‘Did he know?’: Why Israel is rejecting an October 7 reckoning

Yoav Litvin is an Israeli-American doctor of psychology/neuroscience, a writer and photographer.Published On 4 Oct 20264 Oct 2026As Israel prepares to mark three years since the October 7 attacks and with less than a month to go to parliamentary elections, one topic is dominating the electoral agenda.Media reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was warned by the United Arab Emirates before the attacks have put his alleged responsibility back in the spotlight.“Did he know?” is the question on everyone’s lips.Listening to the accusatory choir, one might think that Israeli society finally is acknowledging the real meaning of October 7. Yet the opposite is true.Instead of giving a platform to a reckoning, the elections function to scapegoat Netanyahu for his alleged role in facilitating Hamas’s attack while absolving Israeli society and the Zionist movement of its collective responsibility for the preceding violence and ensuing genocidal aggression.For example, it does not insist on investigating whether the “Hannibal Directive” was deployed as part of the Israeli military response on October 7 and whether it killed Israeli citizens and how many.It does not scrutinise subsequen...