One Witness Too Many |
The serious suspicions that have accumulated in recent years around the entourage of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—including reports and ongoing investigations concerning alleged contacts by several members of his office with representatives of an enemy state—repeatedly return to a seemingly simple question: What did the prime minister know—and what did he allegedly not know?
Whether the issue concerns the security failures that led to the Hamas terror attack of October 7, 2023, political incitement, the conduct of individual ministers and members of parliament, or systematic assaults on the institutions of the rule of law, the same response follows almost reflexively. Netanyahu, we are told, was not informed, gave no concrete instruction, knew nothing of the decisive developments.
Yet this formula has long ceased to be merely an individual line of defense. It points to a structural pattern of political power in which vagueness, insinuation, and formal distance are not signs of diminished control but themselves become central instruments of rule. Not-knowing appears here not as a deficit, but as a resource.
A historical comparison makes the normative difference visible. When it became known in 1974 that Günter Guillaume, a close aide and personal assistant to then–Chancellor Willy Brandt, had for years been an East German spy, Brandt resigned. He did so not because personal guilt or complicity had been proven, but because he assumed political responsibility for a failure at the very core of his power apparatus. Brandt did not argue that he had known nothing. He accepted that ignorance, in such a position, itself constitutes political failure.
That standard is by no means self-evident today.........