Unilateral folly, again

Benjamin Netanyahu has once again mistaken bluster for leadership, threatening to respond to France and others’ unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state with his own unilateral annexation of parts of the West Bank. It is a gesture at once futile and destructive, a tantrum masquerading as strategy. One folly is answered with another, and in the process Israel is wounded by its own hand.

Unilateralism is not new to us. It has been one of the most dangerous temptations in our history. We know the bitter fruit it bears. We withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 without agreement or security guarantees, and Hezbollah filled the vacuum with rockets aimed at Haifa. We withdrew from Gaza in 2005 without agreement or security guarantees, and Hamas filled the vacuum with rockets aimed at Tel Aviv.

October 7 – the massacre, the kidnappings, the unraveling of Israeli security – was the ultimate consequence of that unilateral folly. A day that revealed, in the most excruciating way, the price of imagining that we could impose our own reality on our neighbors without negotiation, without reciprocity, without the slow and painful work of building legitimacy.

Netanyahu knows this. He built his political career on denouncing the Gaza Disengagement as reckless. He warned that unilateral withdrawal would turn Gaza into a base for terror, and he was right. Yet now, in the twilight of his leadership, he proposes the mirror image of the same failure: unilateral annexation. If withdrawal without agreement creates a vacuum filled by terror, annexation without agreement could create a fire that would consume Israel’s legitimacy abroad and its democracy at home. What is this, but the same dangerous illusion in reverse?

The irony is unbearable. Netanyahu rails against France for acting unilaterally, and then threatens to do the same. He insists that peace must be based on negotiation, and then promises to bypass negotiation himself. He complains that others are undermining Israel’s legitimacy, and then brandishes the very weapon most likely to accelerate our slide into pariah status. This is not strategy. It is mimicry. Neither France nor any of the countries that recognize Palestine suffer for their declarations; Israel suffers for its annexation. In the name of punishing Paris, Canberra, Ottawa, or Brussels, Netanyahu punishes Jerusalem.

And he chooses this moment – as the war in Gaza drags into its 700th day, as our soldiers fight and fall in the ruins of Khan Younis and Rafah, as the families of hostages count the endless nights, and as Gaza itself lies shattered, its people enduring unfathomable destruction and grief – to brandish threats of annexation. What message does that send to the world? That Israel has learned nothing from October 7. That we are condemned to repeat our mistakes, endlessly replaying the cycle of unilateral delusion and its inevitable disasters. At a time when we most need to stand tall, to show that Israel can rise above pettiness and spite, Netanyahu drags us into the mud.

Our history offers a clear ledger. When we negotiated — the peace with Egypt, the peace with Jordan, even Oslo with all its failings — we gained legitimacy, stability, partners with whom to manage conflict. When we acted unilaterally, we sowed chaos. The war we are fighting now is a war against the consequences of unilateralism. And a month after the 20th anniversary of the Gaza Disengagement, we should know by now that its failure is one of the clearest lessons of our modern history. Yet Netanyahu, custodian of Israel’s longest war and longest premiership, has the audacity to threaten more of the same poison.

For those of us who still believe in the dream of Zionism as a state both Jewish and democratic, secure within borders that the world recognizes, a home strong enough to shelter us yet moral enough to command our pride — this path is a betrayal. To annex without agreement is to abandon the possibility of peace, to mortgage our children’s future, to court a binational nightmare that will end either in apartheid or in the loss of Jewish sovereignty. It is not others we weaken; it is ourselves.

Unilateralism for unilateralism: this is Netanyahu’s creed. It is the logic of a gambler, doubling down after every loss, insisting that the next reckless bet will redeem the ruin of the last. But nations are not poker chips, and Zionism is not a bluff. The Jewish people did not return home after two thousand years to squander our legitimacy in petty acts of vengeance against foreign parliaments. We came home to build something enduring.

That is what Zionism once promised. And what Netanyahu, bound to his delusions of unilateralism, cannot deliver.