Why Netanyahu must accept Yarden Bibas’s noble invitation, and also back state probe of Oct. 7
‘If we do not look the disaster in the eye, we will not be able to recover,’ the bereaved father and husband wrote, urging the PM to join him when he returns to his kibbutz home
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
The IDF’s multitude of highly detailed internal investigations into the catastrophe of October 7, and the Shin Bet’s far briefer and generalized published findings, both acknowledge their own staggering failure to recognize that Hamas was preparing in clear sight to invade and slaughter Israelis, and to take the most basic precautions to thwart the massacre.
What both these very different sets of investigations also do, however, is make plain that not all blame attaches to them, and to indicate that the political leadership was also centrally culpable.
Over the past decades, Israel considered the threats from Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon to be the priority, while the Gaza Strip was secondary, the IDF concludes in one of its internal investigations — the probe that focused on “perceptions” regarding Gaza and Hamas in the years before October 7. In a summation clearly attributing blame to the political echelon without actually naming the culprit, the IDF charges that the policy vis-à-vis Gaza was paradoxical, as Israel declared Hamas to not be a legitimate partner for a peace agreement, while also not working to create an alternative to its rule in the Strip.
Israel chose to “manage the conflict” with Hamas, the “perception” probe states, in order to create long periods of quiet, under the false presumption that the terror group was uninterested in a large-scale war. Pointing to the shared deadly misconceptions of the political and the security leadership, the IDF probe notes that there were no plans to conquer the Gaza Strip in a war, but also no plans to reach a full diplomatic agreement with the terror group. In hindsight, it laments, Hamas’s ostensible efforts to reach understandings with Israel were part of a deception campaign to trick Israel into thinking it was uninterested in war.
The Shin Bet is more curt in its published findings, but also points an unmistakable finger of blame at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his policies. It notes that over many years, “Israel’s policy vis-à-vis Gaza was to maintain periods of quiet, which enabled Hamas’s massive force build-up.” And it elaborates that a central factor in enabling Hamas to turn itself into a full-fledged army was “the flow of money from Qatar to Gaza and its delivery to Hamas’s military wing” — a policy, it elects not to specify, advocated and endorsed by Netanyahu.
The IDF’s mountains of published material delve, at a granular level, into the tactical components of absolute failure in collecting and understanding intelligence on Hamas ahead of October 7, in internalizing what was happening even in the final hours before the border was overrun, and in battle after battle on the day. The Shin Bet, by contrast — conveniently and self-servingly, albeit understandably for a covert agency — has released only a far more cursory overview, given the sensitivities and dangers involved in bringing more material into the public domain.
What their combined material underlines more than anything else, however, is the essential need for an independent, all-encompassing investigation into the security and policy failures that enabled Hamas to transform from a terror group into an army under Israel’s nose, openly plan an invasion, and carry it out. An investigation that, unlike those of the Shin Bet and IDF, does not primarily focus on the internal disasters within a particular security body, and does not shy desperately away from the role of the political leadership. An investigation, rather, that addresses the strategic failures of Israel’s leadership as a whole. And that does so, primarily, not in order to point or deflect fingers of blame, but to ensure that nothing like October 7 can ever happen again, by getting to all the root causes and ensuring fundamental change.
The fact is that the only body legally empowered to carry out this kind of long-overdue, indispensable investigation is a state commission of inquiry — since that is the only body capable of getting to the whole truth, in part because it has the unique authority to subpoena witnesses.
It is a fairly safe bet that such an inquiry, whose chair is legally appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and is customarily a retired Supreme Court justice, would issue recommendations of far-reaching consequence for the political leadership, and notably Netanyahu. Which is why Netanyahu has been resisting it with all his considerable power and articulacy, and doing his utmost to preemptively discredit it in the wider context of his coalition’s ongoing two-year assault on the very legitimacy of Israel’s judiciary.
What he refuses to accept is that the fundamental national requirement to fully understand what went wrong, in order to ensure that it cannot happen again, actually supersedes the personal consequences for the prime minister under whose watch the portents of disaster went unheeded and the slaughter itself took place.
This really, really, should not need saying. But it all too evidently does, as was confirmed on Monday when Netanyahu, raging from the Knesset podium, argued bitterly for the umpteenth time against the very investigation that the country so urgently needs. His obduracy in this regard is, of course, a dismal echo of the blinkered mindset that produced the catastrophe.
**
At the bottom of the stairs leading to the Knesset visitors’ gallery, shortly before Netanyahu had been required by opposition legislators to address the demand for a state inquiry, some 40 relatives of October 7 victims and of bereaved soldiers in the ongoing war were barred by a line of Knesset Guard members from entering the gallery to hear the prime minister’s speech and the wider debate.
Many of them were carrying photographs of the loved ones they have lost. The gallery was empty. They had registered in advance to be allowed in.
There was no reason to deny these bereaved Israelis access to the soundproofed viewing gallery of their own parliament, to hear their own elected leaders discuss an issue of burning, anguished personal importance to them. And yet, the Knesset Guard, under the authority of Netanyahu’s Knesset speaker, Likud MK Amir Ohana, had been instructed to stop them.
And when they pushed to get past, the bereaved families were attacked — including a bereaved father who was dragged away by a Knesset guard with a forearm across his throat. Three required medical attention. Several were left in tears.
Rarely has there been a more terrible metaphor for an elected political leadership, charged with public service, refusing to so much as listen to the demands of the public, much less heed them.
אלימות מופנית כלפי משפחות שכולות ומשפחות חטופים שרוצות לצפות בדיון בכנסת על ועדת חקירה ממלכתית. pic.twitter.com/O4Z6J6yyLF
— דפנה ליאל (@DaphnaLiel) March 3, 2025
**
Marginalized amid the chaos of Monday afternoon was the most extraordinarily noble invitation — an appeal, an act of outreach — extended to the prime minister by Yarden Bibas, who was released from Gaza captivity a month ago, after almost 16 months in hell, to learn that his wife Shiri, 4-year-old son Ariel and baby Kfir had been brutally murdered by their captors weeks after their abduction.
Writing from the shiva for his family, whose remains had been returned days earlier, Yarden Bibas stressed in his letter — which was read out on his behalf from the Knesset podium by MK Chili Tropper — that they could have been saved and that the entire October 7 catastrophe should never have happened. But he emphasized, too, that he had no interest in settling scores, but rather sought to gather strength and look forward, and to help ensure that it could and would not happen again.
To that end, he highlighted his support for a state commission of inquiry, noting 83 percent public support for it, and insisting that this “is not about personal blame, but about learning lessons to prevent the next disaster.”
And then he urged Netanyahu — the prime minister under whose watch a disaster beyond any conceivable personal scale befell him — to accompany him when he returns for the first time to his home at Kibbutz Nir Oz, to the very scene of the unthinkable tragedy.
“Mr. Prime Minister, I make one final request. I have yet to return to my home in Nir Oz. I do not know what awaits me there,” wrote Yarden Bibas, his words ringing out across the chamber. “I ask you to come with me — to walk beside me as I step into my home for the first time since October 7. Let us do this together.”
After Tropper, a member of the opposition National Unity party, had finished reading the missive, he walked over to Netanyahu’s seat with the letter and spoke into the prime minister’s ear. But Netanyahu was facing the other way, listening to another MK, Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel, and paid little evident heed.
11 שניות שמראות ניתוק .
חילי טרופר מגיש לו מכתב ממשפחת ביבס .
והאיש בכלל לא רואה וכנראה לא מעניין אותו.
עצוב. וכאזרח.
גם שובר לב.
???????? pic.twitter.com/5nN3EbGHXE— YANIV HALIVA TOLEDANO ???????? (@htyaniv) March 3, 2025
As Tropper placed Yarden Bibas’s heartrending plea carefully in front of him, the prime minister’s glance flickered briefly down at it, even as he continued his interaction with Haskel.
As of this writing, Yarden Bibas has not returned to his home. It is not too late for Netanyahu to accept his astonishingly selfless invitation. And not too late, either, for the prime minister to accept the imperative for a state commission of inquiry.
As Yarden Bibas concluded in his letter: “If we do not look this tragedy in the eye, we will never be able to recover.”
The Times of Israel Community.