I listened to Benjamin Netanyahu address the United Nations not as a politician or diplomat, but as a retired Jordanian pilot who spent more than forty years between earth and sky. A lifetime in the cockpit taught me something politics too often forgets: a leader may control the decision, but he does not control the truth. An altimeter does not change because a captain dislikes what it says. A mountain does not move because the pilot refuses to acknowledge it. The wind does not reverse because the man at the controls speaks more loudly. So as I listened to Netanyahu, one question stayed with me: How much truth remains when the man conducting the war becomes the narrator of the war?
Dozens of delegates walked out of the General Assembly hall as Netanyahu began speaking. I do not believe their departure automatically made them right, any more than remaining in the room made others right. But an experienced pilot learns to pay attention when warning lights begin appearing. You do not become angry with the instrument; you ask why the warning appeared. And when several warnings appear at once, you do not accuse every instrument of conspiring against you. You check your course. That is how I viewed those empty seats. My disagreement with Netanyahu is not about his nationality, nor is it a judgment on Israelis as a people. Nations are larger than their governments, and peoples outlive those who govern them. My concern is with a political philosophy in which the language of security can become so expansive that almost every use of force is discussed through it. After a long life, I have difficulty accepting the idea that lasting security can be built upon the permanent fear of another people. Fear does not disappear; it travels from one heart to another, from father to son, until fear becomes memory and memory becomes inherited anger.
The Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote centuries ago that injustice leads to the ruin of civilization. I have never understood “ruin” to mean demolished buildings alone. Buildings can be reconstructed; human memory is harder to rebuild. The deeper destruction begins when power becomes so familiar to those who possess it that the ability to do something begins to feel like the right to do it. There is, however, a profound difference between what we can do and what we should do. The distance between the two is where justice lives. History presents the same problem. October 7, 2023, cannot be understood outside its terrible human consequences, including the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages. But neither can the Palestinian question be understood as though history began that morning. It did not begin with Hamas, with one Israeli government, or with the latest war. It carries decades of displacement, refugees, occupation, settlements, competing national claims, and accumulated memory. Anyone can open a book to its final chapter and describe what appears on that page, but no serious reader would claim to understand the story without reading what came before. History is always larger than the politician attempting to narrate it.
I learned another lesson from flying. From thousands of feet above the earth, borders become surprisingly difficult to see. The lines for which human beings fight, kill, and die largely disappear from the sky. From that altitude, you cannot see the religion of a mother, the nationality of a child, or the political party of a father. You see human beings occupying a very small piece of a very large earth. Perhaps one tragedy of politics is that the closer we come to the ground, the narrower our vision sometimes becomes, until a line on a map appears more valuable than the people living beside it. That is also why I cannot look at Gaza simply as statistics. I have lived long enough to distrust the coldness of numbers when they describe death. Behind every number was a name; behind every name was a face. There was a mother, a home, a window, a memory. Perhaps there was a child who knew nothing about geopolitics, had never read a United Nations resolution, and never asked which side fired first. Perhaps that child simply expected to wake up the next morning. When human beings become statistics, suffering becomes easier for distant audiences to absorb. It does not become easier for those experiencing it.
There is an ancient standard of justice that requires no sophisticated legal theory: there cannot be one scale for my child and another for yours. If my child’s blood is precious, another child’s blood must also be precious. If my mother’s fear is real, the fear of another mother cannot become an abstraction merely because she lives on the other side of a border. Morality that changes according to the identity of the victim is no longer universal morality. I also believe there is an important distinction between a country and the political leader who governs it. A state is larger than its prime minister. A nation lasts longer than a political party. History lasts longer than all of them. The real measure of political leadership, in my view, is not how indispensable a leader can make himself appear, but whether the country he eventually leaves behind remains capable of imagining its future without him.
The great Arab poet Al-Mutanabbi wrote that sound judgment comes before the courage of warriors. A pilot understands that wisdom. Courage does not always mean continuing forward. Sometimes courage means turning. A captain does not lose his dignity when he corrects his heading after discovering that the route has become dangerous; on the contrary, correcting the course proves that he deserves the responsibility entrusted to him. Continuing in the wrong direction merely because turning back feels like defeat can make the captain’s pride more dangerous than the original mistake. So my question to Netanyahu is not whether Israel has security concerns. Israelis, like Palestinians and every other people, have a right to live without fear. My question is different: What if greater force cannot solve every danger created by decades of conflict? What if power can defeat an enemy today while helping create another enemy tomorrow? The greatest leaders are not necessarily those who can list the battles they won. Perhaps they are those who leave their children fewer battles to fight.
I do not claim to know what lies within Netanyahu’s heart. No one has that right. I look instead at consequences, because consequences remain long after those who made the decisions have left the stage. When his years in office eventually come to an end, what will history remember? Will it remember a man who possessed great power and used it to search for a way out of an endless cycle of war? Or will it inherit a region more frightened than before, peoples more deeply filled with bitterness, and generations that received from their fathers the question of revenge instead of the question of the future?
I retired from flying years ago after more than four decades in the cockpit. Every flight, no matter how long, eventually ends. Political power is no different. It has a takeoff, and it has a landing. When a flight is over, passengers do not ultimately judge their captain by how commanding his voice sounded over the intercom. They remember something far simpler: Did he bring us home safely? That is the question I would leave with Benjamin Netanyahu—not how many wars were fought, not how many enemies were defeated, and not how many speeches were delivered, but this: What kind of land, and what kind of memory, will remain when the speeches are over? A plane that has drifted off course can still return if it has enough altitude, enough fuel, and enough time. Nations are different. If generation after generation is consumed by fear, grief, and revenge, a society may one day discover that its arsenals are full while something far more precious has been exhausted. It may still know how to win a war, but it may no longer remember the way to peace.