Bibi: The Supreme Court Can’t Pick October 7th Investigators Because They are All Leftists. Are They Though?

This post exists because my mother screamed at me on the phone.

She asked who I was voting for, and before I could get a word in she told me, in no uncertain terms: “We are Likud!!” My mom hasn’t lived in Israel since the 1960s. She visits often, most of our family lives here, including her two beloved grandchildren, and she has opinions. When the state commission came up, she informed me that the judiciary, the media, the intelligence agencies, basically everyone who isn’t Likud, are leftists.

That’s not my mom’s original thinking. That’s the government’s talking point, more or less word for word. So I decided to actually check it, starting with the Supreme Court, since that’s the institution Bibi says can’t be trusted to pick the investigators.

Israel votes on October 27. That’s four days from now. And one of the biggest fights in this campaign isn’t about Gaza or Iran or even whether yeshiva guys should carry a rifle. It’s about who gets to pick the people who investigate how more than 1,200 people were murdered on our watch on October 7, 2023.

Three years later there is still no state commission of inquiry. None. Netanyahu‘s line is that a state commission would be rigged against him, because by law its members are picked by the President of the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court is supposedly a nest of leftists. So Likud wrote its own bill where politicians in the Knesset pick the investigators instead.

So let’s do this properly. How many leftists are actually on the court? Which justices live over the Green Line? Would liberal judges hang Bibi and conservative ones save him? How long would any of this take? Is the Likud plan a dodge, or is there something to it? And has Israel ever done anything like it before? Yalla.

Justice by justice: the leftist menace, counted

Short answer: it depends who’s counting, but a fair version is four liberals, four conservatives and three swing votes in the middle. Two of the conservatives live in West Bank settlements. And seven of the 11 were appointed while Netanyahu was prime minister.

First, a word on the word “leftist.” No justice is a declared member of anything. When Israeli reporters call a justice liberal or conservative, they mostly mean how willing that judge is to strike down laws and government decisions (judicial activism) versus defer to the Knesset (judicial restraint). That overlaps with left and right politics, but it isn’t the same thing.

Second, the court is supposed to have 15 justices. It has 11. Justice Minister Yariv Levin has refused to fill the four empty seats and told Likud activists that after the election the court would become extinct as he replaces about two thirds of it. Keep that in mind when people tell you this court is the problem.

Here’s the roster, in order of seniority:

1. Yitzhak Amit, President of the court. On the bench since 2009, appointed under a Netanyahu government. Described as liberal by the Times of Israel and as a moderate liberal who often votes with the conservatives by the Jerusalem Post. He’s the guy who would pick a state commission, which is why the coalition treats him as Public Enemy Number One. Levin stalled his appointment as President for more than a year. Mandatory retirement: October 2028.
2. Noam Sohlberg, Deputy President. On the court since 2012, also appointed under Netanyahu. Widely called one of the court’s most conservative justices. Lives in Alon Shvut, a settlement in Gush Etzion. He was the first settler on the Supreme Court, and in 2012 a left-wing group actually petitioned to block his appointment over his address; Esther Hayut, later the court’s President, threw the petition out. This June, Haredi rioters angry about draft enforcement attacked his home, and police said the riot was planned to hurt him. Some leftist.
3. Daphne Barak-Erez. Law professor, on the court since 2012 (Netanyahu government again). Usually counted in the liberal wing. Just finished a three-year term on the committee that picks judges.
4. David Mintz. On the court since 2017, picked during Ayelet Shaked‘s run as Justice Minister. Considered conservative. Lives in Dolev, a settlement in the Binyamin region. In 2018 he reported that three men with hammers boxed in his car near home; he got away. In a hearing on the October 7 petitions, he was the one who asked the government’s lawyer why the cabinet couldn’t at least discuss a commission.
5. Yael Willner. On the court since 2017 (Shaked era). Considered a moderate conservative. She crosses over now and then, but she lands on the conservative side more often than not. Just took Barak-Erez’s seat on the judicial selection committee.
6. Ofer Grosskopf. On the court since 2018, also a Shaked-era pick. Usually described as a moderate liberal, though not every scorecard agrees. The youngest justice; he can serve until 2039.
7. Alex Stein. On the court since 2018. Shaked recruited him from American academia precisely because he was a well-known critic of judicial activism. Conservative. Fun fact: he hits mandatory retirement on October 27, 2027, exactly one year after election day.
8. Gila Canfy-Steinitz. On the court since 2022, picked under the Bennett-Lapid government with Gideon Sa’ar as Justice Minister. Called a moderate conservative when she was appointed, she has become one of the court’s swing votes. She’s also the first Mizrahi woman on the court, and married to Likud’s Yuval Steinitz. A Likud minister’s wife. On the leftist court.
9. Khaled Kabub. On the court since 2022, the first Muslim Arab to hold a permanent seat. Seen as liberal-leaning when he was appointed, he now gets described as a centrist. Swing vote.
10. Ruth Ronnen. On the court since 2022. Usually counted in the liberal wing.
11. Yechiel Kasher. On the court since 2022. A private-practice lawyer the Bar Association insisted on. Viewed as a moderate conservative at first, now usually described as a centrist. Swing vote number three.

So the tally, in three buckets: liberal, four (Amit, Barak-Erez, Grosskopf, Ronnen). Conservative, four (Sohlberg, Mintz, Stein, Willner). Swing, three (Kasher, Kabub, Canfy-Steinitz). Settlers, two (Sohlberg and Mintz). Appointed under Netanyahu, seven. Scorecards disagree at the edges; one Jerusalem Post rundown offered two different ones in the same article. No honest count gets you a leftist majority.

You can watch the middle work in this month’s Cassif ruling. Nine justices decided whether far-left MK Ofer Cassif could run for the Knesset. Seven said yes, including Willner, Canfy-Steinitz and Kasher. Only Mintz and Stein would have barred him. If this is the radical left, the radical left needs better recruiters.

Back in 2018, an Israel Democracy Institute op-ed already argued the old “Meretz court” insult was dead, and that the bench looked more like a Jewish Home court, out of all proportion to that party’s voters. That was before the 2022 appointments moved it further right.

Will the liberals hang Bibi and the conservatives save him?

Mostly, the left-right count of the sitting court doesn’t matter, because sitting justices don’t run a state commission. Under the 1968 law, the government (or a two-thirds vote of the Knesset’s State Control Committee) decides to set one up, and then the President of the Supreme Court picks the members. The chair is usually a retired senior judge. The rest are usually not judges at all.

Look at the last completed one. The Meron disaster commission was set up under retired Chief Justice Miriam Naor and included the former Haredi mayor of Bnei Brak, Rabbi Mordechai Karelitz, and a former IDF planning chief, Shlomo Yanai. When Naor died in 2022, a retired district court president, Dvora Berliner, took over. That’s not a Meretz central committee.

So the only justice whose views really matter here is Amit, who holds the pen until he retires in October 2028. Is it fair for the right to worry about him? A little, yes. Netanyahu says Amit has clear political views, and Channel 12 reported that Amit would likely tap Esther Hayut, the former Chief Justice who loudly fought the judicial overhaul, to chair it. If he did that, a lot of right-wing Israelis would dismiss the report before page one. That’s a real problem.

Here’s the thing, though. That problem already got solved, and Netanyahu said no. In March 2025, President Isaac Herzog and Amit offered a compromise: Amit would pick the commission together with Sohlberg. The conservative. The settler from Alon Shvut. Netanyahu brushed it off almost immediately. If the objection were really “the left will rig it,” a settler holding half the pen should have been enough.

As for whether conservative judges would “blindly support him,” they haven’t so far. Mintz pushed the government in court. Sohlberg is enforcing a draft the coalition’s Haredi partners hate, and got a riot at his house for it. And in October 2025 the High Court ruled there was no real argument against forming a state commission. Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara went further and told the court the government’s refusal is doing serious damage to finding the truth.

Amit has also already stepped aside once. In February, he handed Sohlberg sole power to choose the expanded bench hearing the October 7 petitions. His reasoning: since the law makes him the person who would appoint any state commission, he shouldn’t be making decisions in the case. And who sent the case to an expanded bench in the first place? A three-judge panel of Mintz, Stein and Kasher. Two conservatives and a swing vote.

You could watch what happened next at the High Court’s hearing on those petitions. The justice who went hardest at the government’s lawyer wasn’t a liberal. It was Sohlberg, the settler, who asked him: “What isn’t extreme about the government’s position or its conduct?” Kabub, one of the swing votes, added that the government only started talking about a commission after it got sued, and has been dragging its feet ever since. That’s the “conservative bloc” Bibi is counting on.

And then, in September, the big bad leftist court did what exactly? It parked the case until after the election. The justices accepted the Attorney General’s view that the decision belongs to the next government, and gave the government until January 15, 2027 to explain how it plans to investigate. A court plotting to bring down Netanyahu would not schedule its big ruling for after the voting is done. Some coup.

The track record of past commissions also doesn’t look like a left-wing hit squad:

• The Kahan Commission (1983) found Likud’s Ariel Sharon responsible over Sabra and Shatila, and Begin removed him as Defense Minister.
• The Agranat Commission (1974) mostly blamed the generals over the Yom Kippur War and was famously gentle with Labor’s Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan. Golda resigned anyway, because the public didn’t buy it.
• The Winograd Commission (2007 and 2008) tore into Kadima’s Ehud Olmert over the Second Lebanon War.
• The Meron commission (2024) found Netanyahu personally responsible, saying he should have known about the danger.

That last one is probably the whole story. Netanyahu has seen what a state commission does to a prime minister. It doesn’t care which party you’re in.

How long would it take?

Realistic answer: an interim report naming names within roughly a year of the commission starting, and a full report two to three years in. Which means if the new government sets one up in early 2027, we’d get the first real answers sometime in 2028.

Here’s how long the big ones took:

October 7 is bigger than any of these. It covers years of Gaza policy, the Qatari cash, the intelligence failure, the hours it took the army to show up, the hostages and the war that followed. Hundreds of witnesses, mountains of classified material. Nobody serious thinks that’s a four-month job.

The smart move, the one Agranat and Winograd both made, is an interim report that deals with personal responsibility first and leaves the lessons-learned volumes for later. That’s how Golda was gone within weeks of Agranat’s interim report.

And under the Likud plan, add delay on top. The Kallner bill never passed its final readings before the Knesset dissolved in July. It was rushed through a first reading so it could be revived in the next Knesset, which means two more readings, then a fight over 80 votes to approve members, then an opposition boycott. Ynet’s assessment back in July was that no commission of any kind was coming for at least six months. That was optimistic.

For comparison: Agranat was set up 27 days after the Yom Kippur War ended, and the Shamgar Commission on Rabin’s assassination four days after the murder. We are at three years and two weeks.

Likud’s Knesset commission: dodge, or reasonable somehow?

It’s a dodge. But it’s a dodge wrapped around one real argument, so let’s give that argument its due before we take it apart.

What the bill actually does. Likud MK Ariel Kallner‘s bill passed a preliminary vote in December and a first reading on July 6 by 59 to 0, because the opposition walked out. Six commissioners would need approval from 80 of 120 MKs. If that fails, the coalition names three and the opposition names three. Hearings would be broadcast, with bereaved families and former hostages sitting in as observers. And Kallner says it would look at every branch, including the courts.

The case for it, at its strongest:

• Legitimacy. A big slice of the country doesn’t trust the court. A JPPI poll last November found 46% wanted a classic state commission and 42% wanted a national commission with no Supreme Court role. A report that half the country dismisses on arrival doesn’t heal anything.
• The court is part of the story. The judicial overhaul fight tore the country apart in the months before October 7, including the army reserves. Can a panel picked by the head of the court fairly judge the court’s own role? Fair question. Some coalition figures go further and claim court rulings tied the army’s hands at the Gaza fence.
• Bipartisan models exist. Kallner keeps citing the American 9/11 Commission, which was appointed by politicians from both parties, had no judges in charge, and is still widely respected.

Why it still doesn’t hold up:

• The suspects write the job description. The government gets to define what the commission investigates, and a ministerial team led by Netanyahu was set to decide the mandate. You don’t let the defendant draft the indictment.
• The “equal” part is optional. The revised bill lets the commission start work once just three members are seated. As the Times of Israel reported, that makes a panel appointed entirely by the coalition a real possibility, since the opposition has promised to boycott.
• The bias fix was already offered. See above: Amit plus Sohlberg. Rejected.
• The “court tied the army’s hands” story is false. The ruling people point to is from May 2018, when human rights groups petitioned against the IDF’s live-fire rules at the Gaza fence during the March of Return riots. The court rejected them unanimously and sided with the army. When the claim resurfaced this year, two former senior IDF officers wrote that the ruling had no effect on the rules: they didn’t change before the petition and they didn’t change after it.
• The honest version doesn’t help Likud either. If the overhaul fight and the legal system’s role belong in the investigation, fine. Under the 1968 law the government writes a state commission’s mandate, so it can put the court’s role right in there. The Supreme Court President picks the investigators. He doesn’t pick what they’re allowed to look at, and he doesn’t get immunity.
• The excuses keep changing. First it was “not during a war.” Then it was “the judges are biased.” Netanyahu has never set up a state commission in his whole career, not after the Carmel fire in 2010 and not after Meron in 2021. Though he does like them for other people: as recently as 2022, Netanyahu was calling for a state commission into the previous government’s conduct. Same law, same Supreme Court picking the members. Funny how that worked fine when he wasn’t the one being investigated.
• The 9/11 comparison cuts the other way. America had no standing legal mechanism for an independent inquiry, so Congress built one. Israel has had one since 1968. Kallner’s plan swaps out a tool that works for one that doesn’t exist yet.
• The people who paid the price hate it. The October Council, which represents bereaved families and survivors, calls it a cover-up commission. Even Likud’s own Yuli Edelstein and Dan Illouz sat out the vote in protest. Opposition leader Yair Lapid mocked the open-ended scope by asking why not investigate the death of Trumpeldor while they’re at it.

And the public isn’t confused. In the Israel Democracy Institute’s September survey, 71% of Jewish Israelis said they want the next government to set up a state commission. To be fair, that number has bounced around: in December it was 55% of all Israelis, with Likud voters split down the middle. Bibi’s campaign against the court has worked on his base. It just hasn’t worked on most of the country.

Has Israel ever done anything like this?

No. Israel has never investigated a national disaster with a panel whose members were picked by politicians in the Knesset.

Israeli law gives you three basic options:

1. A state commission of inquiry. Members picked by the President of the Supreme Court, full subpoena powers, can recommend firing people by name. There have been about 20 since 1968, including Agranat, Kahan, the Or Commission on the October 2000 riots and Meron.
2. A government examination committee. The cabinet picks the members. This is what Olmert did after the Second Lebanon War, when he named retired judge Eliyahu Winograd instead of letting the Supreme Court choose. Protesters carried a donkey with a sign saying only an ass couldn’t see it was a whitewash. Winograd then got near-state-commission powers and gutted Olmert anyway.
3. A parliamentary commission of inquiry. MKs investigating, with the powers of an ordinary Knesset committee. Useful for hearings, toothless for accountability.

Kallner’s bill is a fourth thing that doesn’t exist yet: non-MK commissioners chosen by Knesset politicians, with a mandate set by the government. The closest precedent is Winograd, and the lesson of Winograd is that even a hand-picked panel can turn on the guy who picked it. Maybe that’s why this one comes with a scope the government controls.

The historical norm is the opposite of what’s happening now. Governments set up state commissions into their own failures: Golda did it, Begin did it after first resisting, Barak did it after October 2000. Even Ayelet Shaked pointed out in 2022 that governments have always set up commissions on themselves. Begin is the best comparison. He also refused at first after Sabra and Shatila, then hundreds of thousands of Israelis hit the streets, and he reversed within days.

Bottom line

Count the leftists however you want. Depending on the scorecard it’s four or five out of 11, never a majority, with three swing votes in the middle, two settlers on the right, and seven justices appointed on Netanyahu’s watch. The “leftist court” excuse was already answered when the court’s liberal President offered to share the pen with its settler Deputy President. Netanyahu said no.

So this isn’t about bias. It’s about the one kind of inquiry Israel has that has actually ended careers at the very top. It got Sharon out of the Defense Ministry and helped push Golda out of the Prime Minister’s Office. Everything else on offer is designed so that can’t happen.

What I wrote on the third anniversary still stands. We owe the dead, the hostages and the people of the south a real state commission, not a committee whose findings get negotiated in the Knesset cafeteria. The opposition parties say setting one up would be their first priority. Hold them to it. And just this week, families of hostages who came home in coffins asked Likud to drop its “we brought everyone home” campaign slogan, and told Netanyahu to apologize, take responsibility and set up a state commission. They’re not leftists either, Mom. And if you’re in Tel Aviv on Saturday night, the October Council is rallying at Hostages Square at 7:30, three days before the vote.

Then go vote like it matters. Because it does. Is that OK Mom?

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