The terrorist with the jackhammer is the obvious threat. The man removing the rebar is the dangerous one.
Naftali Bennett, however, wants you to see him as a visionary. A big thinker. A deep strategist who sees three moves ahead while the rest of us simpler folk squint at the board. This is the Bennett who lives in Bennett’s own head: the startup founder turned statesman, the man at the whiteboard, the cool technocrat who has run the numbers and arrived, regrettably and against his own sentiment of course, at the hard, grown-up conclusion that lesser men are too emotional to face.
He does not argue. He patiently explains.
The trouble is that it seems as if Bennett does not begin with principles and build a coalition around them. He begins with the coalition he wants and works backward until he has manufactured the principles to fit it. A real leader forms a conviction and then goes looking for the votes. Bennett seems to go looking for the votes and then discovers a conviction. He studies the voters he needs, learns what they most want to hear, and reflects it back to them as statesmanship. What he calls foresight is a mirror held up to a focus group. The whiteboard is a prop. The strategy is reverse-engineered from the swing voter.
We have seen the demonstration of this modus operandi before. In 2021 he looked into a camera, signed his name to a pledge, and swore he would not hand the country to Yair Lapid. Then he handed the country to Yair Lapid. And he went further than the broken promise required: he brought Mansour Abbas and the Islamist Ra’am into an Israeli governing coalition for the first time in the country’s history, not in service of any doctrine he had ever professed, but because that was the arithmetic that delivered him personally to the Prime Minister’s chair. The sweet, forked tongue said one thing to the right and did another for Bennett. That is not a stumble. That is the method.
Now the same method has turned to the outposts in Judea and Samaria, and here the stakes stop being a matter of one man’s career and start being a matter of millions of people’s safety. Bennett tells us that “what is illegal will not stand," that Area C belongs to Israel while Areas A and B should become a “Palestinian autonomy." Strip the euphemism and read it plainly. “Autonomy" is a state in its chrysalis.
And the farms and hilltop communities he is so eager to dismantle are not, as he would have the comfortable voter believe, merely lawless shacks cluttering the landscape backed by the so-called “settler violence" the left loves to gush over. They are the hard-won physical facts on the ground that break up the territorial contiguity a Palestinian Arab state requires in order to exist. Salam Fayyad grasped this years ago better than Bennett now: build the institutions, establish the continuous territory, and statehood arrives as a fait accompli that no negotiation can reverse. The outposts are the rebar driven through that plan. Bennett wants to pull the rebar out and call it housekeeping.
And then he wants to point an army at us. Not a metaphor. Some fifty thousand armed, trained, organized Palestinian Authority security personnel, a force backed by Iran and structurally incentivized toward terror, positioned minutes from Kfar Saba, from Rosh HaAyin, from Ra’anana, from his own front door. After the Gaza envelope. After October 7. After we learned in blood what happens when an armed enemy sits against a soft border and our leadership has talked itself into believing the threat is contained, the fence is enough, the other side has too much to lose.
This is the Conceptzia in a new suit. It is the identical failure of imagination that left the south defenseless on a holiday morning, now proposed deliberately, with foreknowledge, aimed at the soft underbelly of Gush Dan. To call this strategy is an insult to the word. It is the orderly construction of the next catastrophe, scheduled in advance.
Here is the part that should frighten the people Bennett is courting: it will probably work. That forked tongue is genuinely persuasive. He will sweep the same reasonable, security-minded, center-right voters who think of themselves as the sober adults in the room, precisely because he speaks their language, wears their moderation, and flatters their self-image while carrying the seeds of their imminent peril in his pocket. They will hear competence. They will hear a grown-up making hard choices. They will not hear that they are choosing to be made uniquely vulnerable.
I will say the uncomfortable thing, because I have earned the ugly right to by paying for it with self-disclosure. I once supported him. I am not a man who is easily sold, and I was sold. I am embarrassed to write it, and I am writing it anyway, because the embarrassment is cheaper than the alternative, which is watching the cities of central Israel discover what the Gaza envelope already learned once he again sells his program to enough desperate voters.
Bennett's delusion is that he is the strategist in this story. The dangerous part is that just enough voters will believe him. They will hear moderation. They will hear pragmatism. They will hear the reassuring language of an enlightened statesman finally bringing order to the much-hyped chaos of the hills. They will be told that removing Jews from the areas assigned to Palestinian Arab control is merely good governance, that dismantling outposts is merely law enforcement, and that surrendering the strategic facts that prevent Palestinian Arab statehood is merely tidying up unfinished business.
But the hills are not clutter, and the communities are not an administrative nuisance. They are among the last barriers standing between a failed Oslo fantasy and its logical conclusion. Pull enough Jews out of enough places, create enough territorial contiguity, and the floodgates open. The "autonomy" becomes a state, the state becomes an armed enemy perched above Israel's narrow waist, and fifty thousand armed Palestinian Authority security personnel become the nucleus of the mortal threat facing Gush Dan.
At that point, there will be no whiteboard clever enough, no focus group polished enough, and no tongue - forked or otherwise - capable of explaining away the bloody catastrophe visited upon the heart of Israel, G-d Forbid. The rockets, the infiltrations, the funerals, and the shattered lives will not care what name was given to the astonishingly foolish policy that enabled them to make October 7 look like a modest rehearsal. Reality has a habit of issuing its own verdict. And unlike politicians, it never revises the record.
Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli marriage therapist, trainer of therapists, lecturer and author. He volunteers in the IDF reserves, as an MDA medic, in Zaka, and in the Israel Police Search and Rescue Team. His articles have appeared in Jewish News Syndicate, Israel National News, The Jerusalem Post, Breitbart and elsewhere.
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