The Hand on the Switch

Golda Meir once joked that Moses led the Jews through the desert for forty years to bring them to the one place in the Middle East without oil. It was a good line for decades. Then, in 2009 and 2010, partners led by a Texan company called Noble Energy and including Yitzhak Tshuva’s Delek Group found Tamar and Leviathan beneath the eastern Mediterranean, and the joke needed a footnote: still no oil, but a great deal of gas.

I thought of Golda while watching Tom Cruise in Digger, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s black comedy about a Texas oil tycoon, which opened on 2 October. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, billed by the studio as the most powerful man in the world, racing to prove he is humanity’s saviour before a disaster of his own making destroys everything. John Goodman is an ailing, dictatorial American president. Sandra Hüller is the half sister who helps run the business. Emmanuel Lubezki shoots it all in a palette close to black and white.

Let me say what the weekend’s numbers do not. Cruise is brilliant. He is aged, loud, folksy and for long stretches plainly unpleasant, and he never once asks to be liked. For an actor who has spent two decades giving audiences exactly what they came for, it is the bravest work he has done since Magnolia. The cast around him is excellent throughout. If the Academy can look past the receipts, he and they belong on its ballot.

The centre of the film is a speech. Digger stands before the European Parliament, in a chamber dressed to recall the Roman Senate, and for some ten minutes he owns the catastrophe. Then he hands it back, and the chamber erupts. Even the critics who disliked almost everything else agreed on this scene, and Variety compared it to Howard Beale’s broadcast in Network. What makes it bite is that Digger does not blame the usual villains. He blames the people in the room and, by extension, the people in the cinema. The implication is plain. We wanted the warm house, the cheap flight and the full tank. He is only what that wanting looks like with a drilling licence.

The audience has given its reply. Digger took about $8 million from 3,321 North American cinemas and about $20 million worldwide, against an official budget of $125 million that the trade press puts considerably higher. It is the weakest opening of Cruise’s career since Lions for Lambs in 2007. Audiences polled on the way out gave it a C+. A Colleen Hoover adaptation took four times as much.

It is tempting to read that as a verdict on the film. I read it as an answer to the speech. A man tells the public it is complicit, and the public goes next door.

Israelis have rehearsed this. In 2015, on one Saturday night after another, thousands marched in Tel Aviv against the framework that confirmed the Noble and Delek partnership as owners of Leviathan, the largest field. The antitrust commissioner resigned. The economy minister resigned rather than sign the waiver of competition law, and the prime minister signed it himself. In March 2016 the Supreme Court struck out the clause that would have frozen the terms for a decade. It was a serious democratic argument about who owns what lies under the sea. And every marcher went home to a flat lit by Tamar, which had been feeding the grid since 2013.

That is not hypocrisy. It is the condition Digger describes. Gas now generates about seventy per cent of Israel’s electricity. It powers the desalination plants that supply much of the country’s drinking water. In August 2025 the Leviathan partners signed a $35 billion contract to sell gas to Egypt, the largest export deal in Israel’s history, and Israeli gas flows to Jordan as well. The country that had no oil now helps keep its neighbours’ lights on, a strategic asset that no government of any colour will surrender. Israel has also pledged net zero emissions by 2050. Both things are true and nobody is lying.

Then came the proof that the switch works in both directions. On 28 February this year, as the war with Iran began, Israel ordered Leviathan and the smaller Karish field shut as a precaution against missile strikes. For a month Tamar alone carried the country. Exports to Egypt and Jordan stopped. Cairo, already paying sharply higher prices for imported fuel, ordered shops, restaurants and malls to close at nine in the evening to save power, and both capitals were reported to have asked Israel to turn the gas back on. It did, in early April, days before the ceasefire. Meanwhile Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz produced what the International Energy Agency called the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market. Israel, whose oil largely bypasses the strait, rode it out better than most. The country Golda pitied for having no oil had become one whose valve decides whether Cairo’s restaurants stay open. The gas that warms the planet also binds the neighbourhood. When the government approved the Egyptian contract last December, the prime minister presented it as a contribution to regional stability, and he was not wrong. But a customer who has been switched off does not forget it.

Digger delivers his speech in the right building. In December 2025 the real European Parliament voted by 500 to 120 to phase out Russian gas, and early this year the ban became law: Russian pipeline gas must stop by 30 September 2027. It was the proper answer to a supplier that had turned energy into a weapon. But notice what the vote did and did not do. Europe took Russia’s share of its gas imports from 45 per cent in 2021 to about 13 per cent last year, in large part by buying the same molecule from other people. It did not give up the gas. It changed the villain. When Hormuz closed weeks after the law passed, and the pressure to reopen the question grew, Brussels had to insist that going back would be a strategic blunder. A continent can pass a resolution against a supplier. It finds it much harder to pass one against its own radiators.

Next month the argument moves to Antalya. The United Nations climate summit opens there on 9 November, hosted by Turkey, with the negotiations led by Australia, among the world’s largest exporters of coal and gas. This is Digger’s speech turned into a seating plan. At last year’s summit in Belém the oil producers blocked any binding language on phasing out fossil fuels, and the presidency settled for voluntary roadmaps outside the formal process. Nobody in Antalya will be a villain. Everyone will be a customer, a supplier or both, and the communiqué will be drafted by people who flew in.

Iñárritu’s error, if it is one, is to believe that confession scales. A tycoon’s mea culpa in a marble hall changes nothing, because the hand on the switch is not his. It is ours, every evening, in every kitchen. In 2020 the cabinet promised that a fifth of Israel’s electricity would come from renewables by the end of 2025. The country finished last year at 16 per cent, second from bottom in the OECD, under some of the most dependable sunshine on earth. No crowds filled Tel Aviv on Saturday nights over that. Israelis vote on 27 October in a campaign dominated by security, and a missed solar target will not cost anyone a seat. A villain can be marched against. A habit cannot, and a missed target has no face.

The speech was written for a full house. This week it is playing, several times a day, to rows of empty seats in more than three thousand cinemas. Digger is still up there, telling nobody that it was everybody.

The room is empty. The lights are on.