Guess Who the Netanyahu Government Is Blaming for October 7

 For two full years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers insisted that the country would certainly, absolutely, definitely investigate the deadly failures of various authorities for October 7 – but that the formal inquiry would have to wait until after the war.

Now, with a U.S.-imposed cease-fire in place despite myriad (even daily) tripwires, Israelis are thinking in a postwar way. The time for reckoning over who was responsible for failing to detect, prevent or respond adequately to the Hamas attack is drawing near. So are Israeli elections, now one year away from the scheduled date, or possibly sooner.

These factors help explain the rising volume of right-wing voices busily assigning blame in the court of public opinion before any official body can do so. And as the war on Hamas winds down, the pro-government voices have set their sights on the enemies within.

"You cannot heal without first spewing out the evil from within us. Just as in the operating room, you must first extract the infection and only then stitch the wound," wrote Karni Eldad, a right-wing columnist at Israel Hayom, the populist right-wing mass-circulating daily newspaper, this week.

Who is the infection? Karni generously allowed that the masses who demonstrated doggedly on behalf of the hostages for two years are not the disease; a contrast to some of her colleagues on the right who openly blamed the protesters themselves for helping Hamas. She asserted that the guilty parties are definitely not those who wore a yellow hostage-ribbon pin (that would have to include most members of the government who displayed their sartorial commitment to the hostages while evading a cease-fire deal for as long as possible).

But the leaders of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum – these people exploited the hostage families in their darkest hour, says Karni. They weakened the nation and the army, and "sowed panic that IDF actions would endanger hostages" (after over 40 hostages were likely killed in captivity, and six executed point-blank in response to advancing IDF forces). That panic "paralyzed us from defeating Hamas."

For this, she writes, they must "never be forgiven." They must be "extracted from among us," and "neutralized" – putatively to prevent them from further "dividing the nation." But the word "neutralize" in Israel is only ever used for stopping a terrorist in his tracks.

From Eldad, we learn why Israel's right wing believes the Gaza war went on so long – because leftists paralyzed the army and the people during the efforts to achieve total victory. The media – which covered the citizen-led hostage movement (as well as right-wing hostage family activism opposing a cease-fire), and regularly broadcast slogans recalling the hostages – is equally to blame and should share their fate, she argues.

We also learn who is responsible for October 7 itself: According to Karni, the leaders of the Hostage Families Forum are the same ones who protested Netanyahu's government before the Hamas assault. Their political opinions – opposing the government's judicial assault, calling on Netanyahu to leave his position – divided the people and brought the disaster upon us, she says.

Why spill so much ink on one columnist? Because her article represents a highly effect pattern of communication that the Israeli right wing employs (and which everyone should learn). Plant the seed at the grassroots level – newspaper columnists, social media personalities and "talkback" types. Let the sprouting messages seem to spread organically throughout society, then have them climb up the political ladder, through the margins of the far right, where observers can still dismiss them as fringe types. But those fringe types suddenly give voice to what many people are thinking as the ideas swirl in society.

Amichai Eliyahu, a lawmaker from Itamar Ben-Gvir's ultra-nationalist Otzma Yehudit party, exemplifies the latter role. He consistently identifies the root cause of the war as the Israeli judicial system, the High Court and the Chief Justice (President) of the Supreme Court himself, Yitzhak Amit. Any future commission of inquiry must investigate the Court, says Eliyahu – for "forcing authorities to give Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar medical treatment while in prison, for constraining the government's efforts to fix [i.e., loosen] IDF rules of fire and for preventing us from fighting properly."

The blame-message strategy climbs further up the ladder of power and ever closer to the top. Justice Minister Yariv Levin told Makor Rishon newspaper earlier this year that the deepest reasons for the catastrophe of October 7 were the disengagement from Gaza and the Oslo process.

Subsequent governments and their policies since then must also share responsibility, to be sure, said Levin. But an investigative commission must not be appointed "on Kaplan" – a metonym for the pro-democracy protesters of 2023 – "by an extremist who appointed himself as president of the Supreme Court." Rather, the commission must be appointed by someone "everyone trusts," he said.

The justice minister does not recognize the authority of the current chief justice of the Supreme Court in that role. In other words, Levin wants to appoint someone the government trusts. Levin is well aware that if the Oslo Accords (signed in 1993) and the disengagement from Gaza (in 2005) played a role in the developments leading to October 7, Israel had 30 and nearly 20 years, respectively, to change those policies prior to October 7. For most of that time, Likud and Netanyahu were in power; hence the need to appoint a special kind of committee capable of contorting the direction of blame.

And finally, to understand the methodical construction of public arguments to deflect the government's guilt, look for Netanyahu's hidden hand. His chummiest correspondent in Israeli news, Amit Segal, delivered a monologue on Monday explicitly calling to investigate the pro-democracy protesters and the media. Netanyahu himself was busy giving a combative, defiant and triumph-filled opening speech at the Knesset on Monday. But the real action that day was behind the scenes, where Netanyahu reportedly held consultations about rushing a law to establish that government-friendly commission of inquiry. His primary aim, reported Ynet, is to engineer a commission that will investigate the role of the courts and the protests.

For the record, Israel already has a law stipulating the procedures for appointing a commission of inquiry. First, the government must tell the chief justice of its decision to establish a commission, and then the chief justice appoints the head of the commission as well as its members.

But this government operates under its own system. Rule number one: When the laws might undermine or constrain the government's power, change them. And when you don't like the truth – that no single actor had more continuous years of power at the top of the country's chain of command, and therefore no one leader or party has more responsibility in the long term – try as hard as you can to bend it. Netanyahu should offer less Winston Churchill and more Harry "the buck stops here" Truman, but it's not his style.