It was Benjamin Netanyahu’s ninth speech Sept. 29 as Israeli prime minister before the General Assembly of the United Nations. The veteran Israeli leader never misses this chance. Every year he insists anew on being the one standing at the podium, while Israel is put on public trial before the international community, so that he can be our ultimate Alan Dershowitz. Netanyahu knows why he is doing this too. Without these speeches, and without his appearances in Washington before both houses of Congress and the participants at the AIPAC conference, he would not be prime minister. It’s what Netanyahu knows how to do best: deliver speeches. 

He writes his own speeches himself, diligently, punctiliously. He writes and erases. He corrects and edits drafts. He has what it takes. His predecessors, including Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, let their advisers write their speeches for them, and then provided feedback and made corrections when necessary. Then again, his predecessors, including Rabin, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, also did things physically, in the field. They changed the face of history. Netanyahu just gives speeches, which is why he doesn’t leave the work of writing to anybody else. That’s his job.

Israel has a leader who essentially serves as minister of public diplomacy, national psychologist, top lawyer and talented advocate. In all other ways, this leader is unfit. He caused our relationship with Washington to collapse. He dealt a serious blow to Israel’s power of deterrence. He made a significant contribution to destroying the peace process (though Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made an even more decisive contribution, when he refused to accept the Kerry Initiative). He caused the cohesiveness of Israeli society to crumble and led the country to brilliantly stoic isolation internationally. And yet, despite all of that, Israel is addicted to Netanyahu. It is addicted to his speeches, his warning, his authoritative baritone voice which pounces on every inkling of danger or any hint of a plot against Israel, and turns that into pure gold in the service of Israel’s public diplomacy. The constant fear of annihilation is in the genes of the Israeli people. It takes very little effort to convince them that their annihilation is lurching right around the corner. Netanyahu is great at doing that.

To be fair, it is important to note that in most cases, Netanyahu’s warnings have proven themselves correct. He has a knack for identifying risks. His perspective on the Islamic State was more accurate than that of President Barack Obama and the West. In his speech, Netanyahu declared that the Islamic State and Hamas are two branches extending from the same poisonous tree. When it comes to the true essence of Islamic State, the West gets to understand it only the hard way. That hard way will get even harder, before the West also understands the true essence of Hamas and the link between uranium enrichment in Natanz and the blood-curdling possibility that the Islamic State will enrich uranium too or get its bloodied hands on weapons of mass destruction.