Taking ownership of October 7

Three years after October 7, Israel is still arguing over what happened before the massacre: What were the warnings? Who saw them? Who understood them? Who should have been woken up? Could the attack have been prevented?

Those questions demand a State Commission of Inquiry. But they have obscured another question. Responsibility did not end at 6:29 a.m. on October 7. Once Hamas terrorists had entered Israeli communities, murdering and kidnapping civilians, Israel’s leaders became responsible for what they did next.

I came to understand that distinction through my own, much smaller, experience that morning.

Like almost everyone in Israel, I woke to the sirens without understanding what was happening. Within minutes, our emergency WhatsApp group at Ben-Gurion University came alive. My own first contribution was simply “Shabbat shalom.” None of us understood yet what we were responding to.

An hour later, I still imagined that perhaps we could hold a full situation assessment that evening, after Shabbat. We were governed by the assumptions of October 6, in which a terrible morning of rocket fire would eventually subside. 

We soon had to throw aside all those assumptions.

By 8 a.m., a small university emergency team had convened. Over the course of that morning, we began making decisions with incomplete information. We closed the university before receiving instructions from the state, communicated with our community at home and abroad, and began preparing to help families displaced from the Gaza border communities.

I recount this not because running a university bears comparison with running a country under attack. What the experience taught me was that in a crisis, you may not know enough. You may make mistakes. But waiting for someone else to tell you what to do can itself become a decision, with consequences for the people who depend on you.

That is the distinction I keep returning to when I think about our national leadership on October 7.

We need to separate three questions that have too often become entangled: What failures made October 7 possible? What did leaders do once the assumptions collapsed? Did they take responsibility, submit their actions to investigation and learn?

These are different questions. Answering one does not absolve anyone of responsibility for the others.

Moreover, responsibility is not exclusive. One person accepting responsibility does not absolve anyone else. A military commander can be responsible for the failures under his command while the political leadership remains responsible for the system it led and the decisions it made. In a complex organization, responsibility exists at many levels at the same time. But the higher one sits in that organization, the harder it is to explain failure simply by pointing to those below.

Some of Israel’s senior security officials have acknowledged that distinction. Aharon Haliva, who headed Military Intelligence on October 7, accepted responsibility for the failures of the directorate under his command and subsequently resigned. Other senior security officials also acknowledged responsibility. Three years later, a similar acknowledgment has yet to come from the political leadership that was responsible for the country as a whole.

Twelve days after October 7, I encountered a much smaller example of how differently leaders can understand responsibility.

I spent Thursday, October 19, making four shiva calls, driving to houses of mourning in Be’er Sheva, Kfar Yona, Afula and Haifa. While in Afula at the shiva for Liav Asiag z”l, one of our students murdered at the Nova festival, my phone rang. It was Education Minister Yoav Kish, contacting me for the first time since October 7.

By then, Ben-Gurion University had lost 75 members of its extended community, ten more had been kidnapped into Gaza, hundreds had been made homeless. Thousands of our students had been called into reserve duty. I assumed he was calling to ask how we were managing, perhaps to offer help.

Instead, he called to berate me over a letter I had signed, together with the other university presidents, criticizing a controversial decision he led in the Council for Higher Education.

My heated response was not my most presidential moment.

What stayed with me was not the substance of the argument; Kish and I have disagreed plenty over the years. What stayed with me was what occupied his attention at that particular moment. Twelve days into the greatest national catastrophe of our generation, his first call to the president of the university closest to the devastated communities concerned a grievance with my criticism of him.

What occupies a leader’s attention in a crisis tells us something about how that leader understands responsibility. Is the central focus on who criticized me, who failed to inform me, or who’s to blame? Or is it what is happening to the people for whom I am responsible, and what they need from me now?

I do not claim to have asked myself the latter question consistently. But I have come to believe that a true leader knows when to shift their attention from the impulse to defend themselves to the need to defend those who depend on them.

And that brings me to the question of responsibility in the three years since October 7.

Accepting responsibility is not simply a pro forma statement made after the fact. It is the beginning of learning: examining the assumptions that shaped our decisions, asking what should have been done differently, and changing what failed.

Three years later, we need a full accounting. We need to know how the catastrophe became possible, but also what happened once it began. When their assumptions collapsed, what did our leaders do? Did they mobilize the resources of the state and enable others to act? What did they take responsibility for, and what did they learn? When things went wrong, did they ask what they could have done differently, or look for someone to blame? Did they show up, not only for the cameras and committees, but in the homes of the bereaved and among the people whose lives had been shattered on their watch? And have they been willing to subject their own decisions to independent scrutiny?

These questions do not replace the investigation into how October 7 became possible. A commission is needed to establish what happened behind closed doors before and during the events of October 7. But we do not need classified documents to judge whether leaders have taken ownership afterward. We have watched that part unfold in public for three years.

We cannot demand that leaders know the unknowable. We can demand that when reality destroys their assumptions, they take ownership of what happens next – of the decisions that must be made, the people who need help, the resources and institutions that need to be mobilized, and the responsibility they must accept when they fall short.