There are moments in international life when the theater is so exquisitely staged that the audience forgets there is, behind the velvet drapery, a world less dramatic and more disagreeable.
Such a moment arrived when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu advanced to the rostrum of the United Nations and, on cue, a tide of diplomats rose and spilled decorously into the aisles. A walkout with the timing of a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus and the moral poise of a Renaissance pageant. Cameras obligingly panned to a room suddenly sparsified, like a table stripped to the silver in one brisk whisk.
As optics go, it was a masterpiece: a photograph of absence, the geometry of disapproval, a collective emoji rendered in flesh. Delegations from across the Arab and Muslim worlds, a sprinkling of Africans, and some Europeans – newly warmed to recognizing Palestinian statehood – rose and left.
The hall, drained of its diplomatic ballast, resembled a theater half an hour after the curtain: lights still up, actors still bowing, seats defiantly empty.
A gruesome instrument
And yet, what did this carefully choreographed vacuum do? Emptiness is a fine symbol; it is a gruesome instrument. The levers that bear upon Gaza, hostages, rockets, militias, borders, and the miserable mechanics of moving medicine are not operated by the hydraulics of a mass adjournment.
The United States remained in its seat, as did several of Israel’s pugnacious friends; the machinery of aid, armaments, vetoes, sanctions, and back channels went on whirring with the familiar cynical hum of great-power management.
The walkout, therefore, demands acknowledgment and correct placement. It was not a plan; it was punctuation. It did not change the sentence; it changed the emphasis. And emphasis, in our age of clip and caption, is not nothing.
The image of an Israeli leader addressing upholstered vacancy will be tartly useful to those whose quarrel is not with policy but with being, who cherish the belief that the Jewish state is uniquely wicked, uniquely sanctionable, and uniquely undeserving of ordinary permissions freely extended to states neither democratic nor squeamish about civilian life.
Its messages
Let us, then, attempt a seriousness higher than the meme. The walkout disclosed three things. First, a cohort of governments now feels liberally licensed to signal disaffection with Israel and to enjoy the signaling. It costs less than a sanction and flatters the conscience more than a policy brief: international virtue aerobics, excellent for the moral glutes, unlikely to move a mountain.
Second, it granted European chancelleries a choral moment. “We are not merely issuing communiqués,” they cry, “we are leaving.” The tableau implies that “process” without “horizon” is now passé. Perhaps. But process, beige though it is, is the only fabric from which negotiated horizons are cut. The danger is that this gesture makes beige feel contemptible at precisely the hour when beige is needed most.
Third – and tread softly here – the walkout will have landed in Israel with a weary, wounding recognition: the UN, long suspected of keeping a special ledger for Jewish misdeeds, has found a new theatrical pin for the cushion.
This stiffens precisely the instincts abroad most deplored: truculence, defensiveness, the circling of rhetorical wagons, and the fatal belief that the world is a lecture hall where Israel is forever summoned for punishment. If the aim is to coax a beleaguered democracy into tighter discipline and more exacting restraint, there are better methods than gratifying its deepest suspicion of international hypocrisy.
None of this absolves Mr. Netanyahu’s government of speaking carefully and acting more carefully still. The phrase “finish the job,” which to many Israelis – traumatized by massacre and siege – signifies the human desire not to be murdered again, sounds to much of the world like a promise of indefinite pulverization.
Words are not the war, but they are the weather, and certain weathers kindle conflagration. If one wishes to keep friendly capitals in one’s corner, one swaps the bellow for the ledger: delimit objectives, bound operations, show one’s working. This commander, this capability, this corridor, this deadline. Dull, yes, but precisely how allies are retained.
Genuine statecraft
What, then, would genuine statecraft have looked like after the grand perambulation to the exits? For the recognizers of Palestine, pair romance with requirements. Recognition without rectification is sentimentality with a flagpole.
Attach curriculum reform, the proscription of terror militias from any governing role, audited aid with snap-back penalties for diversion, and a transitional administration for Gaza insulated from theocracy’s fingers. If one cannot bear to demand these, the walkout was a selfie with history, not a policy toward it.
For Washington and the dwindling few who still practice leverage, the task is twofold: first, a package coupling hostage release to a time-bound operational wind-down and a credible plan for Gaza’s civilian governance; second, a northern de-escalation Israelis can trust because it is enforced by something sterner than adjectives. The little trinity – demobilize, de-incite, deliver – must be more than a panel title; it must be a schedule with teeth.
For Arab partners, resist the temptation to let the walkout be the sum of your contribution. If the goal is to shelter Palestinian lives from unending cycles, place on the table not applause but administration: money for clinics, salaries for verified civil servants, security training under supervision, and a public renunciation of the cults whose chief sacrament is martyrdom-by-child.
As for Israel, the emptiness in the hall should be read as a clock. Time, once generous, is now parsimonious. The longer operations proceed without a plainly articulated, internationally legible horizon – this structure dismantled, this authority established, these protections guaranteed – the easier ritual congeals into regime: boycotts, bans, and the slow diplomatic quarantining that corrodes even stout alliances.
One may despise the injustice; one may declaim – loudly – against double standards that reek like an abattoir in August; it will not alter the arithmetic.
A word on those double standards, that cudgel of the morally indignant. Many of the loudest scolds keep poets in prison and tyrants in business. But hypocrisy elsewhere does not purchase virtue for oneself. It is a comfort blanket, not a suit of armor. States reliant on alliances must be better than their critics, more exact than their enemies, and more lawful than their rage would wish.
The writer is executive director of We Believe In Israel.