The following are a few quotes, (complete, partial and paraphrases of current and past Israeli political leaders calling for the establishment of State Commissions of Inquiry:

-A call for a state commission of inquiry to investigate the “failures in the housing market” and the steep rise in real estate prices under the government, framing it as a fundamental failure of governance.

–Demands for inquiries into the “preparedness of the home front” and the state of the “health system,” arguing that only a state commission had the power to cut through bureaucracy and get to the root of systemic failures.

Do these quotes sound familiar? They should. They all came from no other than our longest serving Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, but all of them were said when he was in the opposition. Netanyahu’s arguments for state commissions consistently revolved around several key themes:

At the beginning of the war, most of the government coalition members (as well as most of the opposition) stated that there would have to be a State Commission of Inquiry. October 7 was too major an event for it to be handled in any other way. No one talked about any other type of Commission or investigation until Netanyahu made seemingly innocuous statements about the need for everyone to provide answers about what happened, even him. Yet the words State Commission of Inquiry never crossed his lips, nor the taking of any responsibility despite the fact that he had been Prime Minister for the better part of the past 2 decades.

On October 8, when Netanyahu’s most important meeting of the day (the day after the worst attack in the history of Israel) was with his political advisors and PR people and dealt with how Netanyahu was going to stay in power. Immediately thereafter, he began his campaign of deflection and putting blame for everything that led up to and happened on October 7 on the Security apparatus (IDF, Shin Bet, Mossad,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)