Nations do not always fall to invading armies. More often, they are fractured from within, hollowed out by leaders who confuse their own survival with the state’s fate. Israel has reached that precipice. The country is no longer governed in the public interest; it is being sacrificed to the needs of one man desperate to remain in power.

A recent Haaretz investigation, built around the testimony of Gabi Weicker — a childhood friend of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — exposes this collapse with rare devastating intimacy. It does not describe a strategist miscalculating or a leader overwhelmed by events. It portrays a man unravelling in real time, clinging to office as dear life, dragging the nation with him into deeper violence, global condemnation and isolation, and moral ruin.

Weicker is not a political enemy. He has no axe to grind. He is not a partisan rival. He knew Netanyahu before power distorted him, before suspicion hardened into obsession, before he caught the bacillus of corruption. Wicker’s testimony is devastating precisely because it is personal. What it reveals is not a policy breakdown. He drew a complete picture of total ethical disintegration.

Netanyahu, Weicker says, is no longer driven by ideology, security considerations, or even ambition in any recognisable sense. He is animated by himself. He wraps himself in patriotism, echoing Samuel Johnson’s famous jibe, “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Every decision is calibrated to achieve one end: survival; one more term, one more crisis, and one more emergency engineered to postpone the reckoning. The state becomes armor, the........

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