Gammadion

Last week I walked through the ruins of Scythopolis, the Roman city of Beit She’an, with a dear cousin who had come from Argentina to see me after thirty years, and found a cross with bent arms set into the floor of a city whose columns the earthquake of the year seven hundred and forty-nine brought down and left lying where they fell. Three decades of absence shrank before a figure that has lain there for more than twelve centuries, placed by a craftsman who could not have imagined the day it would be stitched onto the armbands of those who set out to exterminate us.

The potters of Athens were already painting it on the bands of their vases in the eighth century before Christ, and the Greeks named it the gammadion, a word English has kept intact, because each arm repeats the letter gamma. The Romans strung it along the borders of their floors, the Jews of this land worked it into the mosaics of the synagogues at Beit Alpha and Ein Gedi, and in India it is still called svastika, the Sanskrit word for well-being. Everywhere it meant more or less the same thing, the returning sun, good fortune, and the wheel of the seasons, and so it came down through nearly three thousand years, until a party in Munich still small enough to fit inside a beer hall put it at the center of its flag in nineteen twenty. Twenty-five years later the design was still the potters’, merely turned to stand on one of its points, and outside Asia no one could see it as decoration anymore, because a symbol carries forever what was done in its shadow.

The figure on the floor of Scythopolis came back to me on Thursday, September twenty-fourth, when Benjamin Netanyahu stepped up to the podium of the General Assembly as dozens of delegations walked out, among them the delegation of the country where I was born, and invited, with a smile, any moral cowards still in the hall to do the same. I had expected some kind of performance, because he rarely crosses the Atlantic in September without putting something on stage, and the repertoire includes the blueprints of Auschwitz in two thousand and nine, the cartoon bomb cut by a red line in two thousand and twelve, and the QR code on his lapel last year. This time he pulled a pager from his pocket and left a Starlink antenna with the President of the Assembly for the Iranian delegation, which was not in the hall to receive it.

I would rather not say this, but in my opinion, whenever he takes a stand or opens his mouth, Netanyahu looks more and more like Laban, of all the figures in the Bible. Ephraim Ganor wrote in Maariv, before the speech, that the prime minister would use the microphone of the United Nations to speak to his own voters a month before our elections.

I do not bring up the gammadion to hang it around anyone’s neck, and I know how easily the world turns that comparison against us. I bring it up because Netanyahu knows the weight of a symbol so well that this week he likened the Entebbe hijackers to the Nazis, and because Thursday’s speech had its own refrain, a sentence he had fetched from an orange grove.

The best-written passage of the speech takes place in the orchards around Ramla in June of nineteen sixty-seven, when a seventeen-year-old finishing high school outside Philadelphia flew home five days before the war, found the country blacked out, and went in search of his brother among the paratroopers camped in the orange groves. He found him at the end of a row of trees, a twenty-one-year-old officer astonished by the visit, and the two shared a makeshift field coffee until the younger one asked what was going to happen and heard from Yoni, after a pause, that they would win because they had no other choice. Nine years later, at Entebbe, Yoni led the unit that stormed the terminal and was the only soldier killed in the operation. I believe every word of the account and grant anyone who lost a brother that way the right to repeat, for the rest of his life, the sentence he carried away from that day.

The prime minister exercised that right at least six times in a single speech, from the account of sixty-seven to the last line, which came after Mark Twain and the verse about the eternity of Israel, with a vow to a reservist wounded this week along the way. By the end, the sentence no longer described any war in particular and served as a frame for all of them, and frames like that hold only stories that end well. In the version told in New York, the one hundred and three hostages of Entebbe all came home, while the records of the operation list one hundred and two hostages rescued, three killed in the crossfire in the terminal, and a seventy-four-year-old woman, Dora Bloch, taken to a hospital in Kampala and later murdered on Idi Amin’s orders.

The prime minister’s defenders will say that what he describes is absolutely true, and they have on their side a country attacked over the past three years by Hamas, by Hezbollah, by the Houthis, by militias in Iraq and Syria, and by Iran itself, whose thousand ballistic missiles were fired, according to Netanyahu, at a territory the size of New Jersey, or of Sergipe, the smallest state in Brazil. Anyone who has made the trip to the shelter in the middle of the night knows that no one there chooses anything, because the siren offers no alternative, and October seventh taught all of us what it costs to believe that Hamas would not do what it had always said it wanted to do. I do not know an Israeli who hears Yoni’s sentence with indifference, and I cannot resign myself to seeing it turned into a plea for votes precisely because it still reaches us.

The man who founded Netanyahu’s party refused that frame before army officers on August eighth, nineteen eighty-two, two months after sending that same army into Lebanon. Menachem Begin went to the National Defense College to explain the difference between wars of no choice and wars of choice, and he told them that in June of sixty-seven we had had a choice as well, that the Egyptian troop concentrations in Sinai did not prove that Nasser was about to attack, and that we had to be honest with ourselves, because we had decided to attack him. He considered that war legitimate self-defense in the noblest sense and was speaking to justify his own, which would end up consuming him, but he put the word choice on the table with his own name beside it. A year later, widowed and with the dead of Lebanon heavier than he could carry, he told his ministers that he could not go on and spent the nearly nine years he had left hardly ever leaving his home.

The difference between Begin and Netanyahu fits entirely inside the word choice, because whoever says he chose keeps the weight on his own shoulders, and whoever repeats that he never had a choice divides it among us, the enemy, and history, and walks away with his hands free and no commission to face. Even when war cannot be avoided, Yoni’s sentence settles only whether we must fight and says nothing about how, and those who govern decide that how every day, and with it who dies and how many die.

Netanyahu displayed the pager in New York as a souvenir, with the quip that Hezbollah certainly remembered them, and the device resembled the one that beeped on September seventeenth, two thousand and twenty-four, on a kitchen table in Saraain, in the Bekaa Valley. Fatima Abdullah had just come home from her first day of fourth grade, picked it up to take it to her father, and was still holding it when it exploded. The attack that day killed twelve people and wounded nearly two thousand eight hundred, most of them in the face, the hands, and the abdomen, and a good share of the victims were Hezbollah terrorists, but two children were among the dead.

In Gaza the Ministry of Health records nearly seventy-four thousand dead, a figure that our government disputes and that an independent survey published in The Lancet found to fall short of the real toll for the first fifteen months of the war. Many of them were Hamas terrorists, but not seventy-four thousand, and our own army spoke last year of just over twenty-two thousand. On our side the reckoning begins on a Saturday morning, with twelve hundred dead in a country he was already governing, and it will stay open for as long as his government keeps refusing, three years on, the state commission of inquiry that more than seventy percent of us have called for in the polls. Netanyahu has never taken responsibility for anything, and when he was pressed about October seventh earlier this year, he pointed out that the former head of the Shin Bet, the former chief of staff, and the former head of military intelligence had not appeared before the State Comptroller, and that he had. He neglected to add that all three had accepted their share of the blame and had stepped down, while he remains in office. None of these deaths fits inside a sentence spoken on the eve of another war, and all of them, one by one, passed through decisions made by people who had a choice, Netanyahu himself included.

I will not venture a guess about what the country will decide on October twenty-seventh, but I know what I would like to hear from whoever comes asking for my vote, a sentence as honest as Begin’s in eighty-two. Netanyahu asked us to hold our heads high, and I ask every Israeli to do exactly that before the ballot box that day, because this time none of us will be able to say we had no choice. Yoni’s sentence belongs to the officer who truly had no choice beneath an orange tree near Ramla, because whoever is in the grove receives a war already decided by others, and for that very reason those words cannot serve a prime minister, whose whole job is to decide. The craftsman of Scythopolis had no way of choosing what the world would do with the gammadion he set into that floor, and Netanyahu repeated his brother’s story by his own choice until he made it a symbol, and, as we already know, a symbol carries forever what was done in its shadow.