Smotrich says he weighed quitting after Oct. 7, but ‘couldn’t find anything’ he did wrong

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich claimed in a podcast interview that he considered resigning after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, onslaught but decided to hold off after giving it more thought and concluding that he did not do anything wrong.

“I thought about resigning — not right after October 7, but a little while afterward, when I tried to think about what I did that wasn’t right and I couldn’t find anything,” Smotrich said during an interview on the Geekonomy podcast on Tuesday.

Smotrich said for the first two months after the war broke out he worked “like a robot on autopilot.” But then, he said that when he had a moment, he got a stomach ache when he thought, “Wow, this happened on my watch. The worst massacre that happened to the Jewish people since the Holocaust happened under my watch. And I am trying to think what I did wrong,” he added.

Smotrich went on to say that he protested against the Oslo Accords as a child, appearing to suggest that the peace process with the Palestinians in the 1990s was connected to the Hamas attack three decades later.

He added that he also demonstrated against Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and was jailed for three weeks after authorities pulled him over with 700 liters of gasoline. While the Shin Bet suspected that he was trying to use the gasoline in an attack, he was never charged.

Smotrich has previously argued that the Oslo process and the 2005 Gaza disengagement were to blame for the October 7 attack.

Hamas-led terrorists massacred some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in southern communities and took 251 hostage on October 7, 2023.

In the immediate aftermath of the brutal assault, Smotrich admitted the government had failed to keep citizens safe.

“I take responsibility for what was and what will be. We have to admit with pain and with a bowed head — we failed. The country’s leadership and the security system have failed in maintaining the security of our residents,” Smotrich told a press conference on October 15, 2023.

Smotrich serves as a minister in the Defense Ministry in the current government, which took office nine months before the Hamas massacre, with responsibility over civil affairs in the West Bank, and served as transportation minister in one of Netanyahu’s previous governments. He was a member of the high-level security cabinet in both.

In a 2015 interview, when describing Palestinian efforts to delegitimize Israel, then-MK Smotrich described the Palestinian Authority as “a burden” and Hamas, because it is a widely recognized terrorist organization, as “an asset.”

Opposition lawmakers have since cited that remark frequently as part of their argument that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governments, which also oversaw the flow of hundreds of millions of Qatari dollars into Hamas-run Gaza, propped up the terror group prior to the onslaught.