The one who benefits the most from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to cancel all the holiday interviews to the media outlets is Netanyahu himself. On Sept. 8, the prime minister made an unexpected announcement canceling all the interviews that had been pre-arranged with the newspapers and the three television stations (Channels 1, 2 and 10). The reasons given by his office were his busy schedule and his need to plan for his upcoming visit to London.

Inevitably, criticism over this move quickly followed. The prevailing allegation among most of the commentators and journalists is that the prime minister is simply leery of facing the media and exposing himself to questions for which he has no good answers. He has no impressive achievements to display, they feel, but only foreign policy failures. His critics rightly contend that a prime minister is obliged — at least occasionally — to account to the public not only directly via the social media networks, but through question-and-answer sessions with journalists who can directly challenge his arguments.

Netanyahu's political opponents accused him of cowardice. Together with the journalists, they mocked his video clip of achievements publicized by the prime minister a short time after he canceled the interviews, under the heading of “Things you won’t hear in the media.” This production is 2½ minutes of swaggering and boasting of his security achievements (“I protect your security”) and economics (“We reduced taxes, we will extract the [natural] gas from the depths of the sea”), which are transmitted via short, precise messages the way Netanyahu likes. “And there’s lots more as well, but you won’t hear it in the media. Check out my Facebook page for more,” he says at the end.

This final, seemingly incidental remark perhaps conveys the most important point of all in the entire clip. It ingeniously places the prime minister in the category of victim vis-a-vis the supposedly one-sided media that acts only out of the desire to wreak harm on him and his wife. This is exactly the picture that Netanyahu likes to paint for the public.