Ernest Becker (1924-1974) said a man builds his life on two fears he will not name aloud. The first is that he dies. The second runs deeper. It is that his dying counts for nothing, that he goes into the ground as one more animal, his name gone in a generation, his span a rounding error in an arithmetic that does not notice him. Culture answers both fears at once. It hands a man a hero system, a set of rules by which he earns a place the grave cannot cancel. Play the part well and you join the things that outlast you. The nation. The faith. The bloodline. The record. Becker called this the causa sui project, the wish to father yourself, to be your own cause and so slip the animal fact that something else made you and something else will unmake you.
Benjamin Netanyahu (b. 1949) builds his on a death with a date. July 4, 1976. Entebbe. His older brother Yonatan Netanyahu (1946-1976) leads the assault unit onto the tarmac in Uganda, frees the hostages, and dies at thirty, the only Israeli soldier killed in the raid. The operation succeeds. The hero falls. From that morning the younger brother carries a fixed point in the sky to steer by, a man who died well in the one way the family taught him to honor, and who can never be argued with, outgrown, or surpassed. Three years later Benjamin founds an institute and names it for the dead man. He spends the rest of his life building a wall high enough that the death which took his brother cannot reach the rest.
Behind the brother stands the father. Benzion Netanyahu (1910-2012) serves as secretary to Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), the hard man of Revisionist Zionism, and then gives his long life to the study of the Spanish Inquisition. His scholarship carries one lesson into the home like cold air through a door. The killing of Jews is not an accident in history. It is the climate of history. The Jew who trusts the goodwill of the nations dies of that trust. The father lives to a hundred and two, exacting, sparing with praise, a man who buries one son and judges the other for the rest of his days. A boy raised in that house learns young that softness is a casualty list and that the world is a corridor with knives in the walls.
Out of the brother and the father comes the hero system. Its sacred word is bitachon.
The official story leaves the terror out. In the official story Netanyahu is Mr. Security, the cool product of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Boston Consulting Group, the commando turned strategist who reads the threat board the way an actuary reads a mortality table. He warns the world about Iran for thirty years. He holds up the cartoon bomb at the United Nations in 2012 and draws the red line with a marker, the rational man explaining risk to a room that will not do the arithmetic. He runs the economy, courts the technology sector, signs accords with Gulf monarchs. He is the adult in the region. This is the subtraction story, the self with the fear taken out, the guardian as a calculating machine who happens to be right about danger. Put the fear back and the machine turns into a man who cannot stop, because the thing he guards against is not Hamas and not Iran. It is the corridor with knives in the walls, and the corridor has no end, so the guarding has no end, so the guardian can never be relieved of his post.
Bitachon is the right word to follow, because bitachon does not mean one thing. In Hebrew the word carries both the rifle and the prayer. The Ministry of Defense is Misrad HaBitachon, the house of security in the sense of tanks and fences and intercepted missiles. Yet bitachon is also the old religious word for trust, the bitachon of Bahya ibn Paquda’s Chovot HaLevavot, the trust a man places in God when he has done what he can and lets the rest fall where God sends it. The same four letters hold the armored division and the open hand. The fight over which meaning rules is the fight over the country, and it runs straight through Netanyahu’s coalition this summer, where the Haredi parties threaten to bring down the Knesset rather than draft their yeshiva students. To the secular security state, bitachon means every able body in uniform. To the man in the study hall in Bnei Brak, bitachon means the opposite. The soldiers do not hold the line. The Torah holds the line, and the student who learns it holds more of the line than the gunner who guards him. One word. Two armies. Neither can hear the other, because each hears his own hero system in the sound.
Watch the word travel further, into rooms that have never heard of the Knesset.
The trauma surgeon works nights in a county hospital where the gurneys come in two at a time on Friday. For him bitachon is a pulse that holds under his hands, a closed abdomen, four units of blood that arrive before the pressure drops. He counts security in minutes. He does not believe in total anything. He sends a man home alive and knows the man will come back, or another man will, and that the work is to win the hour, not the war. A surgeon who demanded a victory that ended all bleeding forever would lose his mind by spring. He learns to let the patient go at the door and call it a good outcome, which is a thing Netanyahu’s hero system cannot allow, because at the door is exactly where the brother died.
The reinsurance actuary in Zurich means something else again. For him security is a book of risk so wide that no single catastrophe can sink it. He prices the tail. He models the earthquake, the pandemic, the hundred-year flood, and he sleeps because the math sleeps for him. He never speaks of victory. He speaks of solvency. His whole craft assumes that the disaster comes, that you cannot prevent it, and that wisdom lies in being large and diversified enough to absorb it and write next year’s policies. A nation run by an actuary would accept that some attack gets through and would build to survive the getting through. Netanyahu cannot run on that arithmetic. A single breach, on a single October morning, breaks the promise the whole system exists to keep, and the promise is not statistical. It is that the death does not come here, not to these people, not again.
The herder on the dry edge of the Sahel carries a third bitachon in his head. Security is the size of the herd, the depth of the well, the number of cousins who will saddle up if a raid takes his cattle. Wealth walks on four legs and can be driven off in a night, so safety lives in kin and in the certainty that an injury will be answered. His is the oldest security of all, the security of deterrence through vengeance, and it is closer to Netanyahu’s than the surgeon’s or the actuary’s. The Israeli doctrine of disproportionate response, the long memory, the answered raid, all of it would be familiar to the herder. The difference is that the herder knows his herd will shrink in a bad year and grow in a good one and that no year is final. Netanyahu wants a year that ends the cycle. The herder would tell him there is no such year. There is only the next dry season and the cousins you can still call.
The Carthusian in his cell would not use the word at all without laughing at the rest of us. Security, to the contemplative, is the soul, and the soul is the only thing no army can take and no October can breach. The body is on loan and short-dated. To spend a life fortifying the body and the city of bodies is, to him, the great distraction, the building of higher walls around a house already condemned. His bitachon is the religious one, trust in God so complete that the loss of everything else cannot reach it. He stands at the far pole from the security state, and he stands, without meaning to, beside the yeshiva student in Bnei Brak, who tells the recruiters the same thing in a different accent. The study hall is the cell. The Torah is the wall. God is the only defense ministry that has never lost a war.
Now bring in the shopkeeper, first in her family with papers, who keeps the citizenship in a drawer she can reach in the dark and cash she can carry in a coat. Her security is portable and private. She does not trust the state to save her, because the state is the thing that let her grandparents down, and so she builds an exit and a second exit and tells no one. Hers is the diaspora bitachon, the suitcase by the door, and Netanyahu’s whole project is the answer to it and the rebuke of it at once. The State of Israel exists to retire the suitcase, to make the exit unnecessary, to give the Jew a wall he owns instead of a coat he flees in. The shopkeeper hears the promise and keeps the coat anyway. She has heard promises.
Set these men and women in a row and the word bitachon bends in the light of each hero system like a coin held at different angles. The surgeon’s hour, the actuary’s book, the herder’s kin, the monk’s soul, the shopkeeper’s drawer, the gunner’s fence, the scholar’s page. Each one is sane inside its own house. Each one would call the others reckless or deluded or naive. Netanyahu’s house is the gunner’s, raised to the scale of a nation and shadowed by a Warsaw childhood that was never his own but came to him through his father’s books as if it had been. His security is real security against real enemies who say in plain words what they intend. That is the part the comfortable abroad keep failing to grant him. The terror is not invented. The corridor does have knives. What the frame adds is the rest of the sentence. The knives are also the answer to a deeper dread, the dread Becker named, and a man who has organized his soul around standing watch will find a watch to stand even when the immediate threat recedes, because to step down from the wall is to admit that the wall was never the whole story.
This is why the second sacred word is victory, and why it must be total.
After October 7, 2023, Netanyahu promises the country total victory over Hamas. Hold the phrase against the others. The surgeon’s victory is a discharge, not a cure that lasts forever. The actuary never claims victory, only another year solvent. The herder’s victory is the recovered herd and the respected name, until the next raid. The climber on the rock face, free of rope, has a victory that lasts exactly until he is down and alive, and then it resets at the foot of the next wall, and he would tell you that a man who thought he had conquered the mountain for good is a man about to fall off it. Total victory is not a military aim. It is a theological one. It is the demand that the threat end, all of it, forever, so that the death which took the brother can be declared defeated and the watchman can at last come down. No campaign delivers it, because the enemy on the other side of total victory is not an army. It is mortality wearing an army’s uniform. So the war does not end. It cannot end, because its ending is the thing the hero system exists to postpone.
How much of this does the man see?
A great deal, on one floor of the building. Netanyahu is the most self-aware strategist of his generation about threat. He knows he is playing Churchill. He chooses the role with open eyes, cites the 1930s on purpose, casts himself as the one who reads the dictator’s intent while the salons scoff. He understands deterrence, signaling, the use of fear as a tool of statecraft. Few living men read the board with his cold attention. He says Iran will never have nuclear weapons and he has built thirty years of policy on the sentence.
On the floor below, the lights are off. The indispensability is the tell. He does not leave. He refuses a commission of inquiry into the failure of October 7, the worst day, the breach of the one promise, and the refusal has a shape Becker would know on sight. A commission writes a verdict. A verdict ends a story and assigns a death, the political death of the man it blames. The corruption trial has the same shape from the other side, a story that must not be allowed to reach its final page, kept open year after year because a closed book is a sealed fate. A man who keeps every game in play keeps the final whistle from blowing, and as long as it does not blow, the death waits in the tunnel and does not come onto the field. He sees the threat with total clarity. He does not see, or will not say, that his refusal to be replaceable is his own causa sui, the attempt to be the cause of his country’s survival so completely that his removal becomes unthinkable, which is a man’s way of making himself the thing that does not die.
Three coordinates, then, to fix him by.
The shape of the hero is the watchman who will not be relieved. He is the son who lived when the better son fell, and a man who survives the hero must spend his life earning the survival, guarding everyone, standing the post the dead man cannot stand. The wall is real and the watch is real and the gratitude owed to such men is real. The cost is that the watchman comes to need the night.
The unnamed rival is not Hamas and not Iran, not Yair Lapid or Naftali Bennett or Benny Gantz or the prosecutors. The unnamed rival is Yoni, fixed at thirty on the tarmac at Entebbe, the brother who died well and so can never fail, never age, never stand trial, never lose an election, never disappoint the father. A living man cannot defeat a dead hero. The dead hero has already won the only victory that counts and left the field. Benjamin Netanyahu has spent fifty years answering a man who cannot answer back, and behind that man a father who rationed approval and outlived his finest son. No term of office is long enough to settle that account, because the creditor is in the ground and does not send receipts.
The cost the ledger cannot price is the rest of it. Netanyahu prices everything the security state can price. Seats. Deterrence. Intercepted missiles. The share of Gaza his maps show his army holding. The ledger is honest within its columns and it is vast. What it cannot enter is the Palestinian dead counted as the dead, the hostages’ subtracted days, his own son Avner’s wedding called off twice under threat of fire, the family not exempt by his own account, the social fabric of a country torn along the seam between the gunner’s bitachon and the scholar’s. The security state can price almost anything. It cannot price the one thing it was built to deny, which is that the watchman is mortal too, that the wall outlives the man on it, and that the brother is not coming back no matter how high the wall is raised or how total the victory is declared.
