What the surface comparison between Golda Meir and Benjamin Netanyahu misses is that the failures itself, while separated by half a century, share more than common than is often acknowledged.

The Yom Kippur War claimed the lives of over 2,600 Israeli soldiers and left thousands more wounded. The events of the October 7 massacres killed around 1,195 people in a single day: 828 civilians, including 36 children and 71 foreign citizens, and at least 367 members of the security forces. This was before the prolonged war that has since claimed the lives of hundreds of Israeli soldiers.

At first glance, these appear to be fundamentally different kinds of crises. One, after all, was a conventional war, the other a massacre followed by asymmetric fighting. In one respect, however, they are strikingly similar: neither was truly unforeseeable.

In the months leading up to 1973, Israeli intelligence registered multiple warning signs: Egyptian and Syrian troop movements, rising tensions, and credible indications of a potential attack. But these signals were filtered through the prevailing strategic assumption – the ‘conceptzia’ – that Egypt would not dare go to war under existing conditions.

A similar pattern preceded October 7, as intelligence indicators suggested unusual Hamas activity and evolving operational capabilities, but these were also interpreted through the entrenched belief that Hamas was deterred and uninterested in a large-scale confrontation.

This parallel rather complicates the tendency to treat 1973 as an unavoidable surprise and 2023 as uniquely preventable. Both were, in their separate ways, preventable.

Following the Yom Kippur War, public anger coalesced into such sustained political pressure that the Agranat Commission was established to investigate the failures, and, although it did not assign direct blaim to Meir, the sense of accountability had not been fully realised. It is also worth recalling that Meir did not step down immediately: she won the December 1973 election and formed a government, only resigning months later as pressure from the public increased.

But that environment, in which continued leadership became untenable, no longer exists in the same form. Netanyahu governs a far more fragmented and polarised Israel, one in which political consensus is very much weaker.

Israeli society has rallied behind military operations, including the current confrontation with Iran, even as trust in Netanyahu himself remains the topic of a most hot debate. In 2024, following the famous pager attack on Hezbollah, Netanyahu’s approval ratings shot up, with one poll for Channel 12 indicating the Likud would win more seats than any other if a general election were held. But support for the war effort has not translated into an overall unified confidence in the leadership directing it. If that poll  had become reality, he would not have won the elections overall.

In 1974, Israel could absorb a political reset. The war had ended, and the state was not facing an immediate, multi-front escalation. Today, Israel operates in a more fluid and continuous security environment. The question, then, is not whether accountability should come, but how and when it can be meaningfully exercised.

Before October 7, Israeli society was already deeply divided, with the likes of the judicial reviews at the hot topics. The war has imposed a degree of unity, as wars tend to do – after the elder Bush’s launch of Operation Desert Storm in January 1991, his approval ratings surged to 82%, having been 30% lower the November before; his son experienced the same success, with an approval rating around 58% that jumped to 71% at the start of the invasion of Iraq. The younger Bush’s success, of course, did not last forever.

I wrote a piece in November last year, here on the Times of Israel, titled ‘Where is the October 7 inquiry?’ In response to it, a reader left a comment: ‘Why would they want to reveal how a ragtag group on hang gliders and motorcycles could rampage for hours unimpeded in one of the most surveilled areas in the world?’ And she was right.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)