Netanyahu Can't Stick Around: Former Mossad Chief

Legendary former Mossad boss Efraim Halevy says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is living in a world which is not real” and cannot stay in office much longer.

“I do believe there are many people in his own party who have reached a conclusion that it's very dangerous to allow him to continue for any long period of time. He is living in a world which is not real. It's not reality,” Halevy said.

The British-born and educated Halevy has often been liked to George Smiley, John LeCarré’s spymaster

“Let's imagine we win the war and Mr. Netanyahu will get up and say, ‘I won the war,’” “Maybe it's true he won the war, but what will people say the day after?”

A longtime critic of Netanyahu and policies encouraging rightwing nationalist Israeli settlers to encroach on Palestinian lands in the occupied West Bank, Halevy also said the failure of Israeli intelligence to detect and deter the Oct. 7 Hamas assaults on Israel would have long lasting effects.

“It's not the first time we have had an intelligence failure. I mean, 50 years ago, we had an intelligence failure on the Yom Kippur War. That was a different story. This is a much more compelling story. The consequences are much more serious than was in the Yom Kippur War.”

The Israeli policy of periodically killing leaders of the fundamentalist terror group has failed, Halevy added.

“You're also changing the character of the movement. And you are reaching a point where, each time you succeed in damaging the leadership, you find a new leadership, which is probably more extreme than the leadership that you cast aside,” he said.

As for Netanyahu’s vow to “decapitate” the current Hamas leadership, Halevy said he didn’t “want to be a prophet and to say it's impossible, but I think it's extremely difficult to do.”

He also rejected the notion of a hostages swap between Israel and Hamas, saying a previous exchange freed Palestinians now running the terrorist group.

“If the price would be to go through the same kind of exercise again and know that, by doing so, you are preparing the next round, for all intents and purposes, that is not a good deal.”

As for the conflict ballooning into a wider regional war, Halevy said that despite the increased tempo of conflict in southern Lebanon, Iran is not “interested in having a major confrontation at all, because Iran wants to take what it gained with the relationship with Saudi Arabia, and it wants to capitalize on it, and it wants to solidify this. And, probably, they know that Saudi Arabia, for reasons of its own, would not be interested in a big flare-up in the north.”

Ironically, Halevy, now 89, was picked to run Mossad by Netanyahu in 1998 after an assassination mission against a Hamas leader in Jordan turned into a humiliating disaster.

He has long argued that Israel would never know peace unless it treated Palestinians with dignity and respect, a policy consistently rejected by Netanyahu and his rightwing base.