The Price of Survival

Our existential tragedy is that we suffer from a kind of innocence that borders on complacency. In Israel, beneath the daily rockets and chronic anxiety, we like to believe that survival rests in the hands of a statesman. We place the nation’s neck in the care of a guarantor whom we imagine to be bound by an inviolable moral covenant. Desperation demands that fantasy. Reality collapses when the guardian of tomorrow turns out to possess the ethical stature of a loan shark.

To understand the soul of the man signing the protection checks, one need only look at the scum he chooses to pardon. Consider the case of Joseph Schwartz. He was not an architect of evil or a Shakespearean villain. He was merely the owner of Skyline Healthcare, a sprawling American network of nursing homes. The moral anatomy of this individual deserves to be drawn with clinical precision. Schwartz’s singular talent was the monetization of bedsores and urine-soaked sheets. He turned the final chapter of other people’s lives into an accounting category. He drained the company’s coffers, evaded vast amounts of taxes, stole nurses’ retirement savings, and outsourced the malnutrition of defenseless elderly people with methodical efficiency. In a rare display of decency, the American federal justice system sent him to prison.

Then came the twist. Last November, after a laughably brief three months behind bars, the businessman walked out through the front door. President Donald Trump granted him a full and unconditional pardon. The official explanation was touching compassion for a sick old man. The real price tag was roughly one million dollars, paid to lobbyists who open the doors of power with the same ease with which they order coffee. Schwartz purchased his freedom with money extracted from the people who cleaned his patients’ waste. Trump, in his infinitely transactional mercy, signed the receipt without blinking.

Anyone who sees Schwartz as an aberration has misunderstood the system. He is the system’s purest expression. During this second term, pardons have flowed from the presidential pen on an industrial scale. Executives who helped collapse banks and billionaires who purchased political influence have found instant redemption. The scales of justice have been obliterated. They no longer weigh crimes; they merely check the credit limit of those waiting outside the Oval Office. The clearest reflection of this commercialization of the state is the enrichment of the ruling dynasty itself. According to recent estimates published by Forbes, the Trump family’s wealth has doubled since the beginning of this second term. The presidential pardon has degenerated into a business counter. The leader of the free world has torn up the civic contract and transformed corporate wrongdoing into a convenience fee.

It is here that the story takes on the contours of tragedy. We were raised to believe that the alliance with the United States rested on shared principles and democratic bonds. Today, we have outsourced the blood of our children to a man who would sell his own mother if the profit margin were attractive enough. If American domestic law can be auctioned off to the highest bidder, it is pure delusion to imagine that foreign policy retains any moral foundation. Presidential diplomacy has become a pawn shop.

We understand the fragility of military logistics. Every anti-aircraft battery we operate functions because we trust that ammunition will cross the ocean when the sirens begin to scream. Under a government run like an empire of extortion, an emergency shipment of missiles ceases to be a commitment between nations and becomes a tool of personal leverage. Defense no longer depends on the urgency of casualties on the battlefield but on the digestion and private moods of the man sitting in the Oval Office.

We sleep on one of the most lethal strips of land on earth, wagering our lives on a man for whom everything—law, honor, blood, and even the existence of an ally—is merely another commodity. And we must confront our own hypocrisy with equal honesty. In a country where the only thing that rots faster than a banana is the moral compass of its politicians, tying our fate to Donald Trump’s predatory cynicism is a sign that we have placed ourselves firmly on the wrong side of history.