‘Don’t rush to your failure’: Biden told Israel not to invade Gaza after Oct 7 slaughter, MK Benny Gantz tells ALL ISRAEL NEWS

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL – After totally miscalculating in Afghanistan in 2021 and failing to stop the Taliban from seizing control of the country, and terribly miscalculating in Ukraine in 2022 and failing to prevent Russia from invading, then-President Joe Biden and his senior national security team made another disastrous miscalculation in 2023.

On Sept. 30 of that year, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Adviser, told a conference, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades now.”

“Now challenges remain,” he added, including “Iran's nuclear weapons program, the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians.”

“But the amount of time that I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11 is significantly reduced."

Sullivan tried to argue that such quiet was evidence of Biden’s successful foreign policy.

But just eight days later, Hamas – funded and armed by the Iranian regime – invaded southern Israel and butchered, raped and burned alive 1,200 Israelis.

Hamas also kidnapped 251 hostages and dragged them into terror tunnels under Gaza.

On October 8, Hezbollah – also funded and armed by the Iranian regime – began firing rockets and missiles at Israel. 

Soon, Israelis found themselves under attack on seven different fronts. 

What ensued has been the longest and most painful war in Israel’s modern history.

Now ALL ISRAEL NEWS has learned that behind the scenes, Biden and his team privately insisted that Israel refuse to invade Gaza.

AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH BENNY GANTZ

Last Monday, I sat down for an exclusive interview with Benny Gantz, the former Israeli Defense Minister and one-time opposition leader who agreed on Oct. 7 to join a national emergency unity government with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In so doing, Gantz also agreed to serve as a Minister in the War Cabinet, alongside Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Gadi Eisenkot, another former IDF chief of staff who is now Netanyahu’s main political rival.

Part of the interview aired over the weekend on THE ROSENBERG REPORT, the weekly, half-hour, prime time show I anchor for TBN, the most-watched Christian TV network in the United States. 

As we discussed a range of topics on war, peace, Evangelicals, and the future of Israel, I asked Gantz, “Is it accurate that in the immediate hours after October 7, President Biden sent officials over here to Israel to insist – to demand – that Israel not invade Gaza in a massive ground operation?”

“President Biden came to Israel” very quickly, on October 18, to show his solidarity with Israel, Gantz began, ever the gracious statesman, “which I appreciated a lot.”

That said, Gantz confirmed that Biden “sent a delegation of four generals to discuss with us their experience from Fallujah [Iraq] and other places around the Middle East and they were telling us, ‘Don't rush to your failure.’”

I wasn’t sure that I had heard him correctly.

“Don't rush into your failure”? I clarified. “That’s what they said?”

“Don't rush to your failure,” Gantz repeated. 

“They were saying you guys were going to lose” if you sent a massive IDF ground invasion into the Gaza Strip to hunt down and destroy all Hamas terrorist forces? I pressed, hardly believing what I was hearing. 

“Yes,” Gantz replied. 

THE BIDEN BETRAYAL

I was floored. 

Publicly, Biden was defending Israel.

But privately, he was pushing Israel to surrender to Hamas in the earliest days after such a horrific invasion and slaughter.

Why would they tell Israeli War Cabinet leaders not to fight and destroy Hamas? 

The answer: President Biden and his military advisors argued that it was going to be too complicated, too difficult, and there would be too many casualties, Gantz confirmed. 

How did you respond? I wanted to know.  

“I explained to my friends – and I appreciated their professional perspective – but nevertheless I explained to them, ‘Listen, this is not an expeditionary force somewhere around the globe. This [terror force] is 500 meters from my home.”

Gantz told me that shortly after the war began, he moved to Kibbutz Yad Mordechai – “by the gates of Gaza,” he said – “to show solidarity with the people over there.

“There is no way we're not going to go into Gaza,” Gantz told the American generals. 

THE GAPING CHASM BETWEEN ISRAELI THINKING AND THE BIDEN WHITE HOUSE 

Gantz was also stunned that President Biden was saying publicly that he stood with Israel and would support the Netanyahu government to take all measures necessary to decisively defeat Hamas and protect all Israelis after the worst attack and slaughter of Israeli civilians in the history of modern Israel.

How could the White House and Pentagon even consider for one moment that Israel wouldn’t invade? 

“You know, there is a huge difference between pre-October 7 and post-October 7 perspectives,” Gantz noted.

“We ran – and I was part of it – at least 5 or 6 military campaigns against Hamas in Gaza in different situations” during his years as IDF chief of staff and later as Defense Minister. “And we didn't go into Gaza full scale.”

“We tried everything else,” other than a massive ground invasion, to manage the Hamas threat.

This included air strikes, special forces operations, targeted assassinations of Hamas leaders and building and steadily improving the Iron Dome system to deter Hamas. 

“None of it worked.”

Gantz added that Israel tried to improve economic conditions for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, hoping that would improve the living conditions and ease tensions. 

“We allowed close to 20,000 [Palestinian] workers to work in Israel,” he noted.

“We were looking at the people themselves, and we were hoping for them to balance between what is necessary for them as a society, economic discussions, and other measures.”

BIDEN DIDN’T UNDERSTAND THE NATURE OF RADICAL ISLAMISM  

I have often said that “to misunderstand the nature and threat to Israel is to risk being blindsided by it.”

Clearly, Biden and his team were blindsided by the evil intentions of Iran and its terror proxies.

And just as they failed in Afghanistan and Ukraine, they didn’t understand the nature of radical Islamism or Vladimir Putin’s radical Russian nationalism.

Gantz tried to impress on the Biden team that “it came to a point that the fundamental approach of radical Islamists is that they like war, they wanted war.”

Such bloodthirsty radicalism is what “brought him [Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar] to order the invasion and murder of 1,200 Israelis – the biggest slaughter of Jews on a single day since the Holocaust – “even though he realized that it's going to bring a very harsh reaction” from the IDF.

Gantz also tried to explain to the Biden team that what Israel was doing with huge air strikes on Hamas targets – and what the IDF would soon be doing on the ground in Gaza was not to seek “revenge” in Gaza.

Rather, Israel’s objectives were to crush Hamas so that it could never pose a threat to Israel ever again and to protect Palestinian civilians as much as possible.

“They asked me, ‘So, how will it look like, this invasion of Gaza?’ I told them, 'It's going to be like a herd of elephants walking into the jungle, but there is no other way of doing it.’”

“We will try to secure Gazan civilians as much as we can [and] try to separate them as much as is possible” from the terrorists. 

Gantz told the Americans it was going to be extremely difficult “to really separate civilians from the fighters.”

‘WE HAD NO CHOICE’

“But we were left with no choice,” he said.

Hamas’ 24 battalions had to be destroyed as quickly and decisively as possible.

Air strikes would be helpful but not sufficient.

Gantz said there was total unity between him, Netanyahu, Gallant, and Eisenkot on launching a huge ground campaign into Gaza to finish off Hamas once and for all.