Winograd Commission members
Photo: Gil Yohanan
Thank God it’s over
The incredibly odd and needless Winograd Commission is finally behind us
Finally we can say it out loud: Good riddance. For a year and three months, this strange nuisance hovered over the country, cast its heavy shadow upon our entire public discourse, and neutralized and eliminated any real possibility for change.
Now, thank God, the commission has spoken. It shall continue to garner attention for a little more time, exact a heavy price on Brazil’s rainforests, and then it shall evaporate and disappear. Praise the lord.
It appears that throughout the country’s history there was never such strange and needless commission, one that is so replete with oddities, errors, and entanglements.
To begin with, there was no real reason for it to exist. After all, the failures of the Second Lebanon War were obvious and known from day one: A hasty prime minister with the sense of judgment one would expect of an adolescent, a flying lieutenant general who is convinced that everything can be determined from the skies, and a military that became rusty during many years of policing and routine security duties in the territories. This is the entire story.
The hundreds of chatter-filled pages produced by the commission did not add anything to this story aside from piles of inflated and banal words.
To begin with, this commission was born as an unclear hybrid. It was funded and appointed by the very people it investigated, possessed vague powers, and featured teeth that were blunted; the way it was formed almost guaranteed the end result.
Media was running the show
To begin with there was no doubt that it was not created in order to shake up, but rather, in order to prevent a shakeup; it was not there to analyze, but rather, to anesthetize.From the moment it started its work, it appeared that more than it was running an investigation, it was being run by the media. Time and again it made statements to the press in order to counter leaks, respond to reports that were either meaningless or baseless, and “clarify issues” which nobody asked it to clarify.
In the meantime, it also wasted time and energy on dealing with petitions to the High Court of Justice that were filed in its favor or against it, clashed with the army’s defense attorneys, got entangled in the space between “recommendations” and “conclusions,” debated whether to issue warning letters or not, was delayed in publishing the testimonies, and got into a mess in an effort to censor them.
It seems that the commission was able to reach the interim report (published in April 2007) with some of its teeth still in working order. Yet by the time the final report was published, it appears the commission was only left with its gums.
