Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying a new technique to avoid accountability for the Oct. 7, 2023 attack: pretending — but not very convincingly — to invite it.

Netanyahu has spent more than two years blocking the establishment of an independent inquiry commission led by a Supreme Court justice, a step that has been normative following calamities in Israel since 1968. After Hamas invaded and massacred close to 1,200 people, kidnapping some 250 to Gaza, Israelis almost universally assumed this path would be followed.

Instead, Netanyahu’s government has recently moved to establish a government commission that would have representatives from both the coalition and opposition,  politicizing a process that is supposed to be impartial. And amid these machinations came the most revealing and credible portrait yet of Netanyahu’s mindset immediately after the attack. Eli Feldstein, a former close aide and spokesperson to Netanyahu, said in a televised interview aired last week that right after the Hamas assault, Netanyahu’s first instruction to him was to figure out how he could evade responsibility.

“He asked me, ‘What are they talking about in the news? Are they still talking about responsibility?’” Feldstein, who now faces trial for allegedly leaking classified information, recalled. The “first task,” Netanyahu had in mind after the massacre, Feldstein said, was to stifle calls for accountability and craft messaging that would offset the media storm.

Even allowing for Feldstein’s legal complications, the story has the ghastly ring of truth— in part because of the entire inquiry farce.

A real inquiry would likely deliver harsh conclusions about Netanyahu’s misguided strategy of coddling Hamas; his failure to heed intelligence before Oct. 7; the staggering human cost of the war that followed; the failure to dismantle Hamas despite two years of brutal fighting; Israel’s growing international isolation; and Netanyahu’s repeated rejection of diplomatic exit ramps.

It is obvious that a commission dealing with such explosive matters must not be controlled by the very people it will judge. Yet that is exactly the system Netanyahu has engineered, while arguing that a state inquiry would be stacked against him. Most Israelis see the attempted whitewash clearly, and some three quarters of the public have consistently said they want a state commission.

Realistically, Netanyahu is hoping the opposition will refuse to appoint its own members or cooperate in any way, enabling him to campaign in the 2026 elections on the claim that his rivals blocked the inquiry. That is a shameless strategy — and entirely consistent with his system.

A complete failure

The facts that would confront any serious investigation are not controversial.

On Oct. 7, 2023, the Gaza border was left almost completely unprotected. This, even though warnings of an imminent attack were abundant. Senior security officials had grown alarmed amid multiple intelligence assessments suggesting Hamas could be planning an assault. In the weeks — and even days — before Oct. 7, Israel’s three top security chiefs sought urgent meetings with the prime minister. They wanted to warn him that the unprecedented internal rift he was driving through Israeli society with his judicial overhaul was inviting attack.

Netanyahu refused to meet with them.

Then terrorists breached the border with ease and overran communities. The state and military failed to respond in a timely or organized fashion.

What worked, in those first critical hours and days, was not the government. It was the efforts of citizens. Volunteers. Reservists who rushed south without orders. Individual officers who grasped the scale of the catastrophe and acted on instinct and conscience. For days, the country was in chaos. Many assumed the government would fall.

This was a total failure. And it was built on Netanyahu’s prior policy of deliberately empowering Hamas. For years, he facilitated Qatari funding into Gaza and treated its rule as strategically useful because it divided Palestinian leadership and weakened the Palestinian Authority. He aimed to ensure there would be no credible Palestinian interlocutor with whom the international community might pressure Israel to negotiate a two-state solution. The danger of Hamas controlling Gaza, he believed, was preferable to the risks that would be required to achieve peace.

Under those circumstances, the judgment of a serious inquiry, as regards the government, is not in doubt. That is why Netanyahu’s current strategy is not to totally avoid accountability, but rather to dissolve it — to spread guilt so thinly that it disappears.

A dangerous slide into surrealism

This is where the government’s current arguments slide from cynical to dangerous. Among the more surreal claims now circulating is the suggestion that Israel’s judicial system bears responsibility for Oct. 7.

On a recent television panel in which I participated, Environment Minister Idit Silman said, without the slightest shame, that the Supreme Court cannot be trusted to appoint a State Commission of Inquiry because the court itself must be investigated. He implied that the current president of the Supreme Court — appointed automatically by seniority, precisely to prevent politicization — is himself criminally suspect. This claim is absurd, unsupported and revealing. It exists for one reason only: to delegitimize the one institution capable of appointing an inquiry beyond the government’s control.

Netanyahu’s allies now argue that the public no longer trusts the courts, and therefore the courts lack legitimacy to appoint an inquiry commission. They are recasting past rulings that imposed even minimal ethical constraints on military conduct, or sought to prevent outright massacres of Palestinians, as contributing causes of Oct. 7.

The truth is that public trust in the Supreme Court, which historically ranked just below the military among Israeli institutions, only began eroding because of attacks by Netanyahu and his surrogates. Since a criminal corruption investigation against him was first announced, they have systematically attacked the police, prosecutors and the judiciary.

Now the government points to the damage it caused as justification for sidelining the court altogether. It is, quite plainly, sabotage of Israel’s democracy and rule of law.

An independent judiciary is a strategic asset. It is what allows Israel to argue credibly that it can investigate itself — and therefore that foreign courts need not intervene on questions of war crimes or human rights, which sadly abound. Undermine that credibility, and Israel weakens itself internationally.

But it’s not just the judiciary. The government also insists that the opposition must be investigated too, going all the way back to the 1993 Oslo Agreements that set up the Palestinian Authority — because they once sat in government. The civil service must be investigated as well — because it implements policy. Netanyahu-aligned social media accounts have been peddling absurd conspiracy theories about the Shin Bet helping Hamas on Oct. 7 in order to harm Netanyahu. The end message: Everyone must be investigated — which is another way of saying that since everyone is responsible, no one is especially responsible.

This is the classic trickery of liars and crooks: Everyone is guilty of something, so no one is uniquely guilty, especially not the leader who held power for most of the past 15 years. But the truth is that authority concentrates at the top, and so must accountability.

Netanyahu’s strategy rests on the assumption that he can fool enough of the people enough of the time to cling to power. It has often worked for him, to Israel’s great detriment. All we can hope is that this new scheme will be a bridge too far. If Netanyahu’s coalition is ousted in upcoming elections, the next government will establish a real inquiry. Justice, even if delayed, will ultimately be done.

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