Germany was licking World War I's wounds when the commission assigned with probing its events summoned Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg.
The German army’s wartime commander ignored the panelists’ questions and instead read an announcement that had one bottom line: The German army was not defeated. It was “stabbed in the back.”
Hindenburg, who struck victories when the war began but then presided over defeats, was referring to the politicians, specifically “the socialists” and “the communists.” The accusation was baseless. Germany lost because its army did not prepare for, or even just imagine, America’s entry into the war. This, however, the generals would not admit, because it was their task to either prepare for this prospect or avoid it.
That the stab-in-the-back myth was later used to blame Germany’s defeat on “the Jews” – is beside the point. What matters here and now, after the cabinet’s decision to prevent its own war’s impartial investigation, is the flight from truth.
Why do people flee the truth? How do they do it, and how do such flights end?
People flee the truth because of fear, shame, and survival. The fear is that their failure will become known. Shame threatens them because truth might expose them as frivolous, reckless, arrogant, or downright stupid. And both prospects inspire fear of death – whether political, social, or even physical.
The escape from truth uses three tactics: change the subject, twist the facts, and shift the blame.
In Hindenburg’s case, he changed the subject from what happened on the battlefield to what happened in politics, and shifted the blame from those who ran the war to those who did not.
The grand lie beyond all this was about Kaiser Wilhelm II, who pushed Germany into the war in which it lost two million soldiers, besides much treasure and land.
Earlier in his career, Wilhelm fired Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the towering statesman who unified Germany, and said it should never fight simultaneously on two fronts. Had the Kaiser fulfilled that will, Germany would not have entered the war it lost. Hindenburg, however, was a monarchist and thus needed a culprit who would be neither the kaiser nor Hindenburg.
Now, the Israeli government has taken a page from Hindenburg’s book.
Seeking the truth about the two-year war we have endured demands a judicial commission of inquiry.
Israeli law demands that such a panel’s members be selected by the president of the Supreme Court. The rationale is obvious: the chief justice is removed from the political fray, and the panel he or she would assemble will be professional and impartial.
There have been 16 such commissions over the years. Some probed deep issues, like the conditions of Israel’s jails (Kenneth Commission, 1979) and some investigated seismic events, like the Yom Kippur War (Agranat Commission, 1973) the Sabra and Chatila massacres (Kahn Commission, 1982), or the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (Shamgar Commission, 1995).
October 7 massacre demands government scrutiny
Everyone understands that the October 7 massacre begs such scrutiny. Even so, the government decided that the war’s investigators will be selected not by Supreme Court President Yitzhak Amit, but by the government itself. The culprits will appoint their judges.
“We don’t trust Amit,” say the government’s mouthpieces, led by Justice Minister Yariv Levin. That is Hindenburg’s method: Change the subject, in this case from the war to the court. That is what Regional Cooperation Minister Dudy Amsalem meant when he said in Sunday’s cabinet session: “The investigation commission’s first item should be the Supreme Court.”
Apparently, Amsalem thinks Levin’s panel will rule that the ones who cultivated Hamas, protected its leaders, handed it Qatari money, and let its terrorists work in Israel – were not Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers, but the judges of the Supreme Court.
The effort to twist, bury, and flee the truth is as inventive as it is transparent. Had the government’s problem been with Chief Justice Amit, as it claims, it would have accepted President Isaac Herzog’s proposal: that the investigators be appointed by Amit’s deputy, Noam Solberg, a religious West Bank resident who was appointed by Netanyahu. But Netanyahu doesn’t want Solberg either, because he knows that Solberg, like Amit, would seek the truth.
That is why Netanyahu had his justice minister, the man who waged war on the Supreme Court, select the investigation commission’s members and decide what they would probe, through a forum of no fewer than eight ministers, including the cabinet’s two most extreme zealots.
Some of the eight have never heard of Hindenburg, but they can be counted on to follow in his footsteps. The question, then, is whether this brazen effort to bury the truth will work, and the answer is it won’t.
Hiding the truth ultimately fails, as two grand precedents make plain.
Joseph Stalin, after ordering the massacre of some 20,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, blamed the bloodbath on the German army. Western reporters were brought to the forest after the Red Army retook it. Victims’ bodies were exhumed and fabricated letters were shown, to create the impression the officers were still alive when the Germans arrived. It was all very convincing, but the Soviets couldn’t explain why the bodies were wrapped in winter coats, though ostensibly killed in the summer. Truth rose from its grave.
The same thing happened after the Yom Kippur War. The government assigned the Agranat Commission to probe only the army, and not the government. The government thought it would bury the truth, but truth would not be buried. The commission probed the army, but the public punished the politicians, ultimately replacing Labor’s hegemons with Menachem Begin’s Likud.
Now the same fate awaits Begin’s successors. “Truth,” they will learn, “springs from the earth,” and “justice looks down from the heaven” (Psalms 85:12).
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarrim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.