political life for as long as possible.

Kirchick’s response to Fallows showed how this line of analysis gets policed. He did not just argue that Fallows was wrong on the merits. He accused him of “leading the brave charge against Jewish conniving,” portrayed him as “annoyed at receiving letters from fearful Jews,” and claimed that his argument “gives Jews a peculiar choice: Either you agree with me, or else you become fair game for a classic anti-Semitic stereotype.” In other words: say that Netanyahu is using Iran and the Holocaust as political instruments, and you will be treated as if you are trafficking in antisemitic tropes.

That reaction became the template. You could disagree with Netanyahu on tactics. You could quibble over red lines and timelines. What you could not do, without triggering the Kirchick treatment, was say plainly: this man is instrumentalizing Holocaust memory and Iran’s threat for his own power and status.

Rosenberg’s column is the respectable, Atlantic-tone version of the same move. He does not smear anyone; he simply writes as if the Fallows reading of Netanyahu doesn’t exist. His Netanyahu is radicalized by trauma and emboldened by unexpected military success, not as a defendant and political survivor who has discovered that a three-front war, no matter the danger or cost, is his last insurance policy.

This silence is not just personal to Rosenberg. It flows from a broader Hasbara Culture that treats Netanyahu’s worldview as sacred. A certain cluster of “Never Again” journalists—Jeffrey Goldberg, Rosenberg, Kirchick, and others—have spent decades telling American readers that Israel’s enemies should be read through Holocaust categories. Iran is not just a hostile state; it is Amalek. Hamas is not just a brutal, rejectionist movement; they are, as Rosenberg himself argues, the new Nazis who simply want to kill Jews. Anyone who doubts that framework is portrayed as naive at best, or dangerously indulgent of genocidal antisemitism at worst. In that article on Hamas, Rosenberg had the Hasbara Culture chutzpah to link to a Jewish Currents interview of the great genocide scholar Omer Bartov and writes, “others on the left have clung to the tortured conception of Hamas as a rational resistance group despite it having been falsified by events.” Thankfully, the writer Shadi Hamid takes Rosenberg to task in a X thread and debunks Rosenberg’s Hasbara Culture ignorance. 

In Hasbara Culture’s world, Netanyahu is not just another politician; he is the man who sees 1938 coming again. His constant talk of “existential threats” is treated not as rhetoric but as revelation. Once you accept that frame, questioning his motives becomes almost taboo. If you say he is exaggerating or exploiting the threat, you are implicitly saying Jews should not take existential danger seriously. If you suggest he is using Holocaust memory for political gain, you risk being lumped with the people who accuse “the Jews” of “using” the Holocaust.

That is why, when Netanyahu throws around Amalek and Holocaust analogies, these journalists nod along. It is why they treated his Gaza campaign and now his Iran war primarily as responses to October 7, rather than as the culmination of a long political and ideological project. And the long political and ideological project is the revisionist Zionist program he inherited and perfected: a maximalist claim to the land between the river and the sea; permanent rejection of Palestinian sovereignty; and an “iron wall” ethic that treats overwhelming, exemplary violence as the only reliable guarantee of Jewish safety and supremacy. Read this way, his invocations of Amalek and the Holocaust are not just panic or trauma, but the moral vocabulary of a worldview that prefers endless war‑management, de facto annexation, and regional work‑arounds to any settlement that would concede equal rights to Palestinians—and that is exactly how Gaza, and now Iran, end up looking like destiny rather than choice.

And it is why Rosenberg can write thousands of words on “the Israel of October 6” without once confronting the most obvious question: what does all of this do for Benjamin Netanyahu?

Turning trauma into destiny

Finally, Rosenberg’s framing turns trauma into destiny. Because October 7 was so horrific, because Hezbollah rockets and Iranian missiles were so frightening, he implies that there was no real choice but to radicalize—to go all the way in Gaza, to finally “finish” Hezbollah, to take the fight directly to Iran. Every escalation becomes the understandable reaction of a wounded society.

But Israelis do have choices, and so does Netanyahu. He chose to cling to office after October 7 instead of resigning. He chose to build and maintain a coalition that depends on messianic extremists. He chose maximalist war aims that make de-escalation nearly impossible. He chose to talk about Iran in Amalek language for years, so that when the moment came, an attack could be sold as the obvious conclusion of “Never Again.”

None of those choices were inevitable products of trauma. They were the decisions of a man who has always treated politics as existential when it comes to himself. To say that, to say that the war on Iran is also a war on accountability for October 7, is not to deny Israeli trauma or danger. It is to refuse the demand that Netanyahu’s motives be treated as holy.

Rosenberg’s column obeys that demand. It gives readers a story in which events explain Netanyahu, rather than one in which Netanyahu is using events. For an Atlantic audience conditioned for years by Hasbara Culture, that may feel natural. But if you want to understand the Israel of October 7 and after, you have to start from a much more basic sentence: Benjamin Netanyahu is doing what he has always done, only more so—he is using the language of existential Jewish threat to protect the one existence he has ever truly cared about, his own.