An October 7 Commission of Inquiry Would Help Israel. Electoral Reform Would Help Much More.

Should there be a National Commission of Inquiry into failures of the Israeli government and military around October 7? Scott Abramson leans towards an affirmative answer, while deftly highlighting the political and psychological consequences of similar commissions in the past.

I have little to add to Abramson’s excellent historical analysis. Yet the underlying theme of the essay—that Israel suffers from a lack of accountability, which he aptly describes with the Hebrew term din v’heshbon—ought to be extended still further. Traumatic and unique as October 7 and its aftermath has been, the crisis of accountability, or, better yet, of unrepresentative government, is deep and long-running, as the broken electoral politics as well as the judicial reform crisis of 2023 amply testify.

In modern liberal democracies, meaningful elections are the public’s primary tool for disciplining the government. When an electoral system is functioning robustly, the public has the opportunity and ability to throw out the bums from one party in exchange for a new or at least different set of bums from another. Witness the British public this month deciding to chuck the Conservative party out of government due to perceived corruption and fecklessness, giving the Labor party a shot to prove that it can do better. The rewards and punishments of elections of this kind can be constructive for both the losers and the winners. The losers are, one hopes, forced into a kind of soul searching and a renewal of personnel if not of policy. Whereas the winners, now firmly in charge of a strong government, can no longer hide from the consequences of what they do and what happens under their watch.