October 7 is stuck to Netanyahu now. Not because of the attack, but because he tried to control the reckoning. Right, so October 7 has stopped being a delayed problem for Benjamin Netanyahu and become a permanent one, because he’s now trying to run the reckoning himself. After resisting an independent inquiry for so long, he’s agreed to a process only on the condition that the government — meaning him — is in charge of it. That move turned a problem he was trying to run down into one that now sits on him. This isn’t just about one attack or one investigation. It’s about a pattern we’ve seen before: accountability deferred, then domesticated, then hollowed out until the exercise exists without threatening the people it’s actually meant to examine. Rendered toothless. And here’s the consequence Netanyahu is now stuck with - once you put yourself in charge of explaining your own failure, you don’t close the story, you weld yourself to it. Right, so October 7 did not begin as an unmanageable political crisis for Benjamin Netanyahu, and pretending otherwise only obscures what actually went wrong afterwards. In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack, Netanyahu did what leaders with long survival instincts always do when catastrophe lands on their watch: he delayed. He framed accountability as premature, wrapped postponement in the language of wartime necessity, and insisted that Israel could not afford institutional reckoning while fighting was ongoing. None of this was illegal. None of it was unusual. And for a time, it worked, because delay often does. But delay only works while it still looks temporary. Once it hardens into a governing posture, it stops buying time and starts accruing cost. The core mistake was not hesitation but misdiagnosis. Netanyahu treated accountability as a timing problem rather than a structural one. He behaved as though the danger lay in when an inquiry might happen, not in how that inquiry would have to be constituted to carry authority. That distinction is important. In systems that still rely on institutional legitimacy, form is not cosmetic. Form determines outcome. The structure of accountability decides whether a reckoning closes a chapter or leaves it permanently open. Netanyahu’s refusal to recognise that reality is what has turned October 7 from a deferred problem into a fixed one.