More than 1,000 days have passed since October 7, and I want to use this moment to invite you to a repulsive but necessary thought experiment. Imagine October 7 happens again. Yes, with all its horrors, its terror, its dead. Everything repeats. And now I want to ask: In that case, would the government be responsible?
This is the point where half the country will probably snort in contempt: “What does that have to do with anything? What are you trying to prove?” Bear with me. What this thought experiment is designed to expose are two deep failures: one serious, the other catastrophic.
The first failure is that every argument put forward to explain why the government and its head bear no responsibility for October 7 is, in practice, an infinitely reusable argument. No matter how many times October 7 happens, the same excuses work again and again. This time it will be the current IDF chief of staff, Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir, who failed to warn in time. Next time it will be whoever replaces him.
Because the public cannot be exposed to all the raw intelligence, what happens here is exactly what Hannah Arendt described as the most effective way to kill truth: turning it into opinion. And when everything becomes a matter of opinion, on the second or third October 7, every citizen assigns blame purely according to their political tribe.
The need for a functioning system of accountability
The second failure, the catastrophic one, goes to the foundation of democratic governance itself. A state can survive only when there is a functioning system of accountability, in which leadership is genuinely answerable to the people. In Israel, that accountability has been completely distorted.
![1000 days since the October 7th massacres. Protestors in Tel Aviv block the Ayalon Freeway. The banner reads “1000 days of shiva [mourning]”](https://images.jpost.com/image/upload/f_auto,fl_lossy/c_fill,g_faces:center,h_537,w_822/728127)
In the classical republican tradition, corruption means preferring private gain over the common good. In Israel today, the prevailing logic has become: If something is not criminal, it is acceptable. That distortion has seeped deep into politics.
“What is right is what the people want,” where “the people” translates in practice to a coalition majority. The current logic runs: Since there is no political alternative and the public keeps voting for the same leadership, that leadership must be fine, and therefore October 7 is not its responsibility and certainly not its fault. The ballot box has been transformed from a tool of civic oversight into a machine for laundering guilt.
The real problem is that leadership needs the concept of guilt in order to correct itself. In a healthy democracy, we would work hard to ensure that public representatives and security chiefs who fail in their duties are forced to genuinely reckon with that failure before anything else. But in Israel today, guilt has vanished.
The relationship between the public and its representatives
Subordinating morality to electoral outcomes has produced a society where anything not criminal is acceptable, and anything that cannot be translated into votes simply does not exist. Even if 27 more October 7s were to occur, the art of deflecting responsibility would go on clearing everyone who deserves to be held to account.
Supporters of the current coalition will argue, not without reason: “What do you want from us? There is no other right-wing, security-minded alternative to vote for.” Without entering that political debate, I will say only this: Contrary to what many believe, casting a ballot is probably the least significant civic act available to a citizen.
What actually matters is the ongoing relationship between the public and its representatives: the daily demand for accountability, the refusal to let failure disappear into the news cycle. If representatives were forced to come to the public first with a genuine reckoning, and only then did citizens vote according to their own preferences, we would be in far better shape.
In the current situation, where each side rallies reflexively to protect its own leader, the arrogance is not even concealed. And accountability is dead.
The writer is the CEO of the Ribo Center.