At the height of Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett’s horror show at the Jan. 20 meeting of the HaBayit HaYehudi Knesset faction, Bennett histrionically approached a map of Israel that had been prepared in advance and pointed to the Judea-Samaria region. Several minutes earlier he had declared that the establishment of a Palestinian state would crush the Israeli economy and by way of explaining this sweeping conclusion, he asked the attendees to imagine the following scenario.

“For one moment,” he said, “consider how the Israeli economy would look if, God forbid, a Palestinian state arises. Every day, ‘only’ one missile falls on Shenkar Street in [high-tech industrial area] Herzliya Pituach. Ask yourselves how the Israeli economy would look if ‘only’ one plane a year is downed when preparing to land in Ben-Gurion Airport. It would shatter the Israeli economy.”

That same morning, a Yedioth Ahronoth headline announced that a delegation of 100 Israeli business leaders, on their way to the annual World Economic Forum in Davos were preparing to transmit a crystal-clear message to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The report said that they will warn Netanyahu, one of the key speakers at the convention, of the widening of the boycotts against Israel as the result of the continued conflict, and of the damage to Israel’s local economic stability and growth. The delegates include Strauss Group chair Ofra Strauss, Google Israel CEO Meir Brand, Amdocs co-founder Morris Kahn and high-tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist Yossi Vardi, who has earned the nickname “guru of the Israeli Internet.”

Bennett tried to refute the appeal that emerged from the very nerve center of the Israeli economy. He publicized his own theory, according to which the very existence of the diplomatic process with the Palestinians is destructive to the Israeli economy. To everyone’s consternation, the minister’s theory was only a clumsy, eclectic accumulation of arguments, all wrapped up in intimidating words and presented on the background of visual tools such as a map and a graph. Thus Bennett argued that during the years in which attempts were made at rapprochement with the Palestinians, terror thrived and the Israeli economy suffered.