The Follies of My Life

There is a well-distributed folly that consists of genuinely suffering because eleven millionaires who would not cross the street to greet their own fans lost a soccer match. On Sunday, when Norway dispatched Brazil in the round of sixteen, I suffered that folly in the middle of a workday, the yellow jersey worn under my work clothes. Nelson Rodrigues, the playwright who treated a defeat on the pitch with the gravity he reserved for adultery and death, wrote that the Brazilian’s homeland wears cleats. Soccer is the oldest folly of my life, and still the cheapest.

I admit I am writing under the influence of defeat. The sting loosened my tongue, and I am taking advantage of the candor while it lasts to confess the folly that costs me the most. I love a country that insists on miracles. Benjamin Netanyahu’s voters have called him a magician for three decades, and I am starting to think they are right, because few performers have made so much disappear. A thousand days after October seventh, the worst security disaster in our history, the state commission of inquiry remains missing, replaced by an investigation in which the man under investigation selects the investigators. Gone is accountability, which used to follow the office like a shadow. Gone is shame, that old stage assistant. Even his own trial he is trying to make disappear, asking Israel’s president for a pardon without any admission of guilt, the White House shouting from the front row. The man administers other people’s pain with the careless cruelty of someone who has never bought a ticket. Any honest ranking would place him among the five worst leaders in the world. Of my world, at least.

The gravest act premiered on the same Sunday as my private defeat. While I was watching the match, the cabinet was approving, unanimously and for the first time in the country’s history, a decision to openly defy an order of the Supreme Court. The chosen object has the discretion of a well-planned trick, a broadcasting regulatory council, too arid to provoke outrage, too decisive for anyone who wants to control what the country watches. Governments that survive only by defying courts appear in the textbooks under a name, and the name is not democracy. The cabinet calculates that no one will take to the streets over a broadcasting council, and the bitterest part is admitting the calculation is probably correct. Tyrannies rarely open with tanks. They open in fine print.

The most ambitious act aims to make the entire country vanish from the community of nations, a collective move to Tristan da Cunha, the loneliest rock in the South Atlantic, without anyone having to leave home. The magician insists on pointing at Iran, and Iran exists, with centrifuges and missiles that fell on our cities this year. But pointing is the trade of those who live off the diverted gaze, and, while we stared at Tehran, the costliest disappearance was happening in the seats. In the United States, guarantor of all our wagers, eight in ten Democrats already regard Israel with distaste, and the new Republican generation, raised to distrust other people’s wars, is asking why ours should merit an exception. The applause that remains comes from the front row and belongs to one man alone, with an expiration date set by the American Constitution. The loss of a patron can be fixed with diplomacy. The loss of two generations of an ally cannot be fixed by anything that fits in a top hat. Harry Houdini, a Jew from Budapest and the greatest in the trade, escaped from sealed boxes before delirious audiences. Our magician has perfected the reverse act.

The good news, and this is the secret he fears most, is that Israel does not fit in the top hat. This is the country that buried the first judicial overhaul under the weight of its crowds, that filled a square in Tel Aviv until the hostages came home, the living and the dead, and that tells the pollsters, week after week, that it intends to dismiss this government at the ballot box. That stubborn Israel deserves leaders worthy of it, and, until it has them, the mothers of Israel who kiss their sons goodbye for yet another call-up keep paying the price of admission, alone.

I took off the jersey at the end of the workday and the sadness came off almost with it, because soccer grief has a statute of limitations. I know the comparison limps, and it is right that it should. A lost World Cup hurts in make-believe, with real tears, and schedules a rematch in four years. A lost country schedules no return leg. It may be that no one marches over a broadcasting council. But there is one street no cabinet can vote off the map, the one that leads to the ballot box in October, and it is for that street that the stubborn majority trains Saturday after Saturday. These are the follies of my life, the cheap one and the costly one, and I intend to be cured of neither. I root all the same, for both, knowing that the people of Israel now sit inside the magician’s sleeve, tucked away with the shame and the commission of inquiry, and that it is better to expose the trick while the audience still remembers what vanished, because we, unlike the eleven millionaires, have nowhere to transfer.