Anyone who has ever felt betrayed – and who hasn’t? – will agree that betrayal is the worst behavior unique to humans.
Animals kill at will, but they never claim loyalty to their victims, and they don’t betray their ilk. Humans do.
And since the investigation of Qatar’s infiltration of our government is all about betrayal, the question is what actually is betrayal, and what is the severity of the betrayal that reportedly happened in our political holy of holies?
Betrayal is a violation of trust. Yet despite this element’s presence in any type of betrayal, no two betrayals are fully identical in their technical circumstances and moral gravity.
Adolf Hitler’s bamboozlement of Neville Chamberlain was clearly more illegitimate, certainly more harmful, than Lady Chatterley’s betrayal of her husband. Moreover, some betrayals are altogether excusable. Such was Anna Sage’s turning in of John Dillinger to the FBI.
The fabled bank robber trusted Sage the madam, and thus took refuge in her Chicago brothel only to learn, belatedly, that he had walked into a trap.
Technically, then, Dillinger was betrayed, but morally, the betrayal was excusable because he was a criminal, and his betrayer’s motivation was not greed, only the cancellation of her pending deportation order as an illegal immigrant – a promise that the FBI readily made, and violated.
Treason or greed? The moral crisis in Netanyahu’s PMO
Morality aside, Sage’s betrayal was of the private sort that everyone encounters one way or another, whether in marital cheating or in workplace plots, when someone helps an unsuspecting friend’s dismissal in return for a portion of his or her salary, title, or cubicle.
Such private betrayals are but microcosms of the big-time betrayals, the ones that involve not two people, but millions, entire states and nations. This kind of betrayal – also known as treason – should be divided between the excusable betrayal, the inexcusable betrayal, and the downright preposterous betrayal, which is what is now at stake here in the Jewish state.
POLITICAL BETRAYAL has been excused when done in the name of the greater good.
That is what was so compelling about Brutus’s oration to the citizens of Rome, as rendered by Shakespeare, with Caesar’s stabbed corpse nearby: “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more,” and “who is here so vile that will not love his country?” and finally, “as I slew my best lover for the good of Rome, I have the same dagger for myself, when it shall please my country to need my death.”
Political betrayal has been altogether legitimized when the betrayed was not an individual but an entire country. That’s what happened when Richard Nixon shed Taiwan for China, a betrayal that was not only tolerated but widely applauded.
Brutus and Nixon could be absolved because what they did was clearly not designed to serve an external enemy. That could not be said of Benedict Arnold, the American general who initially fought the British, but then turned his coat and became synonymous with treason.
One might think that his was the worst form of treason, but his defense could argue that while he got paid £20,000 for turning his coat, his motivation was not financial and also not ideological, but a stalled promotion and a loyalist wife.
Arnold died peacefully as a respected British general, but Marshal Philippe Pétain, who led France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany, spent the last six of his 95 years in jail, after his death sentence was commuted.
Severe though his betrayal was, it still was only about failing to stand up to the enemy, not about actually identifying with its cause.
That is why the ultimate political betrayer was not Pétain but Norwegian collaborator Vidkun Quisling, who, unlike Pétain, was indeed executed because he served the Nazis not out of any constraint, but because he shared their beliefs.
Fortunately, the betrayal that appears to have happened in our political holy of holies was on no such scale. Unfortunately, whatever its historic scale, what happened in Benjamin Netanyahu’s office is morally criminal, politically mind-boggling, and strategically mad.
QATAR IS not technically at war with Israel. Israeli politicians, diplomats, and businessmen have been there many times since the 1990s. Even so, Qatar has been on the side of Israel’s worst enemies, brazenly and effectively.
Qatar’s most straightforward anti-Israeli activity has been its consistent transfer of funds to Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s military buildups. This happened in broad daylight, and Israel’s intelligence services raised it repeatedly with Netanyahu, according to former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot.
Then there was the broader Middle East. Qatar has financed the region’s most radical Islamists, most notably Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. That is why, in 2017, Egypt, along with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, severed their diplomatic ties with Qatar, publicly accusing it of aiding terrorism and destabilizing the Middle East.
Lastly, and worst of all, Qatar is widely believed to have financed antisemitic agitation worldwide, peppered by Al Jazeera’s anti-Israeli vitriol.
This, then, is the outfit that people in Netanyahu’s innermost circle have contracted and served. How could an Israeli help these people’s public relations in general, and while Israel fights Hamas in particular? How could the prime minister let them drive a wedge between Israel and Egypt, at Qatar’s behest? And for what?
For what? For money. Not like Anna Sage, who handed a mobster to the law, but like Delilah, who handed Samson to the Philistines. “Find out how we can tie him up and make him helpless,” they told Samson’s bedmate. “We’ll each give you 1,100 shekels of silver,” they promised, and delivered (Judges 16:5).
What did they promise your underlings, Bibi? And where were you when they slept with the enemy that you were elected to fight?
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sfarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.