It was not only a diversion of fire. It was the construction of an alternative reality — and the structure of it tells you how the state is being run.
In an interview broadcast on Channel 14 on Monday evening, Sara Netanyahu suggested that Yair Golan, now chairman of the Democrats, had been dressed and ready early on the morning of October 7, at an hour when others — the prime minister among them — did not yet know. Asked directly about theories of betrayal, she declined to answer and called for a genuine commission of inquiry. Golan has demanded an apology and warned of a defamation suit; she has refused to apologize and has threatened to countersue. The prime minister said afterward that he does not think there was internal betrayal, while repeating that he had not been woken.
What follows is not about whether the insinuation is true. It is about the shape of it.
Sara Netanyahu spoke about Yair Golan's betrayal because she cannot contain the fact that her husband failed on October 7 and before it. This is not merely a diversion of fire. It is an emotional reaction, a search for an alternative reality in which, somehow, the fire is drawn away from her husband.
Even if there had been a betrayal — a claim that as of now has no support beyond causal theses — one could simply focus on that. But the fact that she attached to it the claim that the prime minister did not know is what is genuinely interesting. Because what she is doing is inserting the entire story into Netanyahu's own frame of reference. In the claim that Netanyahu does not know because he isn't informed, Golan does know. Golan was prepared, Netanyahu was not. What could explain that? That Golan had prior information her husband did not have. And so she uses a man who risked his life in order to rescue Netanyahu, whose conduct on the day of the massacre was problematic at the very least.
The emotional reaction is in fact the very framework within which the state is administered. The state, for Sara, is part of the emotional apparatus, and so is her husband. There are no partitions between them, and no boundaries either.
The Machiavellian and His Mirror:
If Netanyahu is a Machiavellian who plays cynically on the strings of emotion and is prepared to lie cynically to the world, one might say that in Mrs. Netanyahu we see a kind of internalization of that cynical world. Perhaps unconsciously, this is also part of her absolute sense of victimhood.
She feels like a victim not only because of what she and her family supposedly suffer — media persecution, and the conviction that people want to burn them — but more than that, because she carries the emotional burden of her husband's conduct. Her need for control also creates a compulsion to absorb what she is unwilling to endure.
The mentality of Sara and Benjamin Netanyahu is the extreme condition of the Israeli himself. A portrait of the ugly Israeli that the sane mass of the people is no longer prepared to tolerate. There is a right-wing alternative to this, in the form of Feiglin and Smotrich, and for people of the center all the more so. But for all their fawning over the Americans, and their wish to be like all the nations in dress and in conduct, and the constant comparison to the gentiles, the Netanyahus represent a very extreme version of very Israeli traits.
The Cart in the Mall:
The idea is simple. The smug Netanyahu, who refuses to take responsibility, who produces total marketing and far less product, is the one perceived as the Israeli who only wants to sell in order to make money. Like someone setting up a cart in a New Jersey mall.
And Sara? She is the one who arrives after the deal has failed and collapsed, and expresses astonishment, and claims that she is the victim.
This is an extreme condition in which the most boorish Israeli man, the one selling in the mall, and the most boorish Israeli woman, the one working alongside him and defending the sale, run the state together and bring us to a situation that is unbearable even after the results have proved very grave. Their excuse being that the products outside are far less good, and that it is dangerous to buy from outside because of "the Arabs." It is an attempt to preserve the image of the diaspora Jew, surrounded by countless dangers, in order to persuade him that this product is the best one available — and along the way, a display of unserious conduct and unserious character.
The problem is that the members of the Netanyahu family truly believe they are the hottest, most precise and best product on the market. And that every attempt to challenge this becomes not a rational discussion, not a collegial one, not an Israeli and open one, but a set of Pavlovian and peculiar reactions.
This is a kind of secularized diasporism, fitted to serve as an extreme mirror of the Israeli temperament and of the embossed contour of the Israeli character.
The Seam:
Emotionalism, sentimentality, fear — all of it has a place within a modern political structure. The political field is in any case a field of subjugation, because it subsumes the other from the outset. What is particular here is the seam this people lives on: between the fear of a Holocaust and the promise of statesmanship.
Once the couple can no longer appear statesmanlike, what remains visible is their own deep internalization of the fear of annihilation, and their fashioning of themselves as victims. They become the embossed image of this people, in which the fear of annihilation and enslavement fills the entire space.
And the problem is this. When the conduct of a leader and his wife is driven to such a degree by a sense of siege, it becomes hard to guarantee the security of the people. That is not a question of character. It is a question of function.
