The president wants it. The just-retired former chief of staff wants it. The public wants it.
Only Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is adamantly – nay, as was evident in his discussion on the matter Monday in the Knesset, passionately – opposed to establishing a state commission of inquiry into the October 7 massacre.
Why?
In the early days of the war, Netanyahu said that he wanted a state commission of inquiry, but only after the war ended. He pointed to precedent: the storied Agranat Commission, which investigated the failures leading up to the Yom Kippur War, was established only after the war, not during it.
He and his spokespeople argued that a state commission of inquiry during the war would divert the focus of those in the military and the political echelon from the task at hand: winning the war. They would be focused as much on lawyering up and preparing legal defenses as on the crucial job at hand.
He wasn’t alone in this thinking. National Unity Party head Benny Gantz, a week after October 7 when he joined an emergency government, said: “At this time, we are all soldiers of the State of Israel. This is the time to come together and win. This is not the time for difficult questions; it is the time for crushing responses on the battlefield.”
He indicated that there would be a time of reckoning for the invasion, a time for an accounting, a time for apportioning blame, a time for difficult questions. But not just yet.
That argument made sense – for a while. The Agranat Commission was indeed formed after the war – in fact, just a month after the war – but that conflict lasted only 19 days. This one has gone on – at varying levels of intensity – for more than 500.
As the war drags on, and as the intensity of the fighting and the number of active fronts declined, even those who once backed the “focus on the war” argument began to shift gears and call for a probe. Gantz, for instance, called for establishing such a commission in May 2024, just before leaving the government.
The argument in the Netanyahu camp against the establishment of a state commission shifted as well. Less was heard about the dangers of an inquiry in mid-war and more about the supposed impossibility of forming an objective panel – particularly since it would be appointed by newly installed Supreme Court President Isaac Amit.
'Just an excuse'
Netanyahu’s critics say that this is just an excuse, a pretense. They argue that even in Israel’s deeply divided political climate, where former chief justices and ex-military leaders who would naturally serve on such a panel have taken political stances on issues such as the judicial reform debate and thereby disqualified themselves, some objective figures universally respected could be found. Netanyahu’s real fear, many maintain, is that he would be found culpable and have to resign.
Really? It took the Meron Commission, which investigated the Lag Ba’omer disaster in 2021, three years of hearings before it released its findings. A state commission of inquiry into October 7 would likely take even longer – by which point Netanyahu may no longer be in office. Moreover, such inquiries in the past have not recommended that prime ministers resign – other ministers, yes, but not the prime minister.
That being the case, the fear that the findings would force him to step down makes less sense. The real reason, others argue, is that Netanyahu is concerned that the findings of this committee would be history’s protocol and shape how future generations will view him.
This aligns with a widely held perception of the prime minister: that as the son of a historian and a man steeped in history, he is very concerned about how history will judge him.
Typically, discussions of a leader’s legacy emerge in the twilight of their tenure. However, since Netanyahu has been in power for so long – and because his political end is never quite certain – those discussions have been ongoing for years. As far back as 2015, in an interview with the The Jerusalem Post, he spoke of how he hoped to be remembered: “For making the Jewish state and the Jewish people more secure.... Above all, for fulfilling my sacred responsibility to secure the future of the Jewish state and the Jewish people.”
October 7 will undoubtedly stain Netanyahu’s legacy, having already shattered a title he proudly wore for years – Mr. Security. Just as Golda Meir’s legacy is inseparable from the failures that led to the Yom Kippur War, Netanyahu’s name will be linked to the fiascoes that led to the Simchat Torah massacre.
Whether that stain eclipses everything else depends largely on how the rest of the war unfolds – and what the postwar Middle East, including Gaza, will look like.
It is as presumptuous as it is premature to predict history’s final verdict on Netanyahu. The war that will define his legacy is still ongoing.
But when historians look back at this period decades from now, they will likely scratch their heads and wonder how certain developments were tolerated at a time when the country was engaged in an existential battle.
The first such development is the very public spats at the top – between the government and judiciary, the government and the IDF, and the government and the intelligence agencies.
The public deserves to have confidence in its leaders
At a time when the public needs to have confidence in its political, military, and intelligence leaders, this confidence is eroded when the public sees that these leaders don’t have confidence in one another. If the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) releases a report this week that, while detailing its own failures in the October 7 collapse, blamed the government for essentially not knowing how to deal with Hamas over the past two decades, and if sources close to the prime minister respond that Shin Bet head Ronen Bar essentially does not know what he is doing, then what should the public conclude?
When one of the central intelligence branches has no trust in the prime minister, and the prime minister has no trust in the intelligence branch, things are not working right. Historians will rightfully ask how, in the midst of a war, such a breakdown was allowed to happen and was tolerated.
Or how does a situation arise where distrust between the judiciary and the government runs so deep that the prime minister refuses to let Amit appoint a panel to investigate the failures of October 7 – failures the country must learn from to prevent history from repeating itself?
Or how, amid everything else going on, and when the government and attorney-general need to be in sync, does a situation develop whereby a process is initiated – for only the second time in the country’s history – to fire the attorney-general?
At a time of war, when different arms of government should be working in unison, this level of dysfunction borders on malpractice.
A situation where the prime minister can’t work with the attorney-general, the head of the Shin Bet has no confidence in the government, and different branches of the government and military are at constant loggerheads is detrimental – it is damaging in the best of times, and even more so now. If Israel’s leadership is at war with itself, how can it effectively lead a war?
This internal paralysis extends beyond the military and judiciary, reaching straight into Netanyahu’s schedule. Instead of dedicating his full attention to steering the country through this crisis, he is forced to spend hours each week in court trying to persuade judges that specific stories published on a website a decade ago were not part of a favors-for-positive-coverage scheme.
That he is entangled in a legal battle at this time that has nothing to do with the war is tough to justify. That a way was not found to prevent this situation – either Netanyahu stepping down long ago, the president issuing a pardon, or the courts brokering a deal so that matters of state could be dealt with as they should – will likely be seen as inexplicable.
This failure to find a way to separate personal legal battles from matters of state and keep the former from interfering with the latter will not be the only inexplicable failure that future historians will struggle to understand.
Another issue that will likely baffle them is how, after October 7 – after everyone saw the need for a much larger army, after reservists spent month after month after month away from their families and jobs – the country still tolerated a situation where tens of thousands of able-bodied men of army age did not have to serve.
Throughout history, when nations faced existential wars, they mobilized all available forces – because survival demanded it. History is replete with instances where everyone – but everyone – took up arms when the invaders were at the gates. That this did not happen in Israel in the aftermath of October 7 will surely leave future observers dumbfounded.
It’s not only Netanyahu’s legacy that is at stake, but the country’s as well.