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

Sharefacebookxwhatsapp-strokeLink copied!copy urlIsraeli Prime Minister and Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu raises both hands with open palms while delivering remarks from the lectern to supporters during a party campaign rally at Expo Tel Aviv on September 17, 2026 in Tel Aviv, Israel. [Erik Marmor/Getty Images]As 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 subsequent Israeli military operations or whether they put the Israeli hostages in danger or how many were killed by Israeli bombs.

There is no questioning of why key Palestinian negotiators were attacked during ceasefire and hostage negotiations, including Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s chief negotiator, in July 2024 in Tehran and Hamas’s negotiating delegation in September 2025 in Doha.

There is no debate about why the Israeli government repeatedly rejected ceasefire proposals that could have brought the hostages back much earlier.

There is little attention paid to the fact that Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant face arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

The answer lies in the psychological state of Israeli society. For many Israelis, October 7 became a psychological rupture, making it difficult to reconcile their sense of humanity with their complicity in the criminal reality that followed.

The problem, then, is not that Israelis are in denial or misinformed. It is that a large portion of the society is complicit in criminality and actively avoids reckoning with it.

The absence of Gaza and Palestinians more broadly from Israeli political discourse is because of their complete dehumanisation by Israeli society.

How else could one explain the absence from the election rhetoric of questions about, and subsequent accountability for, actions against the Palestinian people?

Why has the Israeli military killed at least 74,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians? Why has it carried out mass and arbitrary detentions, torture and enforced disappearances of Palestinians?

Why has it targeted journalists, medical workers and academics? Destroyed and occupied hospitals? Wiped out ancient landmarks and irreplaceable cultural heritage sites?

Why has the sadistic and often sexually deviant celebration of destruction, subjugation, ethnic cleansing and death by Israeli soldiers been allowed?

What’s more, there is also little interrogation of the consequences of bombing and invading Lebanon, killing nearly 9,000 people since October 2023. Or bombing Syria and Yemen.

These are not isolated abuses. They are symptoms of a system of theft and domination driven by greed and sustained through psychological conditioning, segregation, fear and rewards for aggression. In line with the “Wired to Steal” model, dehumanisation helps produce consent for aggression while escalation following acts of resistance leads to normalisation of further expansion and robbery.

Thus, this election is not about a reckoning with October 7 or its horrifying aftermath. It is a lens onto a fascistic settler society engaged in denial and dehumanisation of an Indigenous “other” as a means of evading and normalising its own ongoing genocidal actions. Although Netanyahu may become the scapegoat, replacing him does not address the underlying machinery of domination and may instead serve to entrench it further.

That machinery remains firmly in place. The continuity between the violence unleashed since October 7 and the longer history of Zionist colonial expansionism is striking, with no lessons learned other than how to improve and grease the machinations of genocide. Fear, victimhood and the construction of a permanently besieged “us” against a dehumanised “them” continue to produce consent for further aggression and expansion.

October 7, therefore, has become not an occasion for genuine reckoning but another means of avoiding one. Netanyahu seeks to focus responsibility for the attacks on questions of what he knew and when while leaving the much broader record of what Israel has done since largely outside the electoral debate. His opponents, meanwhile, have their own complicity and ambitions to answer for. Thus, there is little political interest in a genuine reckoning with October 7. The fixation on Netanyahu allows the wider political establishment and Israeli society to avoid confronting the system of domination in which they remain invested.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.