The Broken Shield

The Star of David was not born as a symbol of state. Gershom Scholem spent decades tracing its history and found something unsettling: for centuries, the hexagram was an ornament, an amulet, a decorative figure without fixed theological weight. It appeared in synagogues and in mosques, in Jewish talismans and in Islamic manuscripts. It belonged to everyone because it belonged to no one in particular. Only in the nineteenth century, when European nationalism demanded that every people have its flag, its emblem, its consolidated visual identity, was the six-pointed star recruited to be the sign of the Jewish people. That identity was born modern. Born as choice, not as revelation.

I also chose. I did not flee anything, did not escape any persecution. I came because I wanted to, because there was something here that seemed worth an entire life. The salt of the Mediterranean in the morning, the sense of belonging to a project that had survived the impossible. That was the wager. And wagers, when lost, hurt in ways that only those who made them understand.

When a symbol is built, it can be destroyed. Not physically, but from within, by the conduct of those who carry it. What Netanyahu and the circle that keeps him in power have been doing is precisely that: destroying the symbol from the inside, using the shield as a weapon and then displaying the wreckage as proof of resilience.

There is a specific violence in this. Not the violence of war, which has its own brutal logic and its own judgment in history. The violence of what is done in the name of a people while that people watches, part in forced silence, part in complicity, part in genuine despair. Gaza is not only a humanitarian catastrophe, though it is that too, in overwhelming measure. It is the place where the image of Israel as a moral project has been executed, decision by decision, statement by statement, by men who need war to survive politically and who have learned to call that need national security.

Scholem understood that symbols carry the ambivalence of their own history. The star that adorned the doors of synagogues in Central Europe was the same one sewn in yellow onto the coats of the condemned. The same sign. Opposite meanings. What changes is not the hexagram, but who holds it and with what power in hand.

What Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir and Smotrich do with that symbol is not different in structure, only in direction. They take the Shield of David and turn it into a blank check. They invoke the Holocaust to silence criticism. They summon the memory of the persecuted to justify persecution. They use the narrative of the people who nearly vanished to legitimize policies that make other peoples vanish. This is not defense. It is suffering converted into a weapon, and it is morally indefensible by any standard other than that of pure tribal convenience.

And the damage does not stay contained within the borders of Gaza or the West Bank. The damage leaks. It reaches the streets of London and São Paulo and Paris, where young people who have never set foot in Israel confuse the state with the people, the government with the tradition, Netanyahu with Judaism. That is the additional crime that the Israeli far right commits against Jews themselves: turning the Star of David into a symbol of occupation in the minds of an entire generation. Scholem feared the symbol might be emptied. He did not imagine it could be filled with this.

There are mornings when the sea is quiet and Israel looks exactly like what it was meant to be. In those moments, the wager still makes sense. But between that silence and what appears on the screens there is a distance that grows each week, and it is a distance that men like Netanyahu created deliberately, because they need the abyss to remain standing.

The Shield of David survived indifference, appropriation, the yellow of the concentration camps. I do not know if it survives this. Being wielded by those who turned fear into ideology and ideology into impunity, while the world watches and slowly learns to associate the six-pointed star not with the people who carried it for centuries, but with the men who seized it one October afternoon and have not given it back.