The quote “Who will guard the guardians?” comes from the Roman poet Juvenal, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”.It sounds better in Latin. It was not a new thought even then. Plato had suggested that the guardians would be honorable and wise, and thus required no oversight; an optimistic but misplaced trust in human integrity.
The responsibilities for the Oct 7 failures were widespread, everyone with influence in Israel; in the IDF, the intelligence communities, the media, the legal authorities, the government and the opposition were all implicated. The crux of the matter was the widely held belief in the conception that Hamas was a rational actor and was therefore deterred from attacking because of Israel’s obvious military superiority. To the western mind it was inconceivable that Hamas would attack, knowing that in response, Gaza could be reduced to a mass of uninhabitable rubble, and that tens of thousands of Gazan citizens and Hamas fighters would die. This in fact is what happened, but in the ideological Islamic mind the result was not a disaster but a victory! They have announced publicly that they will do it over and over if they can.
Meanwhile in the aftermath there is a demand by the Israeli public for a commission of enquiry. The coalition has resisted the formation of the probe into what went wrong because it was culpable, and knew that whatever is uncovered, the blame will fall on it. Much effort has already been expended on attempts by many, from Netanyahu down, to blame someone else, so the formation of the commission is of great political importance; depending on who is directing the probe will determine who gets the most blame.
In fact, with so much widespread failure, who failed and when, is actually almost irrelevant. The aim of the commission of enquiry should be concentrated more on preventing its recurrence than who is to blame for the catastrophe.
This is what should happen. Prime Minister Netanyahu should announce that he will not run for election again because whoever is to blame for the details, the Prime Minister is responsible for the false conception. When Truman was president of the US, he had a sign on his desk that said “The buck stops here”. So it should be in Israel. Netanyahu has served the country well for many years and has a great deal to his credit for which he should be remembered, but he’s not indispensable.
The legal establishment must drop the ridiculous Netanyahu trials that are going nowhere and are an embarrassment and a distraction that the country can ill afford.
The intelligence agencies must be reformed, not by blaming and firing leaders who made mistakes, but by ensuring that monolithic conceptions can never again be allowed to develop. The Catholic Church has a procedure it follows when investigating the possibility of defining someone as a saint. One investigator is assigned the title of Devil’s Advocate. His job is to search for evidence of the candidate’s weakness or failure to always maintain a saintly standard of behavior. We now know that there was ample, though not a preponderance, of evidence of Hamas’s preparations for the attack. Intelligence is not an exact science, particularly in regard to other actors’ intentions. When preparing evidence to present to the political or military echelons, the intelligence agencies must have a unit specifically responsible for accumulating evidence of a minority view; call it the devil’s view. This opinion must be presented, with its supporting evidence, to the political and military leaders, alongside the majority view. Had this been done before Oct 7, the attack might still have happened, but would have been far less disastrous. The dance festival would not have been allowed in such a vulnerable location; the IDF would not have been so unprepared; the kibbutzim on the border would have been more wary; the losses would have been less severe.
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