In a candid conversation between Yitzhak Rabin and the journalist Niva Lanir for Davar Israeli in 1980, the late prime minister reconstructed the days following the interim conclusions of the Agranat Commission, the national commission of inquiry into the failure of the Yom Kippur War. In his conversation with Lanir, Rabin, who served as the minister of labor and welfare in Prime Minister Golda Meir’s government, recounted the shock he felt when he understood that Meir and Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan intend to adopt Agranat’s conclusions, which absolved them of responsibility for Israel’s unpreparedness for war and placed it fully on the military.
“There was no chance that I would accept the conclusions of the report,” said Rabin. “There was not and there will not be a chance that I would place responsibility on the military, if it’s not also placed on the political ranks who are in charge of it. The expression 'I boiled with anger' is an understatement of an understatement to describe what I felt. The government should have rejected the report. I left the meeting furious about the process from its start, about the findings and the willingness of the prime minister and the minister of defense to accept them.”
The continuation of this story is well known. While the government accepted the findings, the public protests did not quiet down nor did the public accept the absolution of responsibility for the political ranks, bringing about the resignations of Meir and later of Moshe Dayan. The defeat of the Maarach, the predecessor to today’s Labor Party, and the power reversal of the 1977 elections were a direct continuation of that same atmosphere among the Israeli public.
The Agranat Commission marked the first time an entity outside of the government was entrusted with the work of inquiry, assuming the investigative authority of the government. Following its conclusions, two years after the war the Basic Law of the Army was passed, which codifies the power relations between the government, the minister of defense, and the commander in chief of the Israel Defense Forces. The law establishes that the military is under the authority of the government and subordinate to the minister of defense. In this respect, the Yom Kippur War was a watershed moment, from which going forward responsibility for a security failure on a national scale would be placed first and foremost on the political ranks.
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