Do you deserve what you have? I ask without irony. You probably do, and so do most of the people I know, including the ones who disagree with me about everything. We worked, we studied, we paid the mortgage, we served or watched our children serve, we buried people. It is an honest answer and I would defend it before any audience. What struck me the other day is that it answers a slightly different question from the one it appears to answer.

Two weeks ago, waiting for a bus, I fell into a long conversation with an engineer who came from Kiev in 1993 and is some six years younger than I am. Call him Sasha. He arrived at eleven without a word of Hebrew, slept four years in a caravan with his parents and a grandmother, was beaten up at school for his accent, served in the army, studied at night, and now designs water systems. When he decided to marry, he had to do it in Cyprus, because the rabbinate does not recognize his mother. He is Israeli enough to risk his life for the state and not Jewish enough to be married inside it. He loathes the current government with a steadier rage than mine, went to the protests before I did, and stayed later.

A bus went by on the Ariel route, and he pointed at it and said he had worked up there in 2018, on the expansion of the water network. He described the job with the technical pride of a man who understands pressure and head loss. Then he said the sentence I have heard from dozens of decent people. We built, they didn’t build. I said the comparison struck me as unfair, since one side builds with a permit and the other builds under demolition. He asked me where I was in 2002, when the buses were exploding, and whether I had a child of draft age. I do not. He does. And he added, without a trace of irony, that nobody ever gave him anything. Nobody did.

I agreed with him on that point and I agree still. What I could have said, and did not, is that the........

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