The recent decision by The State Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Meron Disaster to send warning letters to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his potential responsibility sends the message that committee members are not afraid of doing their job and exposing the unvarnished, a-partisan truth. This fundamental neutrality is something that we all need as a society.
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"The most dangerous thing for any living organism is failure to identify danger. Leadership and the proper identification of danger are pre-requisites for removing the threat," Netanyahu said during a Likud faction meeting in 2009.
Netanyahu has repeated this claim that a leader's over-arching job is to identify threats countless times. He is right. But in the case of the Meron disaster, he has failed to follow his own advice.
Netanyahu was in power for 12 years, he saw countless numbers of State Comptroller's Office reports and dealt with many High Court petitions and warning letters. All this should have been enough to cause him and his people concern. After all, Netanyahu has famously been associated with the phrase "the first to notice."
In that regard alone, his claim that he "didn't know, didn't hear, didn't see", when he testified before the commission smacks of a poor cop-out, particularly because he oversaw the very same event personally.
Netanyahu pressured officials to prepare the site for the many worshippers; he wanted to please his Haredi allies. Of course, like everyone else, he could not believe that things would go so terribly wrong after so many years of rather uneventful gatherings there.
To claim that he was "not informed" of the problems there ahead of time requires a large degree of disconnect. His job is to be informed, and he said as such. Shaking off this responsibility on the part of Netanyahu and others is outrageous, and this paradigm was successfully countered by the committee's decision to send warning letters to the various officials who oversaw it.
Those letters do not automatically imply guilt, and Netanyahu has every right to mount a defense. It may very well turn out that Netanyahu didn't know and couldn't know, but it may also turn out that this inquiry will spell the end of his political career, independent of the outcome in his ongoing corruption trial.
Putting Netanyahu's role aside, what's most important is seeking out the truth, so that it won't be buried as yet another fatality of this tragedy. The commission's warning letters are a sign of normalcy and accountability.
In fact, just after the event, it was impossible to create such a commission of inquiry due to the toxic political climate. Likewise, even when it was eventually formed by the current government, this was a political decision. But when all is said and done, politicians must serve the people.
Without saying this in so many words, the commission reinforced this principle of public service when it sent warning letters on behalf of the State of Israel. That was of great service to the public, like much-needed oxygen to our collective psyche.
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