Why did Israel’s intelligence agencies fail to prepare for the attacks of October 7? Why were warnings ignored? Why didn’t the defensive measures in place work? Could the IDF have responded more quickly, and more effectively, once disaster struck? And how did the political and military establishment convince itself that Hamas was deterred in the first place?

These questions have plagued Israelis, and many others, since October 7. For much of its history, the country has sought answers by convening an official commission of inquiry. As Scott Abramson explains in Mosaic’s feature essay this month, commissions of inquiry have a unique status in the Israeli political system, and have been alternately described as a fourth branch of government and as a ritual for the expurgation of collective trauma.

But will Israel’s polarized political climate prevent an October 7 commission from convening? If there is a commission, when will it be convened and what precise form will it take? Could it find answers to the burning questions on Israelis’ minds? And will it really be able to win the trust of a deeply divided society, and help it heal and learn lessons from one of its greatest national calamities?

In a live conversation on July 24, Abramson, a historian of the modern Middle East, delved into these issues with Haviv Rettig Gur, a leading Israeli journalist and political analyst, and Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver. Subscribers can watch a recording or read a transcript of the discussion  below.

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Jonathan Silver:

Welcome to this conversation with Scott Abramson, the author of our July essay, “How Israelis Probe Their Failings,” and the writer and reporter Haviv Rettig Gur. Scott is a historian of the modern Middle East and works at the Center for Israel Education, having previously held postdoctoral appointments at UCLA and Northwestern University. This is his first appearance in Mosaic.

Haviv Rettig Gur is the lead political writer at the Times of Israel, a frequent guest on Dan Senor’s terrific podcast, Call Me Back, and an occasional contributor to Mosaic. And while he has for years been an astute and insightful political and cultural analyst of the Jewish state, over the last many months he’s been indispensable as one of the very best guides to the Israeli strategic mindset and to the Israeli psyche.

Let me first say a word before we begin about why we at Mosaic thought this was such an important essay to commission and to publish. Our work does not aim to report the news and our big essays are not dictated by the news cycle. Of course, like many of you we’re obsessed with what’s happening in Israel and the Middle East and we try each day to curate the best of what’s published on the Internet and to send you our digested selection of Editors’ Picks to help you stay on top of things.

You ought to read Haviv in the Times of Israel and listen to all the wonderful Israeli news podcasts and read all the excellent Israeli news publications—in addition to reading Mosaic—to stay abreast of what’s happening. Our purpose is a little different and this essay I think is a wonderful illustration of how we understand our role in this media environment. Israel at some point will convene a commission of inquiry over the October 7 attacks and the failings of the government and the military to respond adequately and swiftly, and perhaps also to probe the failings that led up to the attacks. When that happens, it is going to generate an enormous amount of political controversy. That debate isn’t here yet. But when it comes, and I’m sure that it will, this essay and our two written responses—one by Neil Rogachevsky and one by Evelyn Gordon—and this conversation are going to be on the shelf, ready to provide you with the historical and political context that you’ll need in order to understand the terms of the debate.

To begin this conversation, I invite Scott to share some of the main lines of argument that he develops in the essay. He and I are going to have a conversation for a few minutes about what its content, and then I’m going to invite Haviv to discuss it further with Scott.

Scott, the main contention of the essay is that a commission of inquiry of some kind is almost assuredly to take place and that in order to understand the political argument about it, we have to understand the history and purpose of this unique Israeli institution. So, what is a commission of inquiry, and what are the origins of this institution?

Scott Abramson:

A commission of inquiry is, as you said, a peculiar Israeli institution. There are several types, but the one that is preeminent is the state commission of inquiry, which ultimately dates to the British Mandate, in 1921, when an ordinance was decreed establishing a specific commission of inquiry. But strictly speaking it dates from 1968, when a statute was passed in the Knesset establishing and regulating this distinctive Israeli body.

A state commission of inquiry is charged with investigating “matters of vital importance to the public at a given time that require clarification.” There have been twenty state commissions of inquiry in Israel’s history, the first in 1969, the most recent in 2022. They are appointed by the cabinet and empaneled by the president of the Supreme Court. Governments are under no obligation to appoint them, but usually in response to public pressure they do. They have to be chaired by a senior judge. The panel usually consists of three members, sometimes five. And in my essay I address precisely what it is that makes the state commission of inquiry a distinctive Israeli institution. And I can touch on that if you’d like.

Jonathan Silver:

Before you do that, I want to look at what the fact that a commission needs to be chaired by a senior judge means in the immediate political context that we’re emerging out of: right before the October 7 attacks there was a fierce debate about the role of the judiciary in Israel’s public life. It does lead me to wonder if we should understand the commission of inquiry as either an expression of Israel’s democratic self-rule in which one part of society is judging another part of the society or as a technocratic elite passing judgment on the decisions of the elected branches of government. Is a commission an expression of democracy or is it something that sits in judgment of democratic decision-making?

Scott Abramson:

I’m not sure these two understandings are contradictory. I think they could be complementary. The commissions are a crucial auditing body and allow Israelis to reckon with social and intelligence and political failures. At the same time, as you said, they are headed by the president of the Supreme Court and usually, though not statutorily, consist of other judges. And it is in that sense the elite passing judgment on society.

At the same time, the commission itself is critical to accountability in Israel. And even though it might not be elected itself, it is integral to the system of checks and balances in Israel. It’s not liable to political or ministerial pressure. And thus it’s a necessary watchdog in the same way that the state comptroller is.

Jonathan Silver:

You mentioned previously the 1968 state commission of inquiry law that the Knesset passed. What was the problem that this law was intending to solve? What does it actually do?

Scott Abramson:

The first twenty years of Israeli statehood saw 86 commissions of inquiry appointed and each was different from the next. There was no consistency; there was no organization; there was no regulatory guidance. The 1921 British ordinance was not exactly relevant because under that ordinance it was the British high commissioner—the senior British official in Palestine—who appointed the commission. And so in early Israel there was constant floundering, a groping for the right kind of investigative body to probe matters of national importance. But because there was no law that regulated these bodies, they differed and they caused a great deal of debate in Israel’s establishment about their biases, about their independence, about their composition.

The 1968 law was in fact the response to the Lavon affair, which was a scandal in Israel that occurred in 1954. It involved an ill-conceived and botched plan by Israeli intelligence to conduct a false-flag operation in Egypt engineered by Israeli military intelligence and carried out by Egyptian Jews. The aim was to prevent the withdrawal of British troops from the Suez Canal zone. Local Jews working with Israeli military intelligence bombed Egyptian cinemas and post offices hoping this was evidence of Egyptian instability that would dissuade Britain from withdrawing.

Several commissions of inquiry were established to probe the Lavon affair. Three main ones, but a total of seven altogether. And they created a great deal of disagreement in the political establishment. In fact, it was because of Ben-Gurion’s displeasure with the conclusions of one commission of inquiry that he left office. So the Lavon affair illustrated, more than anything else, the need for a law to establish and regulate high-level commissions.

Jonathan Silver:

Today, the commission that was headed by Shimon Agranat following the Yom Kippur War is probably the most famous because it’s been presented in various media and has been depicted in film and it looms largest in the mythology of all the commissions. But is the Agranat Commission really illustrative of anything? When one thinks of a commission of inquiry, should one think of the Agranat Commission as a representative of what they’re like? And can you tell us some of the things that distinguish Israeli commissions from other similar bodies that other democracies have to probe their own failings?

Scott Abramson:

I would agree with you that of all twenty state commissions of inquiry, none is as well-known as the Agranat Commission of 1974. And that’s in part because until October 7, the greatest national trauma in Israel was that inflicted by the Egyptian-Syrian invasion on October 6, 1973. The Agranat Commission gave Israelis what is now the received history of the intelligence failures leading up to the Egyptian-Syrian invasion. The Agranat Commission did not engage with the conduct of the war itself, rather it addressed the failures leading up to it. And the Agranat Commission, as I say, set the narrative in the popular Israeli imagination about how the intelligence failures took place. The Agranat Commission also brought down the IDF chief of staff, the head of the southern command, and the head of military intelligence. It didn’t call for Prime Minister Golda Meir’s and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s resignations, but after the interim report was released and parts of the public felt that the political leadership had been exonerated, there were popular protests and ultimately Dayan and Meir did resign.

As for comparison with other countries’ commissions of inquiry, there are several unique features of the state commission of inquiry, both as an institution unto itself and in relation to the society on which it passes judgment and the country in which it’s created. First of all, these commissions aren’t merely investigative, they’re prescriptive. That is, they’re not just explanatory; they don’t merely describe or diagnose a problem. They’re remedial. They propose solutions, they’re constructive, and they advocate corrective action. They’re also—and this is another distinctive feature—accusatory; they’re finger pointing bodies. The reports they issue cast blame both institutionally and personally. That is very unusual among commissions of inquiry in the democratic world. The American Roberts Commission that convened after Pearl Harbor did name names and point the finger at negligent military officers, but that made it exceptional.

Israeli commissions of inquiry are also independent in a way that other countries’ aren’t. They’re appointed by one branch of the government, the executive branch, and empaneled by another, the judicial branch and the person of the president of the Supreme Court. And once they’re formed, they’re immune to political—and for that matter, judicial—interference, never mind that they originate in the cabinet and Supreme Court. They also possess subpoena authority and that enables them to impound documents, summon witnesses, and compel testimony. If you look at, say, American congressional commissions in the past few decades, rarely were they vested with subpoena authority. And there’s a whole other set of distinctive features that relate to the commissions’ impact on Israeli society and the relationship of the Israeli people to them.

Jonathan Silver:

We ought to turn to that, but let me first just understand one thing. The product of such a commission, the report that it produces, is that report a recommendation that then can be acted upon? Or does it include some kind of compulsory actions that must be taken by statute or law?

Scott Abramson:

The commission reports are, as I think I put it in the article, diagnostic in that they explain what’s ailing Israel, what caused the crisis under investigation. They’re also remedial in that they actively propose recommendations to avoid a recurrence of the event being investigated. They’re both explanatory and prescriptive.

Jonathan Silver:

So they come up with some kind of diagnosis, and might say, for instance, that the intelligence apparatus erred in a certain way. And they’re also remedial, in that they say: in order to avoid that kind of error in the future, you ought to do this or that. But then once they’ve produced that report with those recommendations, if the prime minister’s office or military intelligence says, “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. We’re not going to accept that recommendation,” then it doesn’t necessarily go anywhere as a matter of policy and law?

Scott Abramson:

Yes, that’s right. Because the commission reports are nonbinding, so the government and, for that matter, other institutions are under no obligation to give effect to those recommendations. In many cases, commission recommendations have gone ignored.

Jonathan Silver:

Let’s turn to the effect that these reports have not on the policy process itself, but on Israeli society. Aside from driving any kind of policy or operational change, you argue that they can have a therapeutic effect.

Scott Abramson:

Absolutely. They are a kind of national catharsis or a salve or a balm for the wound to the Israeli psyche that some disaster caused. If you read, for instance, the petition that was recently filed with the Supreme Court by the evacuees and the bereaved and the survivors, what you’ll see is a legal appeal, but one couched not in juridical terms but at least partly in emotional terms. And this petition to the high court tells of the need to heal national trauma, and that’s quite striking in itself because you wouldn’t expect such emotional verbiage to find its way into a court petition.

And if you look at the statements put out by the organization representing the bereaved and the survivors and the displaced, you’ll see that the bulk of them are concerned with the imperative of healing national trauma. In fact, a recent one included the following phrase: “when there are no answers, there is no healing.” And I think this psychic effect that the commissions have on the Israeli body politic is a peculiar feature of these commissions with no parallel in any other democracy, not by a long shot.

Jonathan Silver:

It just speaks to the power for national unity and for national identity that stories have, how important stories are to the way that we understand ourselves, and how the way we collectively process what has befallen us also forms the horizon of our shared future. You can understand how the imprimatur of a state-sanctioned story—one that says, “This is really what happened”—does a lot for a nation’s self-understanding. Now that self-understanding of course will be contested in free societies, but I do appreciate the collective desire to concretize some kind of received wisdom about what actually happened here.

Mosaic has published two written responses to your essay, and one of them challenges the very idea that such a commission about October 7 will have that balming, calming, strengthening-of-shared-membership-in-a-shared-society effect that the authors of that court petition hope it would. Evelyn Gordon argues that the configuration of Israeli politics right now is such that half the country will, by virtue of political partisanship and polarization, support the commission of inquiry because of who is empaneled to sit on it, and half of the country will oppose the commission of inquiry because of who is empaneled to sit on it and the ulterior motives that they may have in the cut and thrust of contemporary Israeli politics. Is she right?

Scott Abramson:

I’m not convinced that it will, though I do think she makes a very cogent and erudite case. I’m still not fully persuaded that the commission would be more polarizing than healing. And I say that for a few reasons. Israelis tend to defer to the victims of tragedies and disasters, to the bereaved, to the survivors, and they attach to their voices a particular moral authority and they give more consideration to their voices than to others. And I’ll cite an example from recent Israeli history. Until the year 2000, Israel maintained a security zone in southern Lebanon. Then in 1997, two Israeli helicopters collided killing more than 70 Israeli soldiers. This gave rise to the so-called Four Mothers movement. And the Four Mothers movement was a grassroots movement of mothers of either slain soldiers who died in Lebanon or soldiers then still serving in Lebanon.

And when the group formed, only about 35 percent of Israelis favored a unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon. But the Four Mothers whose founding purpose was to call for a withdrawal from Lebanon swayed Israeli public opinion. And it wasn’t long after their founding in 1997 that some 70 percent of Israelis supported a unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, which happened in 2000. The origin of that withdrawal is ultimately traceable to the Four Mothers movement.

I would also say that while there is certainly an element that’s opposed to commissions of inquiry, I don’t think it’s an even a split as Evelyn Gordon suggests, however cogently. I think something closer to one third of the population opposes a commission while the rest is strongly in favor or simply in favor. And about a third of Likud parliamentarians have already called for a state commission of inquiry. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant did, on July 11. And I also think state commissions of inquiry are viewed differently from the Supreme Court, never mind that the Supreme Court is the appointing body. And they still are seen by many Israelis as a bastion of mamlakhtiyut, the patriotic virtue of rising above factionalism and partisanship for the good of the state or choosing national interest over self-interest.

Jonathan Silver:

I want to recommend that our readers and listeners recall an essay on mamlakhtiyut by Neil Rogachevsky, published in Mosaic earlier this year, in the context of David Ben-Gurion’s statesmanship and the example that it offers for us today.

I want to ask a final question, a technical question, before I invite Haviv Rettig Gur to join us. But before I do that, I want to push back on one of the contentions that you make, because I think that there’s something a little more subtle and complicated that is going on here. Of course it is true that in as decent a society as Israel, the victims of war bear a special kind of moral status. That is true because, as they suffer, their neighbors and their family and, through the extended rich, thick social networks of Israel, the entire nation grieves with them. And so it is understandable.

But I think the contention motivating opponents of the commission of inquiry involves a concern that politically animated actors are exploiting those victims and attributing political motives to them. And if we return to the pre-war political context, before October 7, Israel as we all know was engaged in a great civil conflict over how it was going to operate its democratic institutions and who would govern the country, and whether ultimate authority should be lodged in the Supreme Court or in the democratically elected representatives in the Knesset.

And a great conflict and civil debate arose. Lines were very sharply divided and the skeptics of the current commission believe that that same debate has been transferred onto this new political environment, and that the fiercest opponents of Prime Minister Netanyahu are going to exploit the suffering of, and the moral status that is legitimately borne by, the victims of war, and use it as a way to advance their political goals to take out the prime minister. I think that if we have to reckon with the state of Israeli politics, we have to take into account that understanding of the forces at work.

Scott Abramson:

Yes, I think to make the state commission of inquiry more palatable to commission skeptics or opponents, there are a few compromise formulas that could be adopted. One inolves Esther Hayut, who was Netanyahu’s main antagonist during the judicial reform and sort of the bête noire of those calling for a judicial overhaul. Esther Hayut should not be appointed to chair the committee. If she were, I think then it would be very polarizing. I think it would be a kind of coda or sequel to the judicial-reform schism. And unfortunately she is a main, some would even say presumptive, nominee to head the commission of inquiry. Netanyahu is terrified of that prospect and I think in the interest of social cohesion someone else ought to be picked. There are reasons that she’s the most likely nominee and I can get into them later.

I think also if the commission, as Netanyahu and his confederates have discussed, begins its retrospective of the events leading up to October 7 with the disengagement of Gaza, that would preempt an outcry by the commission skeptics on the right (who have behind closed doors been insisting on just this), and that’s because they regard the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 as the original sin that led to October 7. I say all this because I don’t think a state commission of inquiry is inherently problematic to many on the right. I think its composition is what’s in question and there are compromise formulas that could be pursued to preserve social cohesion.

Jonathan Silver:

There is one last technical question that I’d like you to address quickly and then I want to invite Haviv to join in. You mention in the essay a pivotal distinction between a state commission of inquiry and a government commission of inquiry. I just want you to explain to our audience what that distinction is.

Scott Abramson:

A government commission of inquiry is a lower-level commission, because it is not merely appointed by the government, as a state commission of inquiry is, but it is empaneled by the government and reports to a government minister. It’s seen as a body with less gravitas, less independence, and because of that it commands less public trust and confidence. When the law establishing government commissions of inquiry was adopted in 2001, one of the ministers in the government said that this is a mechanism that should be used for “small to medium matters.”

Now, because it’s politicized and it’s not as independent, it’s preferable in the eyes of a sitting government which is of course hardwired to avoid accountability. It’s therefore the first resort of a government when the public calls for a commission of inquiry. As I mentioned in the piece, a Channel 12 report dated October 23 has Netanyahu saying behind closed doors that he wants a government commission of inquiry. Evidently he’s retreated from that. But the most famous government commission of inquiry was the Winograd Commission, which was appointed to investigate Israeli mismanagement of the Second Lebanon War.

Jonathan Silver:

Haviv, let me invite you into this conversation. There is no more subtle analyst of Israeli public affairs. Haviv, I’m eager to know what you made of the essay and what questions you have for Scott.

Haviv Rettig Gur:

Scott, thank you very much for writing this essay. It was detailed. It cut to the heart of the matter in a way that I really, really appreciated because I am someone who believes—and I keep trying to convince political scientists of this, usually unsuccessfully—that Israel is a very, very strange democracy. I don’t mean morally. I don’t mean this in some critique-of-Israel sort of sense. But it’s almost without institutions. (It’s a strange thing to say, but I can back it up.) Very briefly, in one sentence, it’s a democracy that probably has the simplest electoral system in the free world. It is a democracy that is almost entirely cultural.

In other words, we don’t have strong checks and balances, so we build out other sorts of things because we can’t agree on a constitutional order that would implement strong constitutional institutions and checks and balances, whether direct election of MPs—which most parliamentary democracies have and we don’t, which is something you also mentioned—or a second house of parliament, or a primary on the back of the ballot of the party as they have in Denmark. There are all these ways that different democracies have checks and balances and we don’t.

And so we have a weird sort of lawyerly culture. And we have by far the most powerful Supreme Court in the free world. I don’t know any serious person who contests that. Even people who say that we desperately need it to stay that way don’t contest that it is actually an outlier among supreme courts. And we have a state commission of inquiry, and in your essay you describe beautifully just how utterly strange this is with its powers, which are in many ways not official or formal. And even after the 1968 law, the twenty different commissions have all had different effects and different powers and think differently about their jobs. And I want to submit that it all ultimately boils down to a lawyer joke. (It’s a terrible joke, but I’m a dad so I get to make terrible jokes.) It goes like this: if one nation on earth would lead the list of most lawyers per capita, obviously it would be the Jewish state.

The problem with this joke is that Israel leads the world on the actual list of most lawyers per capita by a huge margin, over 600 per hundred thousand. Number two on earth I believe is the Dominican Republic at 400, or something like that. It’s a huge margin. We have a culture of law that has stepped in and has turned our Supreme Court into this immense institution. Israelis rebel against governments more easily than against courts. And this kind of weird state commission is also something lawyerly.

We don’t quite trust politicians. We don’t quite know how to kick them out when they screw up big time. So we have to have this bunch of lawyers. Sometimes it’s not lawyers. Sometimes it’s generals. Sometimes it’s experts in a specific issue that the commission is dealing with. But it’s mostly lawyers and they’re going to oversee this. It’s a cultural mechanism, a cultural check and balance.

All of that was the speech. Now I’d like to ask you my question. Isn’t that kind of marvelous? I’m a big fan of these weird Israeli cultural things. I do think the Supreme Court needs to be reined in. I wrote about it a bunch of times over the course of the judicial-reform fight. But state commissions also are a massively important mechanism. You touched beautifully on the cultural question, which is the healing question, the laying-it-all-out-in-front-of-us so that we can go through the cathartic process. Shouldn’t other democracies have something like this? Take America, when it was going through the 9/11 issue and debate. It’s something that I think other nations maybe lack and maybe if they had, they would have these healing processes that they could go through as well. That’s the cultural question and then I’ll get to my others.

Scott Abramson:

I agree with you. I think it is a singular Israeli institution with no counterpart in the democratic world. I think it’s like the kibbutz in a sense, in that there’s nothing of the kind elsewhere in the world. Could other democracies take a page from Israel and create such a body? Well, it’s worth considering. Justice Earl Warren visited Israel in the 1980s. He said that the Americans have in Israel a perfect example of how to balance civil liberties with security. Now whether his successors on the American Supreme Court feel that way is another matter, but I do think this is one Israeli example that other democracies would do well to emulate.

Haviv Rettig Gur:

In other words, Israeli democracy struggles to build out institutions, so it turns to these kinds of cultural things that make sense to the public. So this is essentially a public-facing institution. The really important distinction between the state commission and the government commission is the most fundamental difference there can be, which is its purpose. The government commission—as you wrote in your essay—starts with a cabinet minister, a government minister who needs help. He or she has a problem. We have a 30-year high in traffic accidents this year according to data that came out this week, for instance. Maybe the transportation minister is going to have a commission and that commission reports to her. She appoints it. And that’s not a bad thing. It means its purpose is to help her do her job better.

And so it’s important that it doesn’t threaten her because she actually needs to be able to appeal to that report. And the state commission of course is designed to sit outside the government and critique it. So these are fundamentally different functions. And these are not standing institutions. Now, the great concern I have, and the great concern you have, and I’d like you to comment on this, is that we keep solving fundamental constitutional problems of oversight and checks and balances with these ad-hoc commissions, or with adding a new power to the Supreme Court because it should be somewhere in government. We can’t figure out where to put this new power to limit the government in some way. We keep solving these problems with our faith in lawyers, because of our culture. In the end, we build this enormous institution that has immense powers that we don’t quite know how to deal with afterwards.

In other words, the commission of inquiry came about to solve a specific problem and then we’re kind of stuck with this institution which is now going to be deeply politicized because October 7 is going to be deeply politicized. How could it not be?

Scott Abramson:

Right. I mentioned that there are compromise formulas that might be pursued in the interest of social harmony. For instance, not tapping Esther Hayut to chair the commission, or beginning the commission’s investigation in 2005. Another, which Evelyn Gordon suggests would be constructive in her response, is a commission that doesn’t cast institutional or personal blame or a commission that doesn’t issue recommendations. In fact, I saw that the editor of [the right-leaning Israeli newspaper] Makor Rishon advocated such a commission. I’m not sure this would fulfill the purpose of a commission. It would be certainly a departure from custom. It would be the first commission in a long time not to offer recommendations. But what’s most important here I think is that lessons be learned to avoid failures in the future and that we allow the survivors and the displaced and the bereaved an opportunity for healing. And there seems to be not just a consensus, but virtual unanimity among this group with such moral authority that a commission is a necessity.

Haviv Rettig Gur:

Let me take this political. Apologies, Jon.

Jonathan Silver:

You’re more than welcome to take it political. Go ahead.

Haviv Rettig Gur:

I want to argue for something, and I want to get your response and for you to tell me why it’s a very silly argument. The most important check on the failures that led to October 7 was October 7. Every single one of the institutions involved has already launched deep and massive and serious internal auditing and thinking. Every person involved has already claimed responsibility, taken that public responsibility, from the head of the Shin Bet to the head of army intelligence to whoever else. Publicly and knowingly. And media have been digging through every file. Soldiers have been interviewed from that day. That whole process is very much underway. We don’t need a state commission of inquiry for that. And I submit to you having gone through some of the Supreme Court petition—not all of it, but some pieces of it—that this is not what the request is for.

Now some of those who want that state commission as soon as possible don’t want it so they can learn lessons. What they’re really doing is pointing to the generally accepted belief among most Israelis—I think including the majority of Netanyahu supporters—that we are in a fundamental, profound crisis of trust. The way this government managed judicial reform [has something to do with that]. This is a government elected in November 2022—that is at least three Israels ago in terms of the basic sense of the country and where it’s going and what’s happening to it. And here’s one of the fascinating things for me about judicial reform. My own critique of the judicial reform was not about the substance of the details of the reform itself. It was entirely about the method, because you cannot fundamentally change constitutional orders and fundamental ways of checking and balancing a system in ways that terrify minorities and different groups and different stakeholders without trust.

And the government didn’t just do it without trust. The way it did it shed the trust violently in political terms—I’m talking about political violence, not actual violence. And you saw this in polls: the week before Justice Minister Yariv Levine announced in, the reform January of 2023, there was something like 70-percent support for judicial reform among most Israelis. And then I think by mid-February it was down to 25 percent, which means most of the coalition voters no longer thought that the government’s version was what the country needed. That is a trust deficit with which Netanyahu then entered the October 7 event. And—I don’t know how to say this politely—he never bothered to recover the trust.

Over the last nine months, he’s gone months without giving an interview. He’s the only one in power that day who has not publicly taken responsibility. He is campaigning and never stopped campaigning. And the crisis of trust is what the commission is supposed to come and speak to. You’ve talked about a commission report being a kind of historical document, which I thought was really profound, and that’s what people are asking for right now: tell us what actually happened, clearly, in a single place. And so I submit that Netanyahu’s fear is not that the commission will be politicized, and therefore won’t do its job as it’s supposed to do its job. His fear is that it will do its job exactly as it’s supposed to and then he won’t be able glide through to the next election and when we’ll already be talking about something else. And that’s why this fight over the commission, I suspect, is ultimately going to revolve around trust. And that’s why I suspect Netanyahu is going to lose the fight over the commission.

Scott Abramson:

I quite agree with your analysis, and I think Levin’s conduct as a head of the judicial selection committee, by virtue of his being justice minister, is only aggravating popular Israeli mistrust. And I say that because it’s the president of the Supreme Court who empanels the commission. The Israeli Supreme Court now is headed by an acting president. Uzi Vogelman is the acting president. Hayut resigned in October because she turned seventy and that’s the mandatory retirement age in Israel. Since then, the Israeli Supreme Court has been headed by an acting president. Now he will himself turn seventy in October and without an acting president appointed as successor, much less a permanent one, there will be a headless Supreme Court and therefore no one to empanel the commission.

And Levin is refusing to convene the judicial selection committee to choose the next Supreme Court president. And this is alienating a great many Israelis. He’s refusing to convene it because he opposes the seniority principle. I don’t want to get into the technicalities. But all this to say that I don’t think the incumbent government is helping to resolve the crisis of trust. Far from it.

Haviv Rettig Gur:

Do you think we can have a commission working during the war? Netanyahu has argued that we can’t. And let me add just a sentence to that. There’s a collapse of Israeli public morale. Neil’s response to you cited some polling that showed that 60, sometimes 70 percent—it depends how you ask the question—of the public wants the government to resign immediately or at least for Netanyahu to resign. And also that’s almost exactly the number that thinks we’re losing the war. And over the last—not nine months, because for four months everything held pretty steady—over the last five months, the Israeli public has increasing lost its belief that we can win. This figure tracks within three points just month after month with distrust of the government. The left doesn’t trust the government’s desire to win the war, and the right doesn’t trust its capacity to do so.

These are two different sides critiquing the government’s ability to win. And so the trust question is the question of the public’s willingness and capacity to believe that this war is winnable. And this war isn’t limited to Gaza of course. Can we have this commission attempt this restoration of trust if Netanyahu fights it tooth and nail knowing it could decapitate him? But if he fights it tooth and nail for that reason and at the same time without public trust, is the war winnable?

So can we have the commission during a war?

Scott Abramson:

Netanyahu spoke to the Knesset last Wednesday and said that wartime, as I put it, is no time for a commission. He said that it would be a distraction from the war effort and it would be absurd to expect those high officials involved in the prosecution of the war to set their national duties aside and appear before the commission with lawyers at their side. The commission if appointed wouldn’t be conducting its deliberations for months from now anyway, so I’m not persuaded by his argument. He also, while addressing the Knesset on the same occasion, spoke of the Duke of Wellington’s opposition to any sort of inquiry when he was fighting Napoleon in the early 1800s. So Netanyahu’s been consistent. He’s reiterated his opposition to a commission during wartime, but this was the first time he did, you could say, so searingly.

Jonathan Silver:

Before we go to questions from the audience, I have to say that I think that the question of trust is the deep underlying question that a discussion of the effectiveness of a commission is a proxy for. I’m very glad that we began to touch on that. I think there’s much more to explore about the state of Israeli civil society, its attitude toward the government versus the military, and toward Netanyahu in general.

But let me bring in some of the fabulous questions that we’ve already received from our audience. First: what kind of pressure might cause this government to create a commission? Do you think there will be one before there are new elections? Scott, Haviv, what are the sources of leverage that can actually be brought to bear on the government to force its hand to create the kind of commission that will do its job?

Haviv Rettig Gur:

It’ll be fundamentally from the Knesset that the pressure would come for a commission. The two institutions that have that ombudsman function are the state comptroller and the state commissions. And they’re essentially divided by branch of government. The state comptroller is literally, I believe, an employee of the Knesset. The office is in the Knesset building. And comptrollers are very powerful, but they literally work for the Knesset State Control Committee. By contrast, the commission is called for by the cabinet and then Supreme Court-appointed, as Scott wrote, and thus independent. But nevertheless, cabinets first have to decide to launch it. Thus one belongs to the executive branch, one to the parliamentary branch.

But ultimately, because of the way Israeli parliamentary democracy works, the government is a function of the coalition in the Knesset. And the relative power of the various forces in the government is ultimately a function of their power in the Knesset. So you have to look to coalition politics to see what could stop a commission and what would not stop a commission. And in that respect, I would say, the entirety of the opposition wants a commission, just about. Maybe some of the Arab parties will raise some objections, but I think they’ll vote for it in the end. And within Likud, as Scott said this in the essay, a third of the MKs—maybe even 50 or 60 percent when it comes to certain questions about October 7—would vote in favor. And thus Netanyahu would have to flex every muscle to stop it, and be seen as resisting it. When you plead the fifth in trial, you end up convincing people you’re guilty. Netanyahu’s continued resistance to a commission will end up having that sort of effect. So I suspect it’s unstoppable even if Netanyahu pulls out every technical procedural means to stop it.

Scott Abramson:

I think pressure has been mounting for the past two months or so. In June, the attorney general called on the government to form a state commission of inquiry. Gallant, as I mentioned, earlier this month called on the government to appoint a state commission of inquiry. We’ve also seen in the past few weeks the publication of the internal IDF probe investigating the failures at Kibbutz Be’eri. That itself gave impetus to a call among certain sectors of the public for the government to appoint a commission.

The organization representing the survivors and the bereaved recently formed what it called a civilian commission of retired generals who are on their own accord investigating October 7. But this, as the organization itself said, is a pressure tactic intended to sway the government to act and to appoint the commission. We’ve also seen in the past few weeks the Supreme Court ordering the comptroller to freeze his own investigation of the IDF’s failures on October 7, specifically because there is a fear among certain justices on the court that the comptroller’s commission could encourage the view that it’s an alternative to a state commission of inquiry.

Jonathan Silver:

A longtime friend and reader poses what amounts to a question of national culture. Would a healthier national culture of accountability among Israeli leaders would make a commission of inquiry unnecessary? If the appropriate members of the government had resigned, if Netanyahu had taken responsibility, would that be a better way to restore trust than a commission of inquiry? What advantages in that kind of environment would a commission bring?

Haviv Rettig Gur:

In a word, yes. We have opinion polls about politicians. We have polls on public trust that look at the ten or fifteen front-bench leaders of the Knesset. I’m drawing here loosely on many, many polls over the many months since October 7. Netanyahu is consistently at the bottom of every single poll, including polls of Likud voters. And Gallant is consistently number one in every single poll. Yoav Gallant was defense minister on October 7. Any failure of Netanyahu’s is a failure of Gallant’s.

Yoav Gallant is calling for a commission that will absolutely, if it’s a witch hunt, tar and feather him and run him out of town. Yoav Gallant stood up, I think it was maybe five or seven days after October 7 and said, “I was defense minister, this is on me.” And that puts him at the top of the polls on trust. And Netanyahu hasn’t done that and that puts him at the bottom. What Israelis want out of a commission, what they want out of leaders, is trust.

I think some of the people at the top feel a burning desire not simply to have as their legacy being the one who oversaw October 7, but also being the one who solved the problem of October 7. That’s not a terrible thing to have operating in the back of the mind of the person who’s going to destroy Hamas. But the public has to know the person in charge isn’t a narcissist who can’t see his own faults. And Netanyahu hasn’t shown that he realizes this happened on his watch, and refuses to show that. And to me, that’s the calamity of this war. And I didn’t think that was a calamity of this war until I saw the polling on how many Israelis think we’re going to lose. And then I thought that lack of trust in the leader is a strategic setback.

Jonathan Silver:

Do you think a commission of inquiry conducted while the war is ongoing might reduce support for the war among the Israeli public, or strengthen in it along the lines laid down by Haviv?

Scott Abramson:

I think it could strengthen it because the mere appointment of a commission would be, as one scholar of commissions observed, a tranquilizer for Israeli society. I think it would raise morale and I think it would be a boon for social cohesion. The commission’s interim report wouldn’t be issued for years anyway, so I think it would do much more good than harm.