The three-year anniversary of the October 7, 2023, attack is approaching in Israel, and despite everything that has happened since – including wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran – the memory of the assault continues to play a defining role in how Israelis view their place in the Middle East.
And with elections looming in late October, the Hamas-led assault, which killed 1,139 Israelis and led to about 250 more being taken captive, looks set to play a pivotal role in determining their outcome.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to hold an independent inquiry into his government’s failings ahead of the attack, despite similar inquiries focused on the conduct of the army and intelligence services, continues to dog him ahead of the elections.
Critics, including electoral rival and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, have accused Netanyahu of ignoring warnings about Hamas in the run-up to October 7, presiding over a security doctrine that assumed the group had been deterred, and failing to ensure the country was adequately prepared for the attack. Former Chief of Staff and a leading opposition candidate Gadi Eisenkot has gone further, making an independent inquiry into the failures of October 7 a central plank of his party’s electoral platform.
Netanyahu’s principal response has been in keeping with what many critics argue is the defining characteristic of his premiership: to deflect blame onto others. The stakes are high for the prime minister; he is currently on trial for corruption, and losing the election could make it harder for him to avoid prison.
Netanyahu has begun to push the claim that senior defence officials deliberately chose not to wake him up before the October 7 attack after they began to see suspicious activity in Gaza. “They knew that, as prime minister of Israel, I would have immediately given the order to put the entire military on alert,” Netanyahu said, outlining how he would have prevented the invasion.
Elsewhere, his wife Sara Netanyahu has cited opposition leader Yair Golan’s widely praised response to the attack – running from his bed and driving to the site – as apparent evidence of his foreknowledge of Hamas’s plans.
“Sara and Benjamin Netanyahu are just adding to the conspiracies that are already out in the public arena,” Neve Gordon, an Israeli academic at Queen Mary University of London, said, likening the tactic to similar strategies employed by populists worldwide. “People say it was planned, that the generals were somehow complicit and all of this is speeding up as the elections draw closer and is designed to confuse and reinforce the prime minister’s base.”
Open scars
Israeli media outlets have helped embed the trauma of October 7 within the country through an almost endless repetition of the events of that day, while the attack has also been invoked to justify everything that has come since, including the genocide in Gaza, and the killing of more than 73,000 Palestinians.
“The October 7 massacre was immediately interpreted as a new Holocaust, and the criminal genocidal reaction was interpreted as legitimate, without recognition of the suffering of innocent people,” Lev Grinberg, a professor of sociology at Ben Gurion University, said. “No one wanted to see the images of Palestinian suffering, and the media collaborated with the neglect of the casualties and damages, hiding the images from the public.”
“For most Israelis, [October 7 is] the worst in the country’s history … haunting public opinion and Israelis’ very basic sense of safety,” London-based Israeli academic and media analyst Ayala Panievsky said, describing the trauma of the attack and what she characterized as the institutional failure across the government and security services that met it.
“The fact that these elections will be about October 7 is not surprising really. The problem is that, to this day, none of the horrors that followed in Gaza penetrated the public conversation in Israel,” she added.
“That’s the only story told in the Israeli media. So there is little interest and little information out on Gaza, and this is not at all part of the conversation around the upcoming elections right now,” she said.
