Nothing Netanyahu Says Will Matter

“We can’t rely on miracles. We need action to eliminate the threat. Only one action will accomplish this, and that’s to topple the Hamas regime in Gaza.” These fighting words were uttered by Benjamin Netanyahu—in 2009, when he was running to become Israel’s next prime minister. “I want to say here and now: We won’t stop … We’ll complete the task. We’ll topple the regime of Hamas terror.” A few months after making this promise, Netanyahu took office. He did not, in fact, topple Hamas.

Fifteen years later, Netanyahu is about to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress. He’ll be the first foreign leader to have done so four times, more even than Winston Churchill. And nothing he says will matter.

That’s not just because the speech is happening in the shadow of extraordinary electoral upheaval, days after President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid and hours before Biden will address the nation from the Oval Office. No, the Israeli premier’s speech will be forgotten for a more fundamental reason: Although Netanyahu is very good at delivering portentous pronouncements, his words tend to have few consequences beyond the immediate attention they attract.

One would think that onlookers would have figured this out by now. After all, Netanyahu last addressed Congress in 2015, to lobby against Barack Obama’s impending Iran nuclear deal. It was a masterful piece of political performance art. It also did not derail the nuclear deal. The prime minister’s speech generated weeks of political strife and breathless media coverage in the United States, but the deal went into effect in January 2016, after the Republican-controlled Congress failed to muster the necessary votes to obstruct it. Practically speaking, Netanyahu’s dramatic intervention achieved nothing, other than rallying Democrats around their president and his signature diplomatic achievement.

In reality, Netanyahu never had the clout in Congress to seriously challenge the deal—the address was about him and bolstering his standing in Israel’s upcoming election, not about changing the course of U.S. diplomacy. Countless “important” Netanyahu addresses in Israel, America, and the United Nations for more than a decade have followed this pattern: The Israeli leader uses his speeches to burnish his brand as a statesman of stature, but his words are only tenuously connected to any real-world outcomes.

Consider Netanyahu’s landmark 2009 address at Bar-Ilan University, where the conservative prime minister—under pressure from a newly elected Obama—claimed to have embraced the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, after having spent his career opposing it. “In my vision of peace in this small land of ours, two peoples live freely, side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect,” he declared. “Each will have its own flag, its own national anthem, its own government. Neither will threaten the security or survival of the other.”

Spoiler alert: Netanyahu did not advance the two-state solution in the years that followed. Running for reelection in 2015, he promised that there would be no Palestinian state on his watch. At a press conference in December 2023, Netanyahu told a reporter that he was “proud” to have thwarted the establishment of such a state “for almost 30 years,” because after the atrocities of October 7, “everybody understands what that Palestinian state could have been, now that we’ve seen the little Palestinian state in Gaza.”

Earlier this month, before the prime minister departed to address Congress, right-wing factions in Israel’s Parliament proposed and successfully passed a resolution rejecting Palestinian statehood, garnering 68 of the Knesset’s 120 votes—including Netanyahu’s. Some supporting lawmakers clarified that they opposed a Palestinian state only for the present moment, lest its creation reward Hamas for terrorism. Netanyahu’s Likud party made no such stipulation.

The prime minister’s parade of empty utterances goes on. In 2014, Netanyahu announced a deal with the United Nations to resolve the status of 34,000 African asylum seekers in Israel, calling the carefully negotiated arrangement a “landmark achievement.” Hours later, he nixed the whole thing after backlash from his base. In 2019, as part of his reelection campaign, the Israeli leader repeatedly pledged to annex part of the occupied West Bank to Israel, only to ditch the plan as a condition for signing the Abraham Accords. Today, however, Netanyahu’s hard-right government is quietly pursuing such annexation in all but name.

“The ability to spot danger in advance and prepare for it is the test of a body’s functioning,” the prime minister told a popular Israeli talk show a decade ago. “The Jewish nation has never excelled at foreseeing danger. We were surprised again and again—and the last time was the most awful one. That won’t happen under my leadership.” (It did.)

Whatever one thinks of his policies—and I’ve been a critic—Netanyahu is undeniably a singular salesman for himself. A polyglot and a peerless orator, he excels at using set-piece speeches to hijack the public’s attention and cast himself domestically and internationally as a senior statesman. But this ruse works only because bystanders—including the press—confuse rhetoric for reality and spectacle for significance.

The truth is the reverse: What matters are not the words Netanyahu speaks but the actions he ultimately takes. The rest is noise, and—like his address today—can be safely tuned out.