Should there be a National Commission of Inquiry into failures of the Israeli government and military around October 7? Scott Abramson leans towards an affirmative answer, while deftly highlighting the political and psychological consequences of similar commissions in the past.

I have little to add to Abramson’s excellent historical analysis. Yet the underlying theme of the essay—that Israel suffers from a lack of accountability, which he aptly describes with the Hebrew term din v’heshbon—ought to be extended still further. Traumatic and unique as October 7 and its aftermath has been, the crisis of accountability, or, better yet, of unrepresentative government, is deep and long-running, as the broken electoral politics as well as the judicial reform crisis of 2023 amply testify.

In modern liberal democracies, meaningful elections are the public’s primary tool for disciplining the government. When an electoral system is functioning robustly, the public has the opportunity and ability to throw out the bums from one party in exchange for a new or at least different set of bums from another. Witness the British public this month deciding to chuck the Conservative party out of government due to perceived corruption and fecklessness, giving the Labor party a shot to prove that it can do better. The rewards and punishments of elections of this kind can be constructive for both the losers and the winners. The losers are, one hopes, forced into a kind of soul searching and a renewal of personnel if not of policy. Whereas the winners, now firmly in charge of a strong government, can no longer hide from the consequences of what they do and what happens under their watch.

Israeli elections have almost never worked this way—and never less so than now. It is frequently said that Israel’s multi-party coalition system of government produces no clear winners. But it also produces few clear losers. (Even Shimon Peres, on whom the Israeli public had bestowed the Hebrew-English epithet “loser” for his electoral track record, finally had a late-in-life triumph as an activist president.) A party that wins seats in the Knesset can justify itself as “delivering for its voters” and claim, with plausibility, that it could be an effective power broker in the coalition despite a limited number of seats. Once thus entrenched, Israeli politicians stick around. Most of the leading figures in Israeli politics today—Benjamin Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman, Aryeh Deri, even Yair Lapid—emerged in the 1990s and 2000s. Americans should be the last to complain about gerontocracy in other countries, but at least the U.S. and British systems can still produce young stars who might plausibly, in the eyes of voters, have a bright future.

Beyond national elections, there are few other levers in Israeli politics to discipline rulers. Israel has municipal and regional elections, of course, but the power of local governments pales in comparison to equivalent bodies in Western countries, and these offices very rarely function as a testing ground for national policies or personalities. The former Jerusalem mayor and current Likud minister Nir Barkat is one of the few politicians who has successfully made the jump from the local to the national arena. One major reason for this is that the bosses of the larger, established parties tightly manage the lists of candidates for Knesset elections. Consequently, party insiders and loyalists get to the Knesset in the major parties, while those who may plausibly be closer to the voters, or have new ideas, or are simply more charismatic, are left to form small, quixotic parties—or remain on the outside of the process altogether.

This has all come to a head, and at a most dangerous time. Over the last several years, Israelis of different political persuasions have not simply been dissatisfied with government performance but have expressed outrage that their voices have not been heard. In recent polling highlighted by the strategist Attila Somfalvi, 71 percent of the Israeli public claims not to feel represented by the current government. In the same poll, only 17 percent say that the current government has the support of the nation. In another recent poll, conducted by the Hebrew University’s Machon aChord, 75 percent of Israelis said that Benjamin Netanyahu was unfit to lead the country after the war. At the beginning of the war, the same poll stated that between 49 and 23 percent thought Netanyahu should resign only “after the war.” Now, even as the war continues, the public, by a margin of 42 percent compared to 34 percent, thinks this ought to happen immediately.

So far, however, it seems that these clear signals from the Israeli public are not filtering into the government the way they might in a functioning parliamentary democracy. What the French philosopher Montesquieu called the “permanent inspecting power of public opinion” appears to be failing to make the government accountable. In Britain, the ruling Conservative party heard from constituents and public opinion that it was failing, forcing it to cycle through prime ministers before facing the voters, tail between its legs. But the disciplining mechanism of the British parliamentary model is simply absent in Israel. The public opinion that matters for Israeli MKs is that of party leaders and bosses, since it is they who can make and unmake the members down the ticket.

The public dissatisfaction with the Netanyahu government therefore produces limited change in the Likud party, whose members realize their fate is tied entirely to that of Netanyahu. The widely commented-upon refusal of Israeli politicians or military figures to take responsibility for failures leading up to October 7 is not simply a product of character flaws, though it may well be this as well. Avoiding accountability is simply baked into the Israeli political system. In the absence of the corrective processes that characterize successful representative democracies, it is no wonder that members of the Israeli public would look to a non-partisan commission of inquiry that could represent public opinion, which, “to the pernicious exercise of the power of government . . . is the only check,” per Montesquieu.

At various points in the past, sophisticated political activists have tried to grapple with the lack of din v’heshbon in the Israeli system. In response to a ruling Mapai party that had, by the 1950s, grown hierarchical and authoritarian, a few affiliated youth movements—so called because they claimed to be the party vanguard rather than for the age of their members—such as the Ts’irim, attempted to bring more democratic accountability in the party and in Israel society at large. Though busy running the country, David Ben-Gurion expressed some sympathy with the movement, as he too worried that a sclerotic Mapai might ultimately sap the republican energies of the Israeli people if it tried to control everything from party headquarters. By 1955, Ben-Gurion agreed with a chief goal of the Ts’irim: the introduction of territorial representative voting rather than proportional presentation, which, it was hoped, would hand more responsibility and active political participation to Israel’s citizenry. This effort largely failed, and the unaccountability of Mapai party elite in the years ahead would ultimately damage both party and country.

Even before October 7, a handful on the left and right had been busy trying to create new organizations and movements, fed by the sense that the mainstream parties were out of touch. As reservists return home from Gaza and seek answers politically, one can expect much more of this.

One popular suggestion for making democracy more representative is to put important questions to referenda. In the 1950s, some of the vanguard Mapai activists favored referenda; and advocacy for direct democracy could gain some traction again. That way lies dragons. Israeli government has only succeeded when it has had strong leaders with the will and ability to make tough decisions by themselves. As Edmund Burke argued in his “Letter to the Electors of Bristol,” a representative is not meant to follow popular will rather to use an electoral mandate to exercise his or her own judgment. At election time, the voters can have their say as to whether their representative has performed well.

So, on the one hand, Israel won’t benefit from the blunt instrument of direct democracy. On the other, Burke’s alternative model only functions if the citizens’ votes, as well as other acts of republican citizenship, filter upward, which they now manifestly do not. Like the Ts’irim (and Ben-Gurion in 1955), I believe that the first step is parliamentary reform on the British model. A thousand other proposals may bloom. In the short term, a commission of inquiry on October 7 might do some good: exposing failures and hubris in the government and military would not only allow remedies to be conceived and implemented. It might also model what political responsibility looks like. But a commission of inquiry is no substitute for the harder work of building a more representative Israel.