‘Truth springs up from the earth,” this column warned Benjamin Netanyahu last fall (“The truth about denial,” 21 November 2025), and “justice looks down from the heaven” (Psalms 85:12).
The prime minister, as his latest attempt to distort the truth makes plain, was unconvinced.
Deluding himself he can manipulate public opinion no matter what the people saw, felt, and endured, Netanyahu this week released a 55-page booklet containing his responses to State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman’s questions about the October 7 fiasco’s events.
Sifting through its pages, a Martian might think it represents a sincere effort to expose the military thinking and political decisions that preceded Hamas’s invasion.
For instance, replying to the comptroller’s question about his Gaza strategy, Netanyahu sprinkles quotes from a cabinet meeting in 2014 in which the IDF, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), and the day’s ministers of defense, economics and justice all opposed conquering the Gaza Strip.
Similarly, concerning the days immediately before the massacre, the quotes include one from a representative of Military Intelligence that “we should preserve [in Gaza] the situation that is convenient to us.”
And concerning the funneling of Qatari cash into the Strip, Netanyahu declares that “all the security agencies presented the funding as an indispensable component in preventing escalation.”
Netanyahu's attempt to evade responsibility
Unfortunately for Netanyahu, the readers of this archival hodgepodge are not Martians but the people who have been here throughout the events it is designed to redraw as part of his ongoing effort to evade responsibility and flee the truth.
The tactic of this publication is as obvious as the strategy behind it.
The tactic is to cherry-pick quotes from protocols which the rest of us can’t access, and thus avoid the full, systematic, and impartial scrutiny that this war’s documentation demands. The strategy is also obvious: torpedo the emergence of a judicial commission of inquiry.
Netanyahu knows that a judicial panel’s creation after the Yom Kippur War resulted in Golda Meir’s departure, and another’s creation in the wake of the First Lebanon War ended Menachem Begin’s career.
Like David after learning of Bath-sheba’s pregnancy, Netanyahu fears the truth; the truth about the war that has his name written all over it.
This surfaced forcefully already in summer 2024, when he assigned Transportation Minister Miri Regev with planning the ceremonies of October 7’s first anniversary.
Incredibly, the site Regev chose for the commemoration’s main event was not one of the five kibbutzim where 245 Israelis were murdered, and from which most of the hostages were abducted. Instead, she – meaning Netanyahu – chose Ofakim, which was also victimized but much less than the kibbutzim.
The rationale was clear: kibbutznikim don’t vote Likud. They might use the opportunity to scream the truth. Ofakim votes Likud. Its people might swallow our lies.
Like the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Netanyahu set out, then and there, to rewrite the past, in this case by diminishing the kibbutzim’s dominant share among the Hamas invasion’s victims.
The same fear made the prime minister fail to attend even one of the kibbutznikim’s funerals, or visit any of the hundreds of shiva houses where the slain kibbutznikim were mourned.
Fearing the truth and its most natural and potent vehicle, a judicial commission of inquiry, Netanyahu then had his people launch an all-out attack on Supreme Court President Isaac Amit. The same fear then made him reject President Isaac Herzog’s suggestion that the commission be headed by Amit’s deputy, Justice Noam Sohlberg, even though he is a conservative jurist appointed, for that reason, by Netanyahu’s government.
And last fall that same fear made Netanyahu pass a cabinet decision that the war would be probed by a panel selected not by judges but by politicians, a cowardly choice that even in its manipulative format has yet to be executed.
Now that same fear produced this week’s clumsy attempt to hoodwink any seeker of truth. The truth, alas, will not play by Netanyahu’s script.
The truth that Netanyahu has resolved to bury rests on three foundations, all of which don’t even need an investigation, because they are glaring.
The first is a televised vow outside Ashkelon on February 3, 2009, following a rocket attack from Gaza, in which a grandstanding Netanyahu said: “We can’t rely on miracles. We need action, action that will remove the threat. There is only one act that will do this, and it is to collapse Hamas’s rule in Gaza.”
Netanyahu, who was leader of the opposition at the time, won the following week’s general election, and then served as prime minister for 12 straight years. He had all the time in the world to do as he promised. In fact, he did the exact opposite.
The second truth is that the policy of cultivating Hamas, despite his booklet’s quotes, was Netanyahu’s idea. He had two reasons, which he refuses to admit: strategically, he thought Gaza was marginal, and ideologically, he thought cultivating Hamas would weaken the Palestinian Authority and thus strengthen Israel’s grip on the West Bank.
Lastly, and most crucially, no matter what any other official said or did, Netanyahu was in charge. That is what he fears a judicial commission will rule, and that is why he is out to besmirch the judges, twist the facts, and sabotage any panel that would unveil them.
It is a strategy second in its immorality only to its futility.
Like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s character Arthur Dimmesdale – the church minister whose cowardice makes him join the investigation of the married woman he himself got pregnant – Netanyahu is trying to glue to others the scarlet letter he should wear himself. It failed for that tormented priest, and it will fail for this godless enemy of truth.
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The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier), Yediot Sfarim 2025, a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.