Our existential tragedy is that we suffer from a kind of innocence that borders on complacency. In Israel, beneath the daily rockets and chronic anxiety, we like to believe that survival rests in the hands of a statesman. We place the nation’s neck in the care of a guarantor whom we imagine to be bound by an inviolable moral covenant. Desperation demands that fantasy. Reality collapses when the guardian of tomorrow turns out to possess the ethical stature of a loan shark.

To understand the soul of the man signing the protection checks, one need only look at the scum he chooses to pardon. Consider the case of Joseph Schwartz. He was not an architect of evil or a Shakespearean villain. He was merely the owner of Skyline Healthcare, a sprawling American network of nursing homes. The moral anatomy of this individual deserves to be drawn with clinical precision. Schwartz’s singular talent was the monetization of bedsores and urine-soaked sheets. He turned the final chapter of other people’s lives into an accounting category. He drained the company’s coffers, evaded........

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