When the PM’s wife accuses a hero

In June 2018, the crew of an El Al flight carrying the Netanyahus to Europe was handed a page of instructions. One stood out. Under no circumstances address the prime minister directly. Every question must go through his wife, seated a few centimeters away. If an attendant wanted to know whether he preferred chicken or beef, tea or coffee, the question went to Sara.

In the Channel 14 studio on Monday night, Sara Netanyahu was asked whether there had been betrayal from within on October 7. A simple no would have done. She said she did not want to talk about it. She said she did not know. She said she was part of no theory. And in case anyone was unclear about which theory she is not part of, she had explained a moment earlier that Yair Golan was dressed and ready at an hour when nobody knew anything, her husband included. Then she laughed and asked who the prime minister is that he needs to be told a war has broken out.

Nobody in the studio asked the follow-up. There are no follow-ups on that channel. What there is, is complicity, and it is immoral.

And let us not put all of this on the studio. A channel that sinks this low says something about the people who make it, and just as much about the people who watch it. The set is lit for an audience. Somebody at home heard a woman hint that a general had known in advance about the slaughter of his own countrymen, and did not turn it off, and felt no shame, and went to bed. That audience is not being fooled. It is being served.

It is worth remembering who is making the accusation. In 2019, the same woman took a plea deal over having the state pay for meals ordered in to the official residence. She paid a fine, returned the money, moved on. She is a fixture in the case in which her husband stands accused of taking gifts from businessmen, cigars and champagne delivered in quantities sufficient to become an indictment. Household staff spent years taking her to court.

This is the woman who decided to audit the arrival time of a general on the day of the massacre.

She holds no post. She was not elected. She answers to nobody. And she is the one questions go to before they reach the prime minister. That is how power is arranged in this country, and it has been arranged that way for years, in plain sight.

Now the other side, and here I will not pretend to be balanced.

Yair Golan was born in May 1962. His father’s family left Germany in 1935, which means someone in that house understood when it was time to go. He was a paratrooper, commanded the Nahal Brigade, commanded Northern Command, rose to deputy chief of the General Staff under Gadi Eisenkot. In 2016, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, he stood on a stage and said he saw in this country processes resembling Europe in the 1930s. He was running for nothing. He was the army’s second-in-command, and he said it anyway. It cost him the top of his military career, and he knew it would while he was saying it.

On October 7, 2023, he was 61. Nobody called him up. He drove south, picked up a weapon at an army base, went into areas where terrorists were still operating and spent the day bringing people back from the festival. He went back more than once. Men of 61 do not do that. He did.

I admire it without reservation. He spent that day pulling actual people out of open ground, one at a time, while others were working out the narrative. I carry a card in my pocket authorizing the donation of my organs, and the only thing it declares is that the life happening now, inside particular human beings, cannot be put off in the name of anything. That morning there was one man in Israel behaving as though that were true. It was not the one who was asleep.

Last May, Golan said this country was killing babies as a hobby. The scandal ran for weeks. I agree with him. I agree with every word he said then, and every word he said in 2016, and I am not going to soften any of it here to look more presentable.

Hannah Arendt wrote that the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is someone who can no longer tell fact from fiction. Years later, describing what she saw at the trial in Jerusalem, she was called a traitor by her own and lost friends of 30 years. She was condemned for saying out loud something true and unbearable about her own people. That is what this country does to Golan. And it is what that studio does every night, at a fixed hour, as a method.

I owe you the part that still troubles me. Golan was formally reprimanded in 2007, commanding the Judea and Samaria Division, for authorizing the procedure that sent Palestinian civilians to persuade wanted men to give themselves up. I have not forgotten it and I will not pretend that I have.

The Democrats are polling at around 10 seats. Ten seats form a government nowhere on earth, and I am voting for them anyway. A country that turns a man’s punctuality into evidence against him has lost the ability to recognize courage when it walks right past. I refuse to be counted among those who have learned to find this normal.

Sara Netanyahu ended the interview by calling for a real commission of inquiry. I agree with her for the first and probably the last time in my life. Let there be one.

And when the commission is seated, I suggest it adopt the El Al protocol. Ask him nothing. Ask her everything.