A post-Somalia character study of Eli David
DISCLAIMER: I do not own NCIS, I am not making any money from this and no copyright infringement was intended. If CBS still wants to sue me then just know that I am worth a grand total of £2.36
It is when he first puts down the phone that he realises that something is wrong. He's just been told his daughter, whom he'd believed to be dead, is very much alive and well. He should be overjoyed. He is not.
He is glad, on some level. She is, after all, his last remaining child. He would not much liked to have to say that all his three children were dead and he is glad he does not have to.
He is proud. Not many would be able to survive a Somali terrorist camp and he is proud that his daughter is one of them. It shows he trained her well.
He is angry. His anger is directed at his daughter, her American friends and, partially, at himself.
He is angry at the Americans for manipulating and stealing his daughter from him, from Mossad and from Israel, turning her into a weak shadow of her former self in the process, he is angry at his daughter for letting them and he is angry at himself because, despite all the training, all the many lectures on loyalty to ones country and ones family, his daughter still seemed to have changed sides.
What had he done so wrong that his years of carefully structured Mossad training, starting before his daughter could even walk, could be unravelled so completely by a bunch of American idiots in just a few short years that she, Ziva David, who had fought for Israel since she was a child, had turned her back on her country.
And for Eli David that is the eighth deadly sin, the one that will propel her straight to the burning fires of Hell.
He still, he admits to himself, loves his daughter to some extent; she is, after all, his flesh and blood, but she has become closer to the Americans than she was ever supposed to have become and he regrets sending her there at all.
Because, though she did not die on the Damocles or in Somalia as he had thought, he knows that he has no children left, because Tali died in an accident, Ari died on his orders, but Ziva died as soon as she betrayed her father and her country and, as he turns away from the telephone, he knows that he will never forgive her.
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