Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in an interview with Oded Harush on Saturday night that after the October 7 massacre he briefly considered resigning from his post. He said the events left him with an ongoing sense of self-examination and that he will carry it “until my last day.”
Smotrich said that for the first two months after the attack he had almost no time to stop and process what had happened. “You work 24/7 and there is no time to think, and that is good, because the moment you start thinking, the stomach pains begin,” he said.
He also said that on October 6, one day before the attack, he placed a secret document on the cabinet table warning that Israel needed to initiate a military move against Hezbollah and later against Hamas. He described the contrast between his children packing sweets for Simchat Torah and him writing the classified paper. According to Smotrich, the concern behind the document was that Hamas was no longer deterred and that Israel could be drawn into a much wider war that would not remain limited to Gaza, but could spread to the north and other arenas.
Smotrich further claimed that his position in the cabinet affected the course of the war in Gaza. “There were moments in the war with Gaza when I had a lot of influence, and I had to use a veto to prevent surrender, and without me it would have stopped long ago,” he said. He also addressed ultra-Orthodox enlistment, saying, “I do not want to re-educate them, but to tell them that there is a supreme mission here, to defend the existence of the Jewish people against the enemy. I hope they will make a correction on this matter.”
