David Axelrod speaking at the 2025 Dialogues for Democracy at the Rob and Melani Walton Center for Planetary Health in Tempe, Arizona, March 3, 2025. (credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
CNN’s Chief Political Analyst David Axelrod suggested Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be blamed for Hamas’s massacre while labeling AIPAC “Israel’s lobby” in America on the network’s primetime show “Midterms 2026: Countdown to Election Night” on Oct. 18, 2026.
Both claims twisted basic facts: shifting blame for a terrorist massacre and maligning an American advocacy group as a foreign agent.
During the heated panel exchange, Axelrod faulted Netanyahu for doing “terrible damage” to the U.S.-Israeli relationship. When Senior Political Commentator Scott Jennings responded, asking why it was Netanyahu’s fault that his nation was attacked, Axelrod replied: “Actually, it may be. We don’t know.” Axelrod argued that Netanyahu’s refusal to authorize a customary official review of the intelligence failures preceding the attack linked him to the massacre itself.
Despite pushback from CNN’s Brian Todd, who noted that “negligence didn’t lead to a massacre,” Axelrod doubled down. When Jennings directly asked, “Who did the massacring?” Axelrod refused to answer. Contributor Lulu Garcia-Navarro then framed the exchange as a reflection of the ongoing debate among the Israeli electorate regarding the government’s accountability.
Garcia-Navarro is correct that Israelis are debating their government’s security failures. A state commission of inquiry – the kind of “official review” Axelrod referenced – would investigate the massive operational failures of October 7. Still, Jennings did not ask whether Netanyahu’s government failed to prevent the attack; he asked whether it was Netanyahu’s fault that Israel was attacked in the first place. Axelrod’s answer moved from the question of security negligence to the question of responsibility for the attack itself.
Regardless of Axelrod’s long-standing friction with Netanyahu, failing to stop an attack and committing one are fundamentally separate questions—a distinction Israel itself already makes.
Alongside the debate over the state commission of inquiry, Israel’s parliament in May 2026 approved the “Prosecution law for the October 7 Massacre,” which, according to CNN’s own reporting, creates a dedicated tribunal to prosecute roughly 400 Hamas Nukhba terrorists held in Israeli custody since the attack. One process asks how the attack was able to happen. The other holds accountable those who carried it out.
Whatever a commission ultimately finds about Israel’s security failures, those findings would not transfer responsibility for the torture, murder, and kidnapping of October 7 away from Hamas and the others who chose to commit them.
A commission investigating security failures serves a different purpose than an inquiry into perpetrators. Even if Israel’s border infrastructure had completely collapsed, responsibility for the torture, murder, and kidnapping of October 7 would still rest solely with Hamas and the civilians who chose to commit them. Blurring these lines allows terrorists to evade responsibility for the horrors they inflicted.
Axelrod’s willingness to obscure key facts (or have an intellectually honest conversation) was not isolated to the October 7 discussion; it was also evident when addressing American advocacy organizations.
Characterization of AIPAC as “Israel’s lobby”
Earlier in the segment, Axelrod falsely stated, “AIPAC describes itself on its own web site as Israel’s America — Israel’s lobby in America. That’s what they do.”
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt popularized the term “Israel lobby” with their 2006 article titled, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” which they expanded into a book in 2007. The Anti-Defamation League lambasted the article at the time, calling it a “sloppy diatribe” with “elements of classic anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.”
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is not “Israel’s lobby,” but rather an American organization that advocates for a stronger U.S.-Israel partnership and says it is neither directed nor funded by the Israeli government.
As AIPAC states on its website, “AIPAC and our 6.5 million members advocate for policies that strengthen the U.S.-Israel partnership and help elect Democrats and Republicans who support the alliance. Our members and donors are all Americans, and AIPAC is neither directed nor funded by the Israeli government.” (Emphasis added)
None of the reporters on the panel corrected Axelrod when he made the statement. Although CAMERA and numerous individuals on X highlighted the error, CNN did not issue a correction.
The two errors share a common thread. In each, a fact about Israel was reframed to fit a political argument. With AIPAC, an organization of American citizens was presented as a foreign government’s agent, a manifestation of the “dual loyalty” trope.
On October 7, a debate over Israeli security failures slid toward a suggestion that Israel’s prime minister may bear responsibility for a massacre carried out by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists and other Palestinians who joined them.
Both AIPAC’s role in American politics and the October 7 inquiry are, and will remain, matters of genuine political debate in the United States and Israel. But the facts underlying them are not. AIPAC’s funding and governance are matters of record, not opinion, and an inquiry into security failures is an entirely separate question from who committed the massacre. For audiences trying to understand Israel and its relationship with Jewish communities abroad, the distinction matters, and CNN’s panel failed to draw it.