Everyone was surprised when airplane hijackings returned to our lives. No one was surprised to learn that the people who foiled the hijacking were Israelis who lunged at once to confront the first officer in the cockpit.
That absence of surprise is rooted in the Israeli DNA, which carries within it a readiness to fight. Not out of a thirst for blood, but as a deep expression of responsibility toward the people around you and a willingness to risk your own life against anyone who threatens you and your community.
This incident takes place precisely in the middle of a barren and futile controversy over a single question: was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu informed before the war?
On the Left, they are certain: “Of course, he knew, and he did not lift a finger.”
On the Right, they cry out: “If only they had woken him, everything would have looked different.”
The argument is empty. It is meaningless because it tries to force a narrow legal logic onto reality, hanging everything on a direct causal chain running from protocols, hours of sleep, and intelligence reports to the terrible outcome. It is the product of an ancient and basic logic that we lost somewhere along the way.
To understand how warped and destructive this pedantic sifting of details is, this effort to prove guilt or to wash it away, picture the following: You left the children with a babysitter and went out to a movie. When you came home, you found the children slaughtered in the house.
It may well be that this babysitter could not have prevented a thing. It may be that no other person in their place would have managed to avert the decree. And still, that particular babysitter will carry the full weight of it, the fact that the horror took place on their watch, until their last day.
If they trade that paralyzing responsibility, that unbearable weight, for technical questions, for hairsplitting about procedures and calculations of circumstance, they will be seen, and rightly so, as a monstrous human being, someone without humanity.
The babysitter example is not quite precise. Netanyahu did not happen to be minding the children at the wrong time and the wrong place. He is a leader who, on the strength of his talent and his charisma, was handed the roles of building manager, architect, and engineer all at once.
In the updated image, the children were killed when part of the structure collapsed. This building manager, architect, and engineer can complain from here to eternity that the residents’ committee (in Israeli apartment buildings, an elected committee of tenants that controls the building’s budget and maintenance decisions) tied his hands, but he still owes answers: how does 20 years of having his hands tied release him from responsibility, and why is the fact that he was unaware of the severe water damage in the infrastructure supposed to lift that responsibility from his shoulders?
But long before any of that, there has to be crushing guilt. Because the children died, on his watch.
THIS IS exactly the logic that the philosopher Bernard Williams uses in his book Shame and Necessity. Williams shows how the modern conception shrank the idea of responsibility down to pure legal guilt: for someone to bear responsibility, we now demand a proven causal link, full control, and clear intent. And if the right boxes were checked, or the hour was simply too late, the responsibility evaporates.
Among the ancient Greeks, by contrast, the view was far more realistic and clear-eyed. Oedipus had no capacity whatsoever to resist his fate, which was sealed before he was born. He did not know the facts, yet it never occurred to him to claim that no one had woken him in time, and so to disown the catastrophe that happened on his watch. He paid the full price for what he had done, because in a chaotic world the sheer rush of events is not a writ of exemption from responsibility but an uncompromising demand to take it on.
Using today’s endless stream of information to maneuver, to hurl blame or to dodge it, dismantles the most basic idea of leadership. But it also threatens something more important: the Israeli DNA.
Taking responsibility is in Israel's DNA
This readiness to fight, to sacrifice, and to take responsibility for another person is a kind of miracle, but it is also a distinct psychosocial phenomenon that has been studied and decoded in depth.
In their paper “Transcultural pathways to the will to fight,” social psychologist Ángel Gómez and his colleagues show how the great powers failed again and again – in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and nearly in Ukraine, when they focused on overwhelming material superiority and ignored the will to fight, that intangible factor mistakenly treated as impossible to measure.
Drawing on 31 studies among thousands of fighters and civilians, Gómez demonstrated that the willingness to sacrifice one’s life rests on a clear scientific chain: identity fusion, the sense of being at one with the collective, which produces a perception of spiritual strength that outweighs the physical balance of forces, and which is translated into action through unshakable trust in one’s own people.
The survival of the Zionist enterprise is not magic. It is the fruit of those three components existing here at a level unmatched anywhere in the Western world. The present tragedy is that in the name of political survival, flight from responsibility, and a technical, alienating legal discourse, we work our own hands to shatter those very components.
We erode identity fusion through internal incitement; we hollow out the spiritual strength through discrimination and cynicism toward the value of service, and we collapse the basic trust that allows a person to risk his life for the collective. No nation can survive over time when that foundation is coming apart from within.
Political discourse is supposed to be about advancing policy. But in the coming years, anyone prepared to push aside, to bracket, or to walk right over the communities that serve in Israel, simply because advancing their own policy is the most critical thing of all, has to take one thing into account: we have reached a watershed.
We have reached a tangible danger to the very existence of the most basic core that allows the Zionist enterprise to exist. It may be a decision that makes sense in short-term political terms, but its meaning is clear: to seize the wheel on deck, they are willing to wreck the engine and breach the hull.
What is at stake in the coming years is not only the physical survival of the State of Israel against enormous challenges, but the preservation of our most basic DNA: responsibility, service, and loyalty. These must be fought for and guarded with everything we have, before we find ourselves with a generation that does not prevent planes from crashing, because that, after all, is not their responsibility.
The writer is the CEO of the Ribo Center.