Bittersweet

In November, 1945, George Orwell published a piece called Revenge Is Sour in the weekly Tribune. A few months earlier, as a war correspondent, he had visited a prisoner-of-war camp in southern Germany, where he watched a young Viennese Jew, an interrogator for the American Army, kick an SS officer. The scene taught him, he wrote, that the whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Revenge, in his view, is the act of those who feel powerless, and the desire evaporates as soon as the powerlessness ends. Orwell, it should be remembered, was an optimist.

Revenge is an assertion of control over a situation in which we once felt powerless. Israel, which has power to spare, ought to prove that power cures the desire. It doesn’t. Three years after October 7th, the desire for revenge has withstood all that power and turned into politics. And that politics has acquired a beneficiary, whom you insist on keeping on Balfour Street.

Roni Eshel was nineteen years old and served as a lookout at the Nahal Oz base, less than a kilometer from the Gaza border. She spent her shifts in front of screens trained on the other side. Months before the attack, she told her father that Hamas was studying the lookouts and knew almost every corner of the fence. On Wednesday, October 4, 2023, she put it more simply. They knew everything. She and her comrades repeated the warning to their superiors, who dismissed it. On Saturday morning, Roni was one of the first to see the invaders. By lunchtime, fifteen of the base’s lookouts were dead, and six had been taken to Gaza. Her family waited thirty-four days to learn that she would not be coming back.

That Saturday, I was at home, catatonic, unable to believe that the army we liked to call the most ethical in the world had abandoned our people. We did not lack power. We had tanks, planes, and an intelligence service famous for knowing everything. In Be’eri, the terrorists controlled the kibbutz for about four hours, and nine months later the military spokesman admitted that the troops had not been there for much of the fighting. None of the offensives that followed, in Gaza, in Lebanon, and in Iran, can give those hours back. That is why the desire has not evaporated. The powerlessness that feeds it lives on in a Saturday that no tank can reach. Orwell got the mechanism right and the timetable wrong.

Over what happened that morning, the only control still within reach is knowledge. We need to know why Roni’s warnings died on someone’s desk, why Be’eri waited alone, and who decided what in the weeks before. For that, Israel has a tested instrument, the state commission of inquiry. Revenge offers an imitation of that control, aimed outward, with an advantage that no government disdains. It asks no questions of those who govern.

Netanyahu’s choice of scripture is instructive. Three weeks after the attack, announcing the ground invasion of Gaza, he cited Deuteronomy and told the country to remember what Amalek had done to it. The next verse tells how Amalek struck at those who had fallen behind. For Israelis in 2023, the image required no explanation. The commandment also has a political use. As long as the country is busy with Amalek, it does not ask what the government failed to do.

Israel once knew how to ask the other question. In 1973, Golda Meir did not want a commission of inquiry. Yet less than seven weeks after the war began, on November 21st, her government appointed one, headed by Shimon Agranat, the president of the Supreme Court. Its interim findings, published on April 1, 1974, brought down the chief of staff, David Elazar, and spared the Prime Minister. Nine days later, Golda resigned anyway. The law didn’t require it. The protests did.

This time, the generals did what Elazar had done, without waiting for a commission. Aharon Haliva, the head of military intelligence, stepped down in April, 2024. Avi Rosenfeld, the commander of the Gaza Division, stepped down in June, writing that he had failed in the mission of his life. Herzi Halevi, the chief of staff, and Yaron Finkelman, the head of Southern Command, announced in January, 2025, that they would step down. Finkelman wrote, by hand, that the failure would stay with him for the rest of his life. The Prime Minister stepped out onto the campaign trail.

Netanyahu has held out for three years and twenty-five days. He is the only official in charge on that Saturday who has never endorsed a state commission. In its place, the coalition proposed a panel chosen by politicians to investigate politicians, but the bill never got past a first reading. In September, seventy-one per cent of the country’s Jews told the Israel Democracy Institute that they wanted a state commission, including a majority of those who describe themselves as right-wing. It didn’t help.

In the absence of a commission, the newspapers have been doing its work. According to Haaretz, and, a few weeks later, the New York Times, the President of the United Arab Emirates called Netanyahu about ten days before the attack to warn him that Hamas was preparing a major operation. The heads of the Shin Bet and of the general staff at the time told the paper that they had never been informed. Last Tuesday, Likud once again won more votes than any other party.

There are a lot of theories about why. There’s the Fear Theory, which holds that, in a year of war with Iran and Hezbollah, voters cling to the name they know. There’s the Tribe Theory, according to which Israelis vote with their camp, and the camp doesn’t switch sides over a commission that doesn’t even exist. There’s the Survivor Theory, whose premise is that a man who has made it through three corruption cases in court, five elections between 2019 and 2022, and two years of war seems capable of making it through anything. All have something to them, and none are mutually exclusive. I, too, have a theory. Revenge did for Netanyahu what no campaign could have done. It gave a humiliated country the feeling of regaining control, and that feeling proved stronger, at the ballot box, than the wish to know who had lost it.

Eyal Eshel, Roni’s father, founded the October Council with other families of victims and of hostages. He has received death threats for accusing the state and the army of lying to the bereaved. He used to go to Nahal Oz about once a month, and on one of those visits his footsteps echoed among the charred remains of the room where his daughter had worked. He says he will fight for a state commission until his dying day. Orwell was right that revenge is sour. He just didn’t mention that, in politics, someone always ends up with the sweet part.