What does anyone actually want from an investigation into a disaster? It sounds like a simple question, but Daniel's whole point this week is that we keep pretending there's only one answer. He wrote in about the October 7 debate that keeps resurfacing, most recently with Netanyahu under fire for waiting about three hours before holding his first serious consultation with the chief of military on the morning of the attack. Daniel's observation is that everyone supports investigations aimed at learning lessons and preventing recurrence, but investigations that apportion legal responsibility are a completely different animal, closer to calling for a criminal probe. He wants to know how we've traditionally drawn the boundaries between these types of investigations. Is there normally a firewall between a commission of inquiry and legal prosecution? And he pointed to the Meron stampede as another Israeli case, while asking us to look at models from around the world.
And the timing matters here, because this isn't a settled question in Israel. It's actively shaping an election campaign. The internal military investigations into October 7 have been running for a while now, but the public argument is about whether that's enough, or whether there needs to be an independent state commission of inquiry with real teeth. And the Meron case from 2021, forty-five people killed in a crowd crush at a religious festival, that one already went through a state commission and the aftermath was... let's say instructive about the gap between what a commission recommends and what actually happens.
So the episode is really about taxonomy. What are these bodies for? What can they do? And what happens when you blur the line between finding facts and assigning blame?
Right, and if you look at how different legal systems have answered that, you see they've made very different choices. Some of them deliberately, some of them accidentally, and the Israeli model sits at an odd spot in that landscape.
Let's start with the core distinction, because everything else follows from it. A lesson-learning investigation is trying to answer the question, what went wrong and how do we stop it happening again? A blame-apportioning investigation is trying to answer, who is responsible and what should happen to them? Those are not the same question, and they don't produce the same kind of testimony.
The witness problem is the sharpest way to see it. If you want candor from someone who was in the room when a decision went bad, you need them to feel safe telling you what actually happened, including the parts where they screwed up. But if the same words can be used against them in a prosecution, or in a disciplinary hearing, or even in the court of public opinion, their lawyer tells them to say as little as possible. You get carefully worded non-answers instead of a real account. The inquiry learns nothing, and the prosecution doesn't get much either. Both goals fail.
That's the trade-off in one sentence. An inquiry that can punish gets less truth. An inquiry that can't punish gets more truth but leaves people angry that nobody paid for it.
And different countries have looked at that trade-off and picked different sides. Australia is one of the clearest examples of the firewall approach. The Australian Law Reform Commission has been explicit about this. A Royal Commission is an investigative body, not an adjudicative one. It cannot make findings of criminal guilt or civil liability. Its findings aren't admissible as evidence in later court proceedings. The commission can refer matters to prosecutors, but it doesn't prosecute anything itself.
So the commission is a fact-finding engine that hands its product to the people with the power to act, but keeps its own hands clean of the legal consequences.
And the reason is exactly the witness problem we just described. The ALRC has said the separation is deliberate, because it protects the commission's ability to get full and frank evidence from witnesses who might otherwise invoke self-incrimination protections. If a witness knows nothing they say can be used against them in court, they talk. If they think the commission is just a stalking horse for the prosecutor, they clam up.
The UK has a similar structure, but with a twist. The Inquiries Act of 2005 is the governing framework, and it says in plain terms that an inquiry cannot determine civil or criminal liability. The job is to establish facts and make recommendations. But the evidence gathered by the inquiry can be used in subsequent prosecutions.
That's the critical difference from Australia, and it's not a small one. In the Australian model, the evidence itself is protected. In the UK model, the inquiry can't point a finger at anyone, but the transcript of your testimony can absolutely show up in a criminal trial later. The Grenfell Tower inquiry is the big live example. It's been running since 2017, investigating the fire that killed seventy-two people, and it operates under exactly this framework. The inquiry can't say this person is criminally liable, but everything said in that room is available to the prosecutors running parallel cases.
Which creates a strange situation where the inquiry is supposed to be a safe space for candor, but every witness knows the Crown Prosecution Service is listening.
And Grenfell has been criticized for exactly that. Families of the victims have been frustrated that the inquiry can't apportion blame, that it won't name the people responsible in the way they want. But the chairman has defended the firewall repeatedly, arguing that the inquiry's job is to find out what happened, not to punish those responsible. The punishment is someone else's job, downstream, with different rules of evidence.
So in both the Australian and UK models, the firewall is maintained through a combination of three things. Statutory limits on what the inquiry can find, rules about what evidence can be used elsewhere, and the power to refer matters to prosecutors without conducting the prosecution itself. The inquiry points, the prosecutor swings.
And the US 9/11 Commission is another variation on the same theme. It was explicitly designed as a fact-finding body with no prosecutorial power whatsoever. Its mandate was to investigate the facts and circumstances relating to the attacks and to provide recommendations. It couldn't indict anyone, couldn't prosecute anyone, couldn't even subpoena people the way a congressional committee might. Its final report focused on systemic failures, the intelligence sharing gaps, the missed signals, the structural problems.
Which is why the report reads the way it does. It's not a list of villains. It's a description of a system that failed in about a dozen different ways at once, with the failures compounding. Nobody went to jail because of the 9/11 Commission report. But the report drove a complete reorganization of American intelligence.
The creation of the Director of National Intelligence, the restructuring of the FBI and CIA relationship, the whole homeland security apparatus. That's a fact-finding commission that changed the world without ever having the power to punish a single person.
Now compare that to Israel's state commission of inquiry model, which is unusual. The Commissions of Inquiry Law dates from 1968, and it gives these commissions powers that the Australian, UK, and American models deliberately withhold. An Israeli state commission can make findings that have legal consequences. It can recommend dismissals. It can make findings against named individuals that then feed into other proceedings.
And that's the heart of the October 7 debate. The internal military investigations have been focused on operational lessons, what happened at the tactical level, what the intelligence picture looked like, where the failures were in the command structure. But the public outcry is for a state commission of inquiry precisely because it has the power to hold specific individuals accountable in a way the internal investigations don't.
The three-hour delay is the perfect flashpoint for this. Is that a systemic failure, a breakdown in communication, a structural problem? Or is it a specific failure by a specific person who should face consequences? The internal investigations tend to describe it in systemic terms. A commission of inquiry could say, no, this person failed, here's what should happen to him.
And the Meron precedent hangs over all of this. The stampede in 2021 killed forty-five people. A state commission of inquiry was appointed, and it did have the power to make findings against individuals. It made them. It found failures at multiple levels, named people, recommended consequences. And then... nothing much happened. The findings were never fully implemented. No senior officials faced prosecution. The government essentially absorbed the report and moved on.
Which illustrates the gap between what a commission can recommend and what actually happens when the political will to implement is absent. A commission with teeth can still bite nothing if the government decides not to act.
And that's the second-order question Daniel is really getting at. When a commission has the power to apportion blame, does that power undermine its ability to learn lessons? Because the witnesses know the stakes. If you're a military officer being asked about October 7, and you know the commission can recommend your dismissal or refer you for prosecution, you don't speak candidly. You speak carefully. You have a lawyer. You say as little as possible while appearing cooperative.
So the Israeli model gets the worst of both worlds in some ways. It has the power to punish, which chills candor, but it also depends on political will for implementation, which means the punishment often doesn't actually land. You get a less candid inquiry and no accountability.
That's the pessimistic read, and the Meron experience supports it. But there's another way to look at it. The Israeli model is at least honest about what these investigations are really doing. When the public demands a commission of inquiry after October 7, they're not asking for a lesson-learning exercise. The lessons are already being learned, or at least studied, by the internal military investigations. They're asking for accountability. They're asking for someone to be held responsible. And the Israeli model says, yes, that's a legitimate thing for an inquiry to do.
Which is a real difference from the Australian or UK approach, where the inquiry is explicitly not the place for that, and the accountability happens elsewhere, if at all. The Israeli model collapses the two functions into one body, with all the tensions that creates.
Let me give you the Australian example in more detail, because it's the cleanest version of the firewall. The Australian Law Reform Commission did a major review of Royal Commissions and confirmed the basic structure. A Royal Commission investigates, it reports, it recommends. It does not adjudicate. Its findings are not admissible in later court proceedings. If a Royal Commission uncovers evidence of criminal conduct, it can refer that evidence to the police or the prosecutor, but the commission itself has no power to bring charges.
And the reason the ALRC gives for this is exactly the candor point. You want witnesses to speak freely. You want documents produced without a fight. You want people to feel that the inquiry is a place for truth, not a trap. The moment the inquiry becomes a pathway to prosecution, everyone lawyers up and the inquiry gets nothing.
The UK Inquiries Act of 2005 is slightly different, as I said. The inquiry can't determine liability, but the evidence can be used later. So the firewall is thinner. It protects the inquiry's conclusions, but not the testimony that led to those conclusions.
And Grenfell is the test case for how that works in practice. The inquiry has been going for years, producing massive reports, hearing from hundreds of witnesses. And parallel to it, there are criminal investigations, corporate prosecutions, regulatory actions. The inquiry's evidence feeds those processes, but the inquiry itself stays in its lane.
The families of Grenfell victims have been pretty clear that they want more than the inquiry can give. They want people held criminally responsible. And the inquiry chairman keeps saying, that's not my job. My job is to find out what happened. The criminal justice system has its own process, with its own standards of proof, and it will do its work.
Which is a defensible position, but you can see why it frustrates people. The inquiry takes years. The prosecutions take more years. And in the meantime, the people who died are dead, and the people responsible are... still living their lives.
The 9/11 Commission is the American version of the same trade-off. It was created by Congress and the President, given a mandate to investigate the facts and circumstances of the attacks, and explicitly denied any prosecutorial power. Its final report is a remarkable document, because it's almost entirely about systems. It describes the failure of imagination, the failure of policy, the failure of management, the failure of capability. It names very few villains.
And yet it worked, in the sense that its recommendations were largely implemented. The intelligence community was restructured. The homeland security apparatus was built. The report changed things.
Which is the strongest argument for the firewall model. If your goal is to learn lessons and prevent recurrence, you don't need the power to punish. You need the power to compel truth. And the power to punish actively works against the power to compel truth.
But the counterargument is that sometimes the lesson is that specific people failed in specific ways, and if those people face no consequences, the lesson is hollow. The Israeli public demanding a commission of inquiry after October 7 isn't primarily interested in a report about systemic failures. They want to know who was responsible and what happens to them.
And that's the tension the Israeli model tries to resolve by giving the commission both powers. It can investigate and it can recommend consequences. The question is whether it can do both well, or whether the punishment power poisons the investigation.
The Meron experience suggests it's hard. The commission had the power, made the findings, and then the political system simply declined to implement them. So the accountability never materialized, and the lesson-learning was compromised by the fact that everyone knew the commission could hurt them.
And now we're seeing the same dynamic play out with October 7. The internal military investigations have been running, producing operational lessons, examining what happened at the tactical and strategic level. But the political debate is about whether there needs to be an independent state commission, with the power to make findings against individuals. Netanyahu's three-hour delay is the flashpoint because it's the kind of fact that a commission could use to make an individual finding. Was he negligent? Should he face consequences? A commission of inquiry could say yes. An internal military investigation probably won't.
And the election makes it impossible to separate the investigation question from the political question. Whoever investigates, with what powers, and what they find, will shape the campaign. A commission that finds Netanyahu personally responsible is a very different political event from an internal investigation that describes systemic failures.
Which is why the taxonomy matters. If you understand the difference between a lesson-learning investigation and a blame-apportioning investigation, you can see what's actually being demanded when someone calls for a commission of inquiry. They're not asking for more information about what happened. They're asking for a particular kind of accountability.
And the international models show that there's no single right answer. Australia and the UK chose to separate the functions. The US chose to focus on facts and recommendations. Israel chose to combine them. Each choice has costs and benefits.
The Australian model protects candor but leaves accountability to a separate process that may or may not happen. The UK model protects the inquiry's conclusions but not its evidence, creating a half-firewall that's supposed to balance both goals. The US model gets maximum candor and maximum reform, but minimum individual accountability. The Israeli model gets maximum potential accountability but minimum candor, and the accountability still depends on political will.
So the question Daniel is really asking is, what do we want from the October 7 investigation? Do we want to learn lessons, or do we want to hold people responsible? Because those are different projects, and they require different tools.
And the Israeli public, I think, wants both, which is why the debate keeps going in circles. They want the lessons learned so this never happens again. And they want the people responsible to face consequences. But those two goals pull in opposite directions when it comes to how the investigation should be structured.
The witness who knows he might be prosecuted doesn't tell you everything. The witness who knows he's safe tells you everything, but then you can't prosecute him. You can't have both.
Unless you sequence them. Run the lesson-learning inquiry first, with full candor protections. Then run the accountability process separately, using the evidence the inquiry gathered, with proper legal protections for the accused. That's the UK model, sort of. The inquiry goes first, the prosecutions follow.
But that takes years, and the public patience runs out. Grenfell has been going since 2017. The prosecutions are still ongoing. The families are still waiting. And in Israel, the political calendar doesn't allow for a decade-long process. The election is coming. The public wants answers now.
Which is why the Israeli model, for all its problems, is at least responsive to the political reality. A commission of inquiry can move faster than a full criminal process, and it can make findings that matter politically even if they don't lead to prosecutions.
But the Meron experience shows that findings that don't lead to prosecutions can just... sit there. The commission did its work. The report was published. And then the political system moved on. No senior official faced prosecution. The recommendations were never fully implemented. The forty-five people who died got a report, not accountability.
And that's the risk with October 7. A commission of inquiry gets appointed, does its work, makes findings, and then the political system absorbs it and moves on. The findings become part of the historical record, but nothing changes.
So the real question isn't whether to have an investigation. It's what the investigation is for, and whether the political system is willing to act on what it finds.
And the international models show that the answer to that question varies enormously. The 9/11 Commission succeeded because there was political will to implement its recommendations. The Meron commission failed because there wasn't. The structure of the commission matters, but the political context matters more.
Let me push on one thing. You said the Israeli model is at least honest about what these investigations are really doing. But is it? A commission of inquiry that can recommend consequences but whose recommendations are routinely ignored is not honest about anything. It pretends to have power it doesn't actually have.
That's fair. The formal powers are real, but the practical effect depends on implementation, and implementation has been weak. So the Israeli model is honest about intent but dishonest about capacity. It says, we can hold people responsible, but in practice it often can't.
And the Australian model is the opposite. It's honest about its limits. It says, we can't hold anyone responsible, but we can find out what happened and recommend changes. And that honesty, paradoxically, makes it more effective at what it does.
Because nobody expects a Royal Commission to punish anyone. So the witnesses talk. The documents get produced. The report is thorough. And then the political system decides what to do with it.
Which brings us back to Daniel's original question. Is there typically a firewall between a commission of inquiry and legal prosecution? The answer is yes, in most countries, but the firewall takes different forms and has different thicknesses. Australia has a thick firewall. The UK has a medium firewall. The US has a thick firewall but a different institutional design. Israel has a thin firewall, or possibly no firewall at all.
And the thickness of the firewall determines what the inquiry can accomplish. Thick firewall means candor but no accountability. Thin firewall means accountability but less candor. No firewall means the inquiry is basically a pre-prosecution process, which is what Daniel said, it's more like calling for a legal investigation.
The Israeli state commission of inquiry is closer to the no-firewall end of the spectrum. It can make findings that lead directly to consequences. Which means it's more like a legal investigation than a lesson-learning exercise.
That's why the October 7 debate is so fraught. The people demanding a state commission of inquiry are, whether they realize it or not, demanding a legal investigation. They're demanding a process that can assign blame and impose consequences. They're not primarily asking for lessons to be learned.
The people resisting a state commission are, whether they realize it or not, resisting a legal investigation. They're resisting a process that could hold specific people responsible, possibly including themselves or their political allies.
The debate about the investigation is really a debate about accountability, and the debate about accountability is really a debate about power. Who gets to investigate whom, with what powers, and what happens to the findings.
Which is why the international models are useful. They show that there are other ways to do this. You can have a fact-finding body that doesn't apportion blame. You can have an inquiry whose evidence feeds a separate prosecution process. You can have a commission that recommends consequences but can't impose them. The Israeli model is one option among many, and it's not obviously the best one.
The 9/11 Commission is the strongest counterexample. It had no power to punish anyone, and yet it produced one of the most consequential reports in American history. Because it focused on systems, not individuals, it was able to get cooperation from everyone involved, and its recommendations were implemented because they weren't about punishing people, they were about fixing structures.
But the 9/11 Commission also had something the Israeli investigations don't have: a clear external enemy. The failures were failures to anticipate and prevent an attack by al-Qaeda. The question wasn't really about whether specific American officials should be punished. It was about how the system failed to see the threat.
Whereas October 7 is more internal. The failures were failures of the Israeli security establishment, failures of the political leadership, failures of the intelligence services. The question is much more directly about who was responsible and what should happen to them.
Which makes the Israeli situation more like Grenfell than 9/11. Grenfell was a failure of regulation, of building standards, of corporate behavior, of local government. The question was who was responsible, and the inquiry was deliberately designed not to answer that question, which is why the families are still frustrated.
Meron is the Israeli Grenfell. A failure of crowd management, of regulation, of local government, of the police. The commission was designed to answer the responsibility question, and it did, but the answers were never implemented.
Israel has tried both approaches. Meron had a commission with the power to assign blame, and the blame was assigned but not acted on. October 7 is now facing the same question: do we want a commission that can assign blame, knowing that the blame might not be acted on?
Or do we want something more like the 9/11 Commission, focused on systems and recommendations, accepting that individual accountability will be limited?
The problem is that the Israeli public, after October 7, is not in a mood to accept limited accountability. The scale of the failure was so enormous, the consequences so catastrophic, that a report about systemic failures feels like a dodge.
That's understandable. But the Meron experience shows that the alternative, a commission with the power to assign blame, doesn't necessarily deliver accountability either. It delivers a report that names names, and then the political system decides whether to act on it.
The real question is political will, not institutional design. A commission with the power to assign blame is only as effective as the political system's willingness to act on its findings. And in Israel, that willingness has been lacking.
Which is why the international models are instructive but not decisive. You can design the perfect commission, with the perfect firewall, and it still won't deliver accountability if the political system doesn't want accountability.
The political system in Israel, facing an election, with the current government fighting for survival, is not obviously eager to create a body that could hold its members responsible.
The debate about the investigation is, at bottom, a debate about whether the political system will be forced to confront its own failures. And that's a political question, not a legal one.
Which brings us to the question of what actually happened with the three-hour delay. Is that a systemic failure or an individual failure? The internal investigations have treated it as a systemic issue, part of the broader breakdown in communication and decision-making on that morning. But a commission of inquiry could treat it as an individual failure by the prime minister.
That's the difference between the two types of investigation in a nutshell. The internal investigation says, the system failed, here's how to fix it. The commission of inquiry says, this person failed, here's what should happen to him.
The three-hour delay is the perfect test case because it sits exactly on the line between systemic and individual failure. Was Netanyahu slow to consult the military chief because the system didn't alert him properly, or because he personally failed to grasp the severity of the situation?
The answer to that question determines which type of investigation is appropriate. If it's a systemic failure, you want a lesson-learning inquiry. If it's an individual failure, you want accountability.
The problem is that it's probably both. The system failed to alert him, and he failed to grasp the severity. The system and the individual failed together, in ways that are hard to disentangle.
Which is why the firewall models from Australia and the UK are attractive. They allow the inquiry to examine both the systemic and the individual dimensions without getting bogged down in the question of who should be punished. The inquiry finds the facts, describes the failures, and leaves the punishment question to a separate process.
But that separate process may never happen, or may happen years later, or may be blocked politically. The firewall protects the inquiry's candor, but it also protects the people who failed from facing consequences.
That's the trade-off Daniel is pointing at. You can have candor or you can have accountability, but it's very hard to have both at the same time.
The Israeli model tries to have both, and the Meron experience suggests it ends up with neither.
Which is a depressing conclusion, but I think it's the honest one.
Let me ask you something. You spent years as a pediatrician in Jerusalem. Did you ever see the difference between a medical review and a legal proceeding play out in practice?
All the time. A medical review, a morbidity and mortality conference, is designed to be candid. Doctors talk about what went wrong, what they missed, what they'd do differently. It's protected, in most places, from being used in malpractice litigation. The whole point is to create a space where people can be honest about their mistakes. And it works, mostly, because the protection is real. But the moment there's a lawsuit, everything changes. The lawyers get involved, the candor disappears, and everyone starts speaking in carefully hedged language.
The medical profession has built its own firewall, and it works because everyone trusts it.
The trust is the key. The firewall only works if the people inside it believe it's real. If they think the protection is illusory, they won't talk. And that's the question for any commission of inquiry: do the witnesses believe the firewall, or do they think it's a trap?
Which is where the practical reality matters more than the legal framework. A firewall on paper is worthless if the witnesses don't trust it.
In Israel, after Meron, after the political fights over investigations, I think there's very little trust that a commission of inquiry will be a safe space for candor. Everyone knows it can hurt them, so everyone will be careful.
The Israeli model, whatever its formal design, operates in practice as a blame-apportioning process, because that's what everyone expects it to be.
That expectation shapes the testimony. The witnesses speak as if they're in a legal proceeding, because they might be, or the findings might lead to one.
Which means the lesson-learning function is compromised from the start. The inquiry can't learn lessons because nobody will tell it what actually happened.
The accountability function is compromised too, because the political system can decline to act on the findings. So you get neither.
The international models at least deliver one or the other. Australia delivers lessons. The UK delivers facts that can feed accountability. The US delivered reform. Israel delivers... a report that gets filed away.
That's the pessimistic read. The optimistic read is that the Israeli model, because it combines the functions, at least forces the political system to confront the findings. A report that names names is harder to ignore than a report about systems.
But Meron showed that it's not hard enough. The names were named, and the political system ignored them anyway.
Which suggests the problem isn't the institutional design. It's the political culture. No commission, however well designed, can force a political system to act against its own interests.
We're back to the question of political will. The international models show different ways to structure an investigation, but none of them can solve the problem of a political system that doesn't want to be held accountable.
That's the uncomfortable truth at the heart of the October 7 debate. The argument about the investigation is really an argument about whether the political system will be forced to confront its own failures. And that's a question that no commission of inquiry can answer.
The three-hour delay will be investigated, one way or another. The question is whether the investigation will lead to consequences, and that depends on the political context, not the legal framework.
The election makes it even more complicated. A commission of inquiry appointed before the election could shape the campaign. A commission appointed after the election could be shaped by the campaign. Either way, the investigation is entangled with politics.
Which is why Daniel's question about the firewall is so timely. The firewall between inquiry and prosecution is supposed to protect the inquiry from politics. But in practice, the politics always finds a way in.
The Australian and UK models try to insulate the inquiry by making it purely investigative. The Israeli model embraces the political dimension by giving the inquiry the power to make findings with legal consequences. Neither approach fully works.
Because the firewall is only as strong as the political system's commitment to maintaining it. And in a polarized political environment, that commitment is weak.
What do we actually know about the three-hour delay? The facts are still disputed. The timeline is contested. The internal investigations have produced some findings, but they haven't been made fully public.
That's another dimension of the problem. The internal investigations are conducted by the military, about the military, with the results reported to the military. The public doesn't get to see the full picture. A state commission of inquiry would be more transparent, but it would also be more political.
The 9/11 Commission was transparent. Its report was public, its hearings were public, its findings were widely discussed. That transparency was part of why it worked. The public trusted the process because they could see it.
The Israeli internal investigations are the opposite. They're conducted behind closed doors, with the results filtered through the chain of command. The public doesn't trust them because they can't see them.
That lack of trust is what's driving the demand for a state commission. The public doesn't want more internal reviews. They want an independent investigation that they can see and trust.
But the independence is the hard part. Who appoints the commission? Who serves on it? Who defines its mandate? All of those decisions are political, and in the current climate, they'll be contested.
The Meron commission was appointed by the government, and its findings were ignored by the government. So the independence was compromised from the start.
Which is why the international models are worth studying. They show different ways to structure independence, different ways to define the relationship between inquiry and prosecution, different ways to balance candor and accountability.
But they also show that the institutional design is secondary to the political context. A well-designed commission in a hostile political environment will fail. A poorly designed commission in a supportive political environment can succeed.
The real question for Israel is not what kind of commission to have, but whether there's the political will to have a commission at all, and to act on its findings.
That's a question that will be answered by the election, not by legal scholars.
The firewall between inquiry and prosecution is a real thing, and it matters, but it's not the most important thing. The most important thing is whether the people in power are willing to be held accountable.
That's the question Daniel's prompt ultimately raises. Not how to design the perfect investigation, but whether we're willing to accept what an honest investigation would find.
The three-hour delay is a fact. The question is what we do with it.
The answer to that question will tell us more about the health of Israeli democracy than any commission of inquiry ever could.
I keep thinking about the 9/11 Commission. It worked because the political system wanted it to work. The Bush administration resisted it initially, but eventually cooperated, and the recommendations were implemented because there was a consensus that the intelligence failures needed to be fixed.
Whereas in Israel, there's no consensus about what needs to be fixed. There's a consensus that October 7 was a catastrophic failure, but no consensus about who was responsible or what should happen next.
That lack of consensus is what makes the investigation question so fraught. It's not a technical question about institutional design. It's a political question about power and accountability.
The Australian Royal Commission model works because there's a broad consensus that the inquiry should find facts and make recommendations, not assign blame. The UK model works because there's a consensus that the inquiry should establish what happened, with accountability handled separately. The US model worked because there was a consensus that the focus should be on fixing the system, not punishing individuals.
In Israel, there's no such consensus. There's a deep disagreement about what the investigation should do, who it should target, and what the results should be.
Which is why the debate keeps going in circles. The two sides are arguing about different things. One side wants lessons learned. The other side wants accountability. And they're both calling it an investigation.
Daniel's prompt is really an attempt to clarify that confusion. To point out that these are different projects, with different goals, and that conflating them leads to bad outcomes.
The international models show that the conflation is not inevitable. Other countries have found ways to separate the functions, or to combine them in ways that work better than the Israeli model.
But the Israeli model is what it is, and changing it would require a political consensus that doesn't exist.
The October 7 investigation will proceed, one way or another, and the Meron experience suggests that the outcome will be unsatisfactory to almost everyone.
Which is a grim note to end on, but I think it's the honest one.
Hilbert: You're both right.
Hilbert: I worked for a state commission once. Small country, ferry disaster. My job was cataloging evidence. Boxes of it. The commission was barred from apportioning blame. Paper said so. But the prosecutors were running a parallel investigation, same evidence, same witnesses. Everyone figured it out in about a week.
Hilbert: The witnesses stopped talking. They'd come in, sit down, and read statements their lawyers had written. We know nothing, we saw nothing, we followed procedure. The commission's final report was three hundred pages long and said almost nothing. Nobody learned anything. Nobody was prosecuted. The ferry company changed its name and kept operating.
Hilbert: The firewall only works if people believe it. The paper said the commission couldn't be used for prosecution. The paper was wrong. The evidence flowed straight from our files to the prosecutor's desk. The chairman knew it. He tried to stop it. Then he found out his own deputy was briefing the prosecutors on the side.
Hilbert: The chairman resigned. Halfway through. His resignation letter was never made public. The government suppressed it. I know because I was the one who filed it. They told me to lose it. I made a copy instead.
Hilbert: My brother-in-law worked for the ferry company. He says the whole thing was a show. The commission was set up to look like something was being done, while the real investigation, the one that could have hurt people, was quietly steered into a dead end. He's not a reliable source, my brother-in-law. But he was right about that.
The deputy briefing the prosecutors is the whole firewall problem in one story. The legal separation meant nothing because the people on both sides were talking to each other. And once the witnesses figured that out, the candor was gone.
What strikes me is that the commission still produced a three-hundred-page report. It had the form of an investigation without the substance. That's the worst outcome, because it lets everyone pretend the inquiry did its job.
Hilbert: The report was thorough. It listed every fact we could verify. It just didn't mean anything. The facts were all from documents. The people who knew what happened weren't
