One Witness Too Many
Rule through ambiguity is not a lack of control but one of its most refined forms: responsibility is shifted downward, power concentrated upward. Seen in this light, Netanyahu’s style of governance appears less an anomaly than a contemporary variant of a familiar authoritarian pattern.
The serious suspicions that have accumulated in recent years around the entourage of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—including reports and ongoing investigations concerning alleged contacts by several members of his office with representatives of an enemy state—repeatedly return to a seemingly simple question: What did the prime minister know—and what did he allegedly not know?
Whether the issue concerns the security failures that led to the Hamas terror attack of October 7, 2023, political incitement, the conduct of individual ministers and members of parliament, or systematic assaults on the institutions of the rule of law, the same response follows almost reflexively. Netanyahu, we are told, was not informed, gave no concrete instruction, knew nothing of the decisive developments.
Yet this formula has long ceased to be merely an individual line of defense. It points to a structural pattern of political power in which vagueness, insinuation, and formal distance are not signs of diminished control but themselves become central instruments of rule. Not-knowing appears here not as a deficit, but as a resource.
A historical comparison makes the normative difference visible. When it became known in 1974 that Günter Guillaume, a close aide and personal assistant to then–Chancellor Willy Brandt, had for years been an East German spy, Brandt resigned. He did so not because personal guilt or complicity had been proven, but because he assumed political responsibility for a failure at the very core of his power apparatus. Brandt did not argue that he had known nothing. He accepted that ignorance, in such a position, itself constitutes political failure.
That standard is by no means self-evident today. To understand how profoundly the logic of political responsibility has shifted, it is worth turning to historical analyses of authoritarian forms of rule. One of the central debates in Holocaust research revolved around whether Adolf Hitler issued an explicit order for the annihilation of European Jewry—or whether the Nazi system functioned precisely through the absence of clear directives.
For decades, two camps confronted one another: intentionalists and functionalists. The former understood the policy of extermination as the execution of a plan formulated from the outset; the latter emphasized a gradual process of radicalization driven by local initiatives, administrative dynamics, and institutional rivalry. Today it is widely accepted that the Führer’s power derived less from the abundance of explicit commands than from their strategic absence.
Hitler ruled by generating expectations rather than issuing precise instructions. It was enough to identify enemies, hint at directions, and shift the boundaries of what was permissible. Administration, party, and military learned to act “in the Führer’s sense”—often through anticipatory radicalization and competition for proximity to the center of power.
What emerged was a regime of systematic ambiguity: responsibility without signature, initiative without order, violence without formal command. Knowledge was fragmented, implicit, dispersed—denial always available. For this very reason, the retrospective question “Did Hitler know about it?” proves misleading. Rule through ambiguity is not a lack of control but one of its most refined forms: responsibility is displaced downward, while power is concentrated upward.
Against this background, Netanyahu’s style of governance appears less an anomaly than a contemporary variant of a familiar authoritarian pattern. This is not to suggest that he personally pulls every string or is the origin of every individual action. The logic of this form of rule lies precisely in the fact that this is unnecessary. The political leader marks directions, delegitimizes oversight, names enemies, cultivates personal loyalty—and then allows others to act “in his sense.” Responsibility diffuses; power remains concentrated.
What takes shape is not governance by command, but governance by climate: a climate in which attacks on the judiciary, the opposition, or minorities appear legitimate; in which political violence is relativized or flanked by silence; in which ministers and parliamentarians outbid one another in radicalization—knowing that the leader benefits from the outcome while remaining able to distance himself from the means. In such a configuration, not-knowing itself becomes a political instrument.
But in a democracy, responsibility does not exhaust itself in factual knowledge of particulars. It includes responsibility for the whole: for appointments, for public language, for institutional boundaries. Those who systematically weaken mechanisms of control, who delegitimize the guardians of democracy, who cultivate personal dependency and blind loyalty cannot credibly invoke ignorance.
The historian Carlo Ginzburg has drawn attention to a fundamental distinction between juridical and historical logic. While in law the principle testis unus, nullus testis applies—one witness counts as none—historical inquiry operates under different conditions. At times it is precisely a single, isolated testimony that renders a mechanism of power visible—especially a mechanism of erasure. A lone witness may be legally insufficient, yet historically sufficient to show that something occurred—and that systematic efforts were made to ensure that no further witnesses remained.
Netanyahu’s strategy of “not knowing” exploits precisely this gap. It imports the juridical logic of accumulating proof into the political sphere—not in order to clarify truth, but to block responsibility. From a historical perspective, the absence of cumulative testimony does not exculpate; it may instead point to the success of a system designed to create conditions under which responsibility never coalesces. Not-knowing here is no accident, but a structural product.
To understand how the sentence “I did not know” can become not merely a line of defense but a form of governance in its own right, a psychoanalytic distinction is helpful: not all not-knowing is ignorance. At times it is split knowledge—a condition in which a subject knows something while simultaneously withdrawing from that knowledge. The knowledge is present, but severed from acknowledgment, responsibility, and moral consequence.
Politically, this split enables both direction and evasion: knowing enough to enable or to profit, yet not enough to bear responsibility. In this sense, denial is not a psychological failure but a political success.
In Ginzburg’s terms, what is lacking here is not witnesses. What is at work is a method that ensures that there will always remain only a single witness—one witness too many to deny everything, but never enough to carry responsibility. Netanyahu’s not-knowing is therefore not a deficit, but a form of rule—and a specific mode of political existence.