The Commission TRICK

THE ENGLISH-ONLY REPUBLIC: HOW TO HOLD A COMMISSION WITHOUT HOLDING YOURSELF

On December 24, 2025, Israel offered the world a Christmas Eve morality play with the props swapped: instead of candles, procedure; instead of hymns, vote counts; instead of confession, committee mechanics. The human reality, however, did not cooperate with the script. In the Knesset plenum, bereaved families stood up, turned their backs, and held photographs of the dead and questions that still have no address. That gesture was the only part of the day that did not feel engineered for an audience. 

Then came the vote: 53–48 in favor of a preliminary reading of a bill to establish a politically appointed probe into the October 7 failures, explicitly positioned as an alternative to a state commission of inquiry. The bill now moves to committee, because in Israel accountability is often not denied; it is deferred, proceduralized, and rebranded. Some coalition lawmakers reportedly stayed outside and did not vote, which is a small but telling detail: even when history is on the agenda, people still find ways to be “busy elsewhere.” 

Here is the absurdity that matters (and it is not funny, but it is absurd): the political class is attempting to convert the question “Who failed?” into “Who gets to appoint the people who decide what ‘failure’ means?” The bill’s architecture is the real message: a mechanism that can function even if the opposition refuses to participate, ultimately empowering the Knesset speaker in ways that predictably preserve coalition control. In other words, the investigation is designed as a governance instrument first and an epistemic instrument second. 

Now, zoom out one notch and the day becomes even stranger. While the Knesset debates how to investigate the past, the Prime Minister’s Office issues a ceasefire-related threat in a statement published only in English, after an incident in Rafah in which an officer was lightly wounded when an APC ran over an explosive device. “Published only in English” is not a linguistic quirk; it is a targeting solution. Hamas is not the primary reader. The intended reader is the international control panel. The message is not “we are speaking to the enemy,” but “we are performing compliance and resolve to the guarantor.” In 2025, language choice is geopolitics. 

Meanwhile, Bethlehem returns to full Christmas festivities for the first time since the start of the Gaza war: scouts, bagpipes, a tree in Manger Square, the city trying to remember how public joy looks without denying why it had disappeared. That is not “normalization.” It is a bruised insistence that symbolic life must not be surrendered to the machinery of war. It is also a reminder that civilians carry the calendar, even when states treat time as an instrument. 

And then, as if the day required one more layer of institutional surrealism, a cabinet minister publicly calls for a full probe into the “Qatargate” allegations, describing the affair as “shocking” and demanding it be investigated “to the very end.” When a minister’s demand for investigation becomes newsworthy precisely because it is rare, you are not looking at a system that is failing to investigate; you are looking at a system in which investigation itself has become politically rationed. 

Even Iran appears in the day’s liturgy: the defense minister speaks of “closely monitoring” developments amid reports of expanded missile production, invoking earlier strikes and promising that “what was before October 7 will not be again.” Monitoring, promising, declaring: the verbs of strategic posture. But the question that haunts the domestic sphere is simpler: if the state can monitor everything abroad, why does it struggle to monitor itself at home without turning the process into a partisan artifact? 

This is the ethical crux, and it demands a respectful tone because the stakes are measured in lives, not in rhetoric. Families are not asking for aesthetic closure. They are asking for the minimum that any polity owes its dead: truth that is not negotiated, and responsibility that is not diluted into committee math. 

If you want the day’s final irony, here it is: a politically appointed probe is sold as “trust-building,” yet it is engineered in a way that assumes distrust as a permanent feature and then weaponizes that distrust as design logic. Trust is not produced by controlling the investigators. Trust is produced when power accepts that it cannot curate the terms of its own judgment.

To the families: your refusal to face the plenum was not incivility. It was civic clarity.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

Source liveblog (for readers who want the timeline): https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-december-24-2025/