The Future Is Still Ours to Shape
As we prepare to welcome Rosh Hashanah, we are asked to do something that has become extraordinarily difficult in Israeli public life: to look back honestly.
The Jewish New Year is the beginning of the Yamim Hanoraim (ימים נוראים), not simply a celebration of what lies ahead. It is a time of Heshbon Hanefesh, חשבון נפש, an accounting of the soul. We examine what we have done, what we failed to do, and what must change if the coming year is truly to be different from the one before it.
For Israel, that reckoning can no longer be postponed.
This week, Haaretz published a disturbing investigation into the days preceding October 7. According to the report, in the final days of September 2023, UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for 45 minutes and warned him that Yahya Sinwar was planning a significant operation against Israel. The investigation reports that Netanyahu believed the more immediate danger was in the West Bank and assured the Emir that Israel was prepared. Most troublingly, according to the investigation, this warning was not shared with the heads of the IDF, Shin Bet or Mossad.
The Prime Minister's Office has categorically denied the report, saying that Netanyahu did not speak with the UAE President during that period and received no such warning. Former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar and former IDF chief Herzi Halevi, however, confirmed to Haaretz that they had not been informed of the warning described in the investigation.
We do not yet know the full truth.
And that is precisely the point.
Nearly three years after October 7, Israelis should not have to discover pieces of the story through books, newspaper investigations, leaked documents and competing political claims. A catastrophe of this magnitude demands something far more serious: an independent State Commission of Inquiry with the authority to establish what happened, who knew what, what decisions were made, and why.
Yesterday, Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Liberman and Yair Golan made a joint commitment that a government under their leadership would establish such a commission as one of its first acts.
That commitment matters.
A commission of inquiry must not be an instrument of revenge. It is an instrument of democracy. Accountability is not weakness. It is how a country learns from catastrophe, restores trust in its institutions and does everything possible to ensure that such a failure can never happen again.
And perhaps that is also the challenge of this Rosh Hashanah: not simply to replace one government with another, but to imagine a different kind of life in Israel.
On 27 October, Israelis will vote in the first national election since October 7. The opportunity before them is larger than changing the names around the cabinet table. It is an opportunity to begin repairing the democratic and social fabric of the country. To return to the values enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence: freedom, justice and equality. To bring the wars on all fronts to an end and replace the mindset of perpetual conflict with one that once again believes in the possibility of peace and a better future. To restore Israel’s ambition to be both the Start-Up Nation and an Or LaGoyim אור לגויים , a light unto the nations, leading not only through innovation, but through the values it represents.
That repair must include Israel's Arab citizens.
For too long, Israeli politics has contained an extraordinary contradiction. We proudly describe Israel as a democracy while treating the participation of a substantial part of its citizenry in national government as somehow illegitimate. Democracy cannot mean that Arab citizens may vote, but the parties they elect must forever remain outside the room where the country is governed.
There are encouraging signs that this paradigm may finally be beginning to change.
Last week, Ra’am (Arab party) leader Mansour Abbas and former Yesh Atid MK Yoav Segalovitz announced an extraordinary political partnership. Segalovitz, a former senior police officer and deputy public security minister, will run number two on Ra’am's list, becoming its first Jewish Knesset candidate. Abbas described the partnership as a model for Jewish-Arab political cooperation.
It is more than an electoral manoeuvre. It challenges one of the assumptions that has paralysed Israeli politics: that Jewish and Arab citizens can live together, work together, study together and build businesses together, but somehow cannot share responsibility for governing the country together.
Perhaps this new year can begin to change that.
And the rebuilding cannot stop at Israel's borders.
Israel must also rebuild its relationship with Jews around the world, including those who have spent the past three years struggling to reconcile their love for Israel with profound concern about the direction of its government. Criticism of an Israeli government must never be confused with abandonment of Israel itself.
Nor should Israel forget the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have chosen to build their lives abroad. They have not ceased to be Israeli. Their children have not ceased to be part of our story. Rather than treating departure as betrayal, a renewed Israel should ask how to keep these Israelis connected, involved and welcomed.
The Jewish world does not need narrower bridges. It needs more of them.
This Rosh Hashanah therefore arrives at an extraordinary moment.
We enter 5787 carrying enormous grief. October 7 can never be undone. The lives lost cannot be restored, and the failures that preceded that terrible morning cannot simply be erased by an election.
But the future is still ours to shape.
We can choose truth over concealment. Accountability over avoidance. Partnership over exclusion. Democracy not merely as a slogan, but as a principle that applies equally to all citizens. And we can rebuild the bridges between Israel, Israelis abroad and Jewish communities throughout the world.
The shofar is, among other things, a call to wake up.
Perhaps this year we should hear it that way.
A call to examine what went wrong.
A call to demand answers.
A call to rebuild.
And, with an election only weeks away, a reminder that a new year can also be the beginning of a new chapter.
May 5787 be a year of truth, accountability, healing and renewal.May it be the year in which Israel begins to heal, rebuild and once again look to the future with hope.
Shana Tova!
שנה טובה!
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