The Floor Above Us

Israel has been listening to American negotiators. The scandal is that we left the windows open.

There is a building in Kiryat Gat, in southern Israel, where Americans and Israelis work side by side to keep the peace. It is a monument to alliance, to shared purpose, to the unbreakable bond between two great democracies. It also has a floor the Americans aren’t allowed on, and a floor the Israelis aren’t allowed on, because the two great democracies would each prefer the other not hear what they say about it. You can learn everything you need to know about modern statecraft from a single building that requires its closest friends to take the stairs to a room they can’t enter.

This is the setting against which we are now asked to be scandalized that Israel has been listening to us.

The reports, such as they are, suggest that Israeli intelligence has been working hard to find out what Steve Witkoff thinks before Steve Witkoff finishes thinking it, eavesdropping on the president’s chief Iran negotiator and a few others as they try to assemble something resembling a peace deal. The Pentagon, we’re told, has quietly elevated Israel’s counterintelligence threat level to critical, a designation now reserved for an ally we are simultaneously fighting a war beside. There has never been closer military coordination between the two countries. The officers sit at the same tables at Central Command. The threat assessment went up anyway. Hold those two facts next to each other long enough and you begin to understand that “ally” is a word doing an enormous amount of unpaid labor.

But let us be fair to the Israelis, who are, after all, only guilty of the entirely predictable. Intelligence services spy. They spy on enemies, friends, rivals, patrons, clients, and the people they are at that very moment embracing for the cameras. This is a job description. The United States does it too, energetically, to everyone. To express shock that Israel listens to American negotiators is to express shock that water is damp. It is the weather. You do not indict the weather.

What you can indict, what a serious country would indict, is the conduct that left the windows open. Here, buried two-thirds of the way down the page in the manner of all things that are actually the story, is the part that matters. Senior American officials, it turns out, have a fondness for private aircraft. They like to conduct the nation’s most sensitive business on their personal phones, the ones in their pockets, the consumer devices, the same hardware they use to order dinner and post grievances. And they have made a habit of waving off the embassy staff whose entire professional purpose is to keep precisely this from happening. One former official, surveying the wreckage, observed that these tendencies made them especially vulnerable targets for the spy services of allies and adversaries alike.

Vulnerable targets. Read that again. Not victims. Targets.

This is the part the term kakistrophe was built to hold, the catastrophe a kakistocracy manufactures for itself, where incompetence and disaster are not cause and effect but the same event seen at two moments. Yes, this is also the part where I remind you that we have put the word on a mug, because if the republic is going to leak secrets through vanity and personal phones, the least we can do is drink coffee from the proper diagnostic equipment.

Israel did not crack a hardened American position through some feat of espionage genius. There was nothing to crack. The position was on a personal phone, in the air, beyond the reach of anyone whose job was to protect it, because the men carrying it consider such protection beneath them. The bug is downstream of the vanity. The breach is downstream of the contempt. The same disposition that staffs a government by loyalty rather than competence, that treats the State Department as an obstacle and the professionals as the enemy, that mistakes the rejection of process for the exercise of power, that disposition does not stay home when its owners travel. It boards the private jet. It rides along on the personal phone. Eventually it hands a foreign intelligence service, gift-wrapped, the one thing a government is supposed to be able to keep: its own secrets.

We have spent a great deal of this administration cataloguing the kakistrophe in its domestic habitat, the toll booths, the audit immunity, the steady replacement of people who know things with people who are loyal. It was always going to find its way abroad. It was always going to discover that the world outside the country is less forgiving of vanity than the country has been. At home, weaponized incompetence merely costs Americans money and dignity and the occasional functioning institution. Abroad, it costs you the negotiation, because someone is listening, and you made yourself trivially easy to hear.

The White House says the account is false. The Israeli embassy says it does not spy on American officials, a denial of such pristine implausibility that one almost admires the commitment. We will, in the interest of intellectual honesty, note that much of the specific eavesdropping allegation rests on anonymous officials and was first reported elsewhere, and that prudent readers hold such things lightly until more arrives. Fine. Hold the bug lightly.

But you don’t need the bug to convict. The phones are real. The jets are real. The contempt for professional safeguards is not some exotic allegation requiring a listening device to prove. A government that conducts its statecraft this way does not need to be betrayed by an ally. It has already betrayed itself, daily, as a matter of routine, and the only open question was who would be courteous enough to take advantage first.

It was the friends. It is always, eventually, the friends. They had the floor right above us the whole time.