How to get an Honest October 7 Investigation?
How can we get an investigation of responsibility for October 7 to be honest? We must begin by noticing that how defective in honesty –- how lacking in proper context – the pressures for an investigation have been.
- The misleading, near-universal story
The Jerusalem Post reported in March 2019 that an unnamed source at a Likud faction meeting said Netanyahu, retorting to a hardline critic, had defended the Qatari cash transfers to Gaza, on the ground that anyone opposed to a Palestinian state should favor them, since they kept Hamas and the Palestinian Authority apart.
I would guess Netanyahu really did say something like this, although he denies it. But that should not be the main issue.
The serious issue – the one that matters for us today – is the context that pushed Israelis into statements like that. This context is what determines the locus for accurate attribution of causality and blame for political misstatements.
- The larger, more accurate story
The critical context was a simple, obvious one: that Netanyahu and the entire Israeli establishment were under enormous pressure from leaders and media, both in America and worldwide, not to take a harder line.
Remarks like the one attributed to Netanyahu were all but inevitable in this context. They served as a way of deflecting domestic critics who demanded a harder line in ways that would be unacceptable to Israel’s allies abroad.
After October 7th, Haaretz, a left-leaning anti-Netanyahu, paper, ran a sharpened version of his earlier-attributed remark. This came to be treated as if it were his formal statement of Israel’s policy. It got repeatedly used as a handy weapon for domestic parties to accuse him of co-authoring the massive attack that Israel faced on October 7th. From there it went global, quoted many times in this distorted context and interpretation.
The remark should be understood in the international context that shaped it. It should not be used to blame a single leader for consequences that the context effectively imposed on nearly all Israeli leaders.
The still larger sociological context is that of a Western political class and media, one that exerts a massive influence on Israel’s own media and intellectuals. The main voices in this class had long been pressing Israel not to resume war against Hamas. They wanted it to preserve instead the arrangement reached in 2012, when the Obama Administration worked with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government to bring Israel into a truce with Hamas.
- Israel’s own analysts said as much, without noticing its full meaning
During the 2014 war, one Israeli think-tank analysis described a “global clock” measuring when international leaders and audiences lose patience with Israel’s fighting back. There was also a government dispute between those seeking to eliminate Hamas rule and those willing to settle for a ceasefire on the 2012 model.
In 2021, Netanyahu publicly rebuffed Biden’s demand for “significant de-escalation”. Yet the Security Cabinet accepted a ceasefire the next day, hours after a fourth Biden call, with Israeli broadcasters reporting heavy American pressure.
Israeli analyses warned that without international legitimacy, severe pressure would force shortened and limited military action. When the present war began, Israeli commentary was still speaking of a ticking diplomatic clock.
This is the context. Today’s analysis should start with it. Only then can blame be distributed accurately. And only then can people begin to figure out how better to manage the context of external pressures.
- The need for a true investigation on October 7 guilt
The calls for an investigation into responsibility for the causes of October 7 are thus far dangerously distorted. They assume that it is solely Israelis who are to be investigated. This would mean that all the blame would be forced into what can be given to Israelis, implicitly always meaning Netanyahu.
It is a classic case of internalization of guilt and projection of blame, not honest investigation.
A valid investigation would have to thoroughly examine the larger context of international pressures, on which a large share of the actual blame lies. Its primary goal should be to free the Israeli mind, as if in a national course of psychoanalytic therapy, from the muddling naturally done to that mind by the unavoidable dependence on allies and the internalization process. Only after that should it look into the shares of the blame borne by Israelis – Israeli politicians, media, parties, and institutions.
Calls for an investigation should begin by stipulating this.