The Man Who ‘Didn’t Know’ — and a Nation That Must Ask

There are moments when reality cries out so deafeningly that the silence surrounding it becomes overwhelming. The Tishrei holiday season in Israel used to symbolize family serenity, renewal, and autumnal grace. Today, it stands seared as our national fault line: there was life in Israel up until October 2023, and there is everything that shattered in its wake. Look at us this Simchat Torah: despite the agonizing cries of bereaved families and desperate pleas not to dance and rejoice over the spilled blood of their loved ones, celebration circles proceeded at the Nova festival site. Amid these fraught days, looking at disassembled sukkahs where interconnected paper chains once hung, a very different kind of chain is being laid bare before our eyes: a chilling sequence of warning signs, classified files, intelligence alerts, and relentless testimonies.

What has surfaced here in recent days should have shaken every household in Israel to its core, shattered our complacency, and rattled the very foundations of the state. How are we not filling the streets? How can Israeli public life absorb this mounting evidence in deafening silence, as though it were merely another passing footnote? When did we become so conditioned to accept the toxic premise that “everyone is out to get him”—that all systems, commanders, neighbors, and global allies are driven by a single agenda to undermine him? Can it truly be that everyone else is perpetually guilty, while one solitary man remains forever blameless?

The script is wearyingly familiar and cycles endlessly: the writing flares on the wall, warnings accumulate, catastrophe strikes—and the prepackaged narrative is instantly deployed. Everyone is persecuting; everyone is plotting political downfall; and the customary spectacle of evasion, finger-pointing, and tactical deflection begins anew. We witnessed this exact pattern play out just recently during the terrifying FlyDubai flight incident—a harrowing catastrophe averted merely by a stroke of luck and the raw courage of ordinary citizens on board, narrowly preventing a mass disaster that could have claimed dozens, if not hundreds, of casualties. And what did the leadership offer in return? Rather than urgent soul-searching and an unsparing probe into the Ministry of Transport, the Shin Bet, and aviation security bodies, we received yet another disgraceful cycle of buck-passing and mutual recriminations.

This dynamic has long ceased to be about a single flight or a single horrific Saturday; it is a systematic doctrine replicated across every burning security front surrounding us. Facing Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, the north, and the south, the Israeli public is expected to possess the memory of a goldfish: to swallow the identical narrative over and over, to erase who held the reins of power for nearly two decades, and to applaud the self-anointed savior emerging from the very inferno he helped stoke. There is always a convenient scapegoat, always an alibi, and always the same leader standing at the helm insisting on the same tired illusion. Most infuriatingly, there are always those who buy it—the fantasy that only he knows, only he is the responsible adult in the room, and somehow, only he can pull us back from the abyss into which he steered us.

Netanyahu repeatedly claimed he was never awakened. He was the one who proclaimed before the cameras, with bone-chilling detachment, that he “sleeps with a clear conscience.” But how on earth could anyone sleep with a clear conscience in the face of such an alarming cascade of warnings? The very person duty-bound to keep watch with bloodshot eyes chose total willful blindness instead. And how can we, as citizens, afford to keep our own eyes shut right now?

We are no longer discussing mere intuition or gut feelings, but a formidable body of domestic and international investigative journalism—from The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal to Israel’s leading investigative desks, including Israel Hayom and Haaretz. Together, they present an indelible factual record: Israeli intelligence explicitly warned the Prime Minister in four separate, unprecedented letters that our adversaries viewed domestic fractures as an open invitation for an all-out assault; Hamas’s “Jericho Wall” operational plan to invade border communities and overrun military posts had long been sitting on the table; urgent warnings of an imminent flare-up were relayed in September by regional intelligence services and neighboring leaders; and on October 1, 2023—exactly one week before Black Saturday—a high-level security consultation offered an unambiguous window to raise red flags and ramp up operational readiness. In practice, these warnings were never converted into decisive action, civil policies and financial pipeline transfers continued uninterrupted, and the entire apparatus was left sedated.

These revelations do not emerge in a vacuum, and the frantic scramble surrounding them speaks volumes. We all witnessed the rushed international flight on a private jet and the unusual closed-door meetings abroad, designed with a transparent objective: to secure retroactive denials from foreign leaders and paper over the cracks of failure. A leader fully convinced of his innocence and integrity does not scramble on panic-driven overseas rescue missions. So the question presents itself once more: Does the entire world truly harbor an obsession to bring him down? Do The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Israel Hayom, Haaretz, the intelligence services, field commanders, and regional heads of state all belong to a grand global conspiracy, leaving him with zero accountability? Is everyone at fault except the man who has captained the ship for nearly twenty years? Have we resigned ourselves to a leadership that claims exclusive credit for every success, yet in catastrophe claims universal persecution and blames the entire system?

Beyond political accountability lies a searing societal and human test: What does this say about us as a society? What are we so afraid of—the hard questions? The truth? Has the fear of disillusionment paralyzed us to the point where we prefer hollow excuses over looking reality straight in the face? Continuing to shut our eyes to these revelations is not camp loyalty; it is a total abdication of civic and moral responsibility. A society committed to life cannot afford to fear the truth.

The demand for an independent, State Commission of Inquiry is an existential imperative for the simplest reason: we deserve answers. We deserve to know why. This is not a benevolent gesture of goodwill from the government; it is a fundamental civic and moral right—one owed by right, not granted by favor, and certainly not smothered beneath deflections and personal attacks. Only an autonomous commission empowered to open bureau logs, inspect the transcripts of those fateful consultations, and expose unvarnished facts can dissipate this smokescreen.

Those who abandoned the watch cannot demand that the public remain asleep. A nation that chooses life does not sanctify blindness. The time has come to stop bowing our heads, to look reality in the eye, and to state with utter clarity: Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister—the time has come to step aside. We deserve to know, we deserve to heal, and we deserve a leadership that stays awake for us.