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If there’s one thing most Israelis agree on after nearly a year and a half of war, it’s the need for a deep, impartial investigation into the catastrophe of October 7—laying bare what went wrong that day, beforehand, and possibly after. The demand for such an inquiry has escalated, voiced in equal measure by gaunt ex-hostages and the outgoing, guilt-ridden, military chief of staff.

And if there is one thing that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not want, it is such an investigation. The reason isn’t hard to fathom. A serious probe will likely hold Netanyahu responsible for Hamas catching Israel unprepared. Its conclusions could echo the signs directed at the prime minister at street protests: You’re the boss. You’re guilty.

Commissions of inquiry are the normal mechanism by which Israeli governance reckons with its response to extraordinary events. The procedure for creating one is enshrined in law: The cabinet votes to create the commission and defines the scope of its inquiry. The chief justice of the supreme court appoints the members, and a senior judge or retired judge chairs. In the weightiest investigations, the chief justice has chaired the commission. The panel can subpoena witnesses and documents. It can find individuals responsible for actions and omissions. The findings aren’t criminal convictions, but they can include recommendations to dismiss high officials.

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The best-known inquiry commissions have near-mythic status in Israeli memory. One investigated how Israel was taken by surprise at the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and its preliminary report sparked the resignation or dismissal first of top generals and then of Prime Minister Golda Meir, ending her career.

Another examined Israel’s role in the 1982 massacre, by a Lebanese Christian militia, of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. The inquiry’s most resounding conclusion was that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon bore “personal responsibility,” because he “ignored the danger of acts of revenge and bloodshed” by the militia. Sharon resigned. Even when he became prime minister many years later, he did not hold the defense post again, as some prime ministers have done.

With rare exceptions, the law on commissions of inquiry requires the government to decide to investigate itself. This is the procedure’s weakness, but popular pressure has historically proved effective in forcing the government’s hand. Meir decided to create the commission that ultimately forced her out in response to the public anger, spurred by army reservists returning home from the front. Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s government understood that it needed to act after an estimated 400,000 demonstrators flooded central Tel Aviv in what was then the largest protest the country had ever seen.

This history best explains why the public today expects an inquiry commission, and why Netanyahu resists appointing one: Disasters beget commissions, and commissions can beget upheaval.

Polling shows that up to 83 percent of Israelis, including a large majority of voters for parties in the ruling coalition, want a state inquiry into October 7. And in recent days, pressure for an inquiry has grown. One reason is that a slew of internal army investigations have been released, probing, among other things, the failure to defend border communities on the morning of the attack, and the years of overly sanguine assessments of Hamas.

Those inquiries reinforce earlier press reports based on leaks and add frightening detail. The Military Intelligence Directorate had stopped listening in real time to Hamas walkie-talkies. It had acquired Hamas’s plan for an invasion of Israel—and dismissed it as purely aspirational. Completely misreading Hamas, the army believed that it was deterred from attacking Israel by the outcome of previous fighting. That bias led it to dismiss multiple signs of the impending attack in the hours before it began.

The army’s investigation and a parallel one by the Shin Bet counterintelligence agency lay out those bodies’ mistakes. Only obliquely, though, do they say anything about the decisions or negligence of the government. This makes sense; an army investigation of elected leaders would have the scent of a coup. But the publication of the army probes draws attention to the government’s refusal to be investigated.

It also fits a pattern. Generals have acknowledged that they let the country down; Netanyahu hasn’t. The military chief of staff on October 7 and after, Herzi Halevi, resigned just after the current cease-fire began in January and left office last week. The disaster occurred “on my watch, and I bear responsibility,” Halevi said when he turned over command. Then he added—pointedly, as Netanyahu was present—“It’s not right that only the Israel Defense Forces investigate an event like this. Establishing a state commission of inquiry is necessary and essential.”

Early this month, opposition parties managed to force the Knesset to hold a debate on establishing a state commission. An opposition parliamentarian read a letter from Yarden Bibas, who was taken captive on October 7 and released in the first stage of the now-stalled hostage deal. Bibas was still observing the traditional Jewish week of mourning for his murdered wife and two small children, whose bodies had been returned from Gaza. “I call on you, Mr. Prime Minister,” Bibas wrote, to “unite the people of Israel, bring peace to our souls, fulfill the will of the people and the [victims’] families. Announce today the establishment of a state commission of inquiry.”

Netanyahu was required to respond, and he did so with a speech of more than half an hour that included jibes at the opposition and an attempt to link the former prime minister and outspoken government critic Ehud Barak to Jeffrey Epstein. On the inquiry issue itself, he conceded that “it’s crucial to investigate thoroughly everything that happened on October 7.” But, he claimed, a state commission would be “politically tilted” and its “conclusions known in advance.”

What he and “a majority of the people” wanted, he said, was an “objective, balanced” inquiry panel. He appeared to be referring to plans that his inner circle had reportedly floated to get around the commission law, possibly by establishing an ad hoc parliamentary panel with coalition and opposition members. Under the commission law, Chief Justice Yitzhak Amit would choose the panel, and the retired chief justice Esther Hayut could conceivably chair it. The prime minister and his coalition regard both judges as too liberal—and too independent. But what they seem to be suggesting instead is to choose the panel on the basis of party, which would be overtly political, as well as lacking the long precedent and settled law of a state commission.

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Netanyahu was prime minister for 13 of the 14 years before October 7. A commission of inquiry might look into his strategic choice to allow Hamas to remain in control of Gaza as a means of keeping the Palestinians divided. It might also determine whether the notion that Hamas had been deterred, and so did not pose an immediate threat, was the army’s and that Netanyahu simply failed to question it—or whether generals shaped their evaluations to fit what the prime minister wanted to hear. Such an inquiry could determine what warning signs the prime minister may have ignored in the days and years before the catastrophe.

In Israel, a state commission of inquiry is not merely a judicial instrument or a means of settling facts. It’s a ritual of national closure that allows people to put events in order and move on. The commission’s summary of errors and of horrors, its assessment of culpability, its recommendations for the future—all of these help turn trauma into history.

Netanyahu is more aware than anyone of what an inquiry might discover beyond what the public already knows. The longer and more insistently he opposes a state commission, the more he reinforces the expectation that he will be weighed in the balance and found wanting.

The skid steer’s hydraulic breaker rose up toward the sky, then plunged into the street below, rupturing the concrete and the yellow paint overlaying it. The jackhammer’s staccato thundered over the din of passing traffic. It was a Tuesday morning in March, and people walking by covered their ears. Others took out their phones to capture the destruction. The bright-yellow paint, now fragmented into a growing pile of concrete, had spelled out the words Black Lives Matter over two blocks on 16th Street Northwest, about a quarter mile from the White House.

The city-sanctioned mural had been created in 2020, after the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes. Floyd’s death catalyzed racial-justice protests nationwide, including in Washington. On June 1, federal authorities used smoke grenades and tear gas to remove protesters from Lafayette Park; President Donald Trump then marched across the park so that he could pose with a Bible in front of a nearby church. Four days later, the area was renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza and the mural was painted.

Many believed that it would become a permanent fixture in the district, and originally, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said that it would be, so it could serve as a “gathering place for reflection, planning and action, as we work toward a more perfect union.” But a few weeks ago, Republican Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia introduced legislation that would withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from the city if it did not remove the mural and change the name of the area to “Liberty Plaza.” D.C. was already facing funding uncertainty and has been shaken by layoffs of federal workers in the thousands. Mayor Bowser decided that fighting to preserve the mural was not a battle worth having.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Civil rights undone]

“The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a very painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference,” Bowser wrote in a post on X.

I made my way to Black Lives Matter Plaza on Tuesday, the day after construction crews began removing the mural. I have spent the past several years writing about our collective relationships to monuments and memorials that tell the story of American history. I have watched statues being erected, and I have watched others taken down. In both the United States and abroad, I have wrestled with whether monuments are meant to perform a shallow contrition or honestly account for historical traumas. Part of what I have come to understand is that such iconography can rarely be disentangled from its social and political ecosystem. Symbols are not just symbols. They reflect the stories that people tell. Those stories shape the narratives people carry about where they come from and where they’re going. And those narratives shape public policy that materially affects people’s lives.

The removal of the mural is not the same as a change in policy, but it is happening in tandem with many policy changes, and is a reflection of the same shift in priorities. It is part of a movement that is removing Black people from positions of power by dismissing them as diversity hires, rescinding orders that ensure equal opportunity in government contracts, stripping federal funding from schools that teach full and honest Black history, and suing companies that attempt to diversify their workforce. This goes far beyond an attack on DEI; my colleague Adam Serwer calls it the Great Resegregation:

What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy.

Near the construction site, I walked up to one of the workers holding a stop sign near an intersection. Antonio (he asked me to use only his first name because he wasn’t authorized to speak with reporters) wore a highlighter-yellow vest, his dreadlocks falling down his back from beneath his white hard hat. He told me he lives in Southeast D.C. and remembered feeling a sense of pride when the mural was painted. When he found out that he would be part of the team removing it, he asked not to be behind the wheel of any of the machines. “I just told them I don’t want a part in touching it,” he said, shaking his head. He looked over at the jackhammer pummeling the concrete on the other side of the street. “It was a memorial for the culture, and now I feel like something is being stripped from the culture.”

On the other side of the street was a woman in colorful sneakers and a green beanie. Nadine Seiler stood alone holding up a large cloth sign above her head that read Black Lives Matter Trump Can’t Erase Us.

“The reason that this is happening is that people want to ‘make America great again,’” she told me. “But the same people who want to ‘make America great again’ don’t want white children to know how America became great in the first place”—by “exploiting people who are not white.”

“They’re trying to erase everything,” she said.

Seiler doesn’t blame Mayor Bowser for removing the statue: “She has been put in a difficult position, because ultimately she’s going to lose anyway.” She blames President Trump, the Republican Party, and the American people themselves who are standing by and allowing democracy to erode all around them.

While I was there, Seiler was the only person I saw rallying against the removal of the mural. She came to the United States from Trinidad 37 years ago, and has become something of a full-time protester. She has history with the Black Lives Matter Plaza: She was among the activists in 2020 who hung hundreds of signs affirming Black lives and inveighing against Trump along the fence that surrounds the White House. On multiple occasions, people came and tore the signs down, so for three weeks Seiler “lived on Black Lives Matter Plaza” to protect them. She told me she’s since become the custodian of those signs, and holds many in storage.

I told Seiler I was surprised that more people weren’t there protesting. She said that she wasn’t surprised, but she was disheartened. It was reflective, she said, of the tepid resistance Americans have put up to the new administration more broadly. She’s attended protests over the past several weeks focused on some of Trump’s earliest executive actions: the dismantling of USAID and withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and World Health Organization; the indiscriminate firing of thousands of federal workers; the blanket access the president has given Elon Musk and his DOGE team to sensitive and classified information; the assault on the rights of trans people; the effort to end birthright citizenship; the pardoning of Capitol insurrectionists; and more. At those protests, she told me, she’d seen maybe 100 or 200 people. This is wholly inadequate given the gravity of what is happening, she said: “There should be thousands of people in the streets. There should be millions of people in the streets.”

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Someone drove by, slowed down, and took a picture of Seiler’s sign before driving off. “We’re not rising up,” she continued. In many other countries, she said, there has been more robust resistance to the rise of authoritarianism. “We’re just sitting here and taking it without barely any pushback.” She added, “It’s very disappointing to me, because I’m an import, and I was sold on American democracy, and American exceptionalism, and American checks and balances”—she lowered her sign and folded it up under her arm—“and we are seeing that all of this is nothing. It’s all a farce.”

Seiler, despite having gotten citizenship two decades ago, doesn’t think that it will protect her if the Trump administration starts going after dissenters. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder who led protests against Israel at Columbia University and is now in immigration detention, has only reinforced a sense that her days are numbered. “I feel eventually they’ll find a way to come at me,” she said, tears beginning to form in her eyes.

Behind us, the pulverizing of concrete continued. Clouds of dust rose up and surrounded the machines that were cracking the street open. It will take several weeks of work for the mural to be completely destroyed and paved over again. I looked down at the fragments of letters in front of me. The first word they chose to remove was Matter.