On Thursday, 1,000 days after the worst disaster in Israel’s history since its founding, the country still has no state commission of inquiry into the October 7 massacre. Yet some conclusions are already unavoidable, beginning with the man who led Israel, through strategic blindness and political arrogance, into catastrophe.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised Israelis “total victory.” In one respect, he delivered it: If elections are held as scheduled in October 2026, that will be his greatest victory, and perhaps his only one.
In nearly any self-respecting democracy, the leader presiding over such a failure would not have remained in office for longer than it took to pack his belongings. In Japan, resignation would have come on October 7. In Germany, it would have come the next day. In Britain, it may have taken slightly longer, if only because the prime minister would first have had to inform the monarch.
Israel, however, is not a dictatorship, and Netanyahu’s achievement should not be taken from him. Only he could marshal the necessary quantities of resentment, disinformation, manipulation, cynicism, populism, and disregard for human cost to survive politically for this long.
As for the “total victory” promised on every other front, the verdict is mixed. Israel’s security establishment, the IDF, Mossad, and Shin Bet, inflicted unprecedented blows on Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. Their accumulated capabilities are, at this point, far weaker than they were before October 7.
The immediate existential threat to Israel has been removed. For now, Israelis can breathe. But that is true only for this moment, not necessarily for the next one.
Netanyahu understood from the beginning that Hamas could not be erased entirely, that Hezbollah could not simply be disarmed, and that “total victory” was not a realistic military endpoint. The phrase served another purpose: extending the war, delaying elections, and obstructing a state commission of inquiry.
Israel pays the price while Netanyahu survives
This was the same type of commission he had demanded only two years earlier over the spyware affair. In the end, Netanyahu survived. The state paid the price.
The central question is how Israel, a military, technological, and economic powerhouse, reached a point at which its citizens faced mass slaughter. The answer lies in a security doctrine advanced by Netanyahu, one that allowed Israel’s enemies to build terrorist armies along its borders until they became a noose around the country’s neck.
Netanyahu repeated this week that Iran already had nuclear bombs, while also insisting that Iran would not obtain nuclear weapons as long as he remains prime minister. The contradiction is obvious. Tracking the prime minister’s claims requires nearly superpower-level capacity.
Israel’s regional standing has weakened
Despite the removal of the immediate existential threat, Israel’s broader strategic position has deteriorated. Hamas has not been uprooted. Hezbollah has not been disarmed. Iran has not disappeared as a regional threat.
Worse, Israel’s regional isolation is deepening as new alignments form among Riyadh, Doha, and Ankara. The asset that once helped Israel decide every major campaign, its relationship with the United States, can no longer be taken for granted.
It is not too late to reverse the damage. From October 2023 to October 2026, Israel can move from disaster and defeat toward recovery and hope.