On Dec. 15, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his displeasure with the Palestinian leadership’s decision to ask that the UN Security Council instruct Israel to end its occupation of the territories within two years. He lashed out at the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) threat that it would apply to join the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Upon emerging from his Rome meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry, at which he demanded that the United States exercise its veto power over such a Security Council resolution, Netanyahu warned that Israel would not ignore such unilateral Palestinian moves. In a phone conversation with French President Francois Hollande, Netanyahu argued that going to the UN was “the opposite of a peace agreement,” adding that such a move “would cancel any future negotiations and result in deterioration.”

Netanyahu is quite right. A unilateral diplomatic move is an essential contradiction to the spirit of the Oslo Accord. Creating facts without the benefit of negotiations and mutual understanding is not in keeping with the position of the international community. Indeed, it would have been better if a decision regarding an end to the occupation were adopted as a bilateral move and even a multilateral one, with the inclusion of the Arab League. But if going to UN institutions to bring about an end to the 47-year occupation is a unilateral step, how does one define the construction of settlements in the occupied territories, in violation of the law and international consensus? Are the expropriation of Palestinian lands and “Jewification” of East Jerusalem not recipes for deterioration?

Each one of the quarter-million housing units built since the 1993 Oslo Accord is a unilateral move. The annexation of East Jerusalem, in contravention of UN resolutions, is a unilateral move. The decision to hold on Dec. 9 the meeting of the Likud Party’s central committee in the settlement of Ariel, in the heart of the West Bank, is a unilateral move. Party leaders have declared time and again that Ariel is part of the State of Israel, the same state designated by Netanyahu’s proposed nationality bill as the nation state of the Jewish people. Only the Jewish people.