I took this photo in the Terminal 3 duty-free hall on Friday, September 29, 2023, a little after one in the afternoon. Sukkot was starting that evening and half the country seemed to be flying somewhere. Kids in Nike tracksuits, strollers parked between the tables, somebody’s dad bent over a coffee while the departures board ran through Larnaca and Athens and Rome. Nobody in that hall was thinking about the Gaza fence.
Eight days later the same holiday ended on Simchat Torah. Hamas came through the fence that morning.
Let me start with what I don’t believe. I don’t believe Benjamin Netanyahu personally opened the gate. The army had the Hamas attack plan more than a year ahead and filed it as fantasy. Military intelligence convinced itself Hamas was deterred and busy governing. The lookouts on the border, most of them young women watching screens all day, reported what they saw and were brushed off. A lot of people in uniform got it badly wrong, and some of them have said so out loud.
So I’m narrowing it down. The government that sat above all of those failures has spent three years refusing to be examined, and that alone is reason enough to send it home.
Not after the next war. Not after another committee. On October 27.
The Generals Resigned and the Ministers Stayed
Try a simple test. After October 7, who stood up and said this happened on my watch? Aharon Haliva, head of military intelligence, resigned in April 2024. Herzi Halevi, the chief of staff, announced he was leaving the following year and said the failure was his. Those were the men whose job was to see it coming, and they paid for missing it.
Ask the same question of the cabinet and you get a different answer. The ministers who waved through the Qatari cash into Gaza and built a whole strategy on a quiet, paid-off Hamas are mostly still in their chairs. The Likud minister who pushed hardest for a real inquiry was Yoav Gallant, Netanyahu’s own defense minister. He was fired.
This month Haaretz reported that the UAE’s president warned Netanyahu days before the attack that Hamas was planning something big, and that the warning never reached the defense establishment. Maybe that report holds up in full and maybe it doesn’t. Finding out is exactly what an independent commission is for.
Who Picks the Investigators Is the Whole Fight
Israel already has a tool for this. A state commission of inquiry is chaired by a judge, its members are chosen by the Supreme Court president, and it can subpoena witnesses. It’s how this country has investigated its disasters for fifty years, and Likud has used it too. Menachem Begin set up the Kahan Commission after Sabra and Shatila. It found that Ariel Sharon, Begin’s defense minister, bore personal responsibility, and Sharon left the defense ministry. A Likud prime minister accepted that his own government didn’t get to grade its own homework.
Netanyahu understood this once. In 2022, out of power, he backed a state commission to look into the government that had replaced him. The rule only became a judicial plot when the subject was October 7.
Now look at what his coalition is offering instead. Likud’s bill, which passed its first reading in July, lets the coalition shape the commission and decide what it examines. Netanyahu wants it to reach back to Oslo, to the 2005 disengagement, and to the protest movement against the judicial overhaul. The protesters. When your inquiry into the worst day in Israel’s history puts the people on Kaplan Street in the dock, you’ve told everyone what the inquiry is for.
Most Israelis see it. Poll after poll, a clear majority wants the state commission. The government keeps saying the public won’t accept one. The public keeps saying it will.
What I Still Won’t Sign Up For
I don’t think a new government fixes the army on its own, and I don’t think any report heals this country. Half of Israel doesn’t trust the Supreme Court and won’t trust a commission it appoints. Plenty of people who want Netanyahu gone already know what they want the report to say. That’s a real problem and I don’t have a clean answer to it.
I also don’t buy that everyone who votes Likud next month is voting for a cover-up. People vote on the draft, on Iran, on what a week of groceries costs. A lot of them rolled the same suitcases through this same hall.
But a government doesn’t get to fail on the worst day in the country’s history, block the one independent investigation the law provides, and then ask for four more years. The families in this photo flew home after Sukkot to a different country. They’re owed a government that answers for that.
October 27 is when they get to ask.
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