Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was determined that the world would know Iran had violated its 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers, but he was stingy with the truth. In his recent news conference, Netanyahu addressed Iranian positions from before the agreement was signed and did not supply proof that Tehran had not fulfilled the terms of the deal. Nonetheless, if US President Donald Trump is to be believed, the warmed-over leftovers Netanyahu fed him removed any doubts he might have had about the need to pull out of the deal. And most Israelis are cheering their leader.

Netanyahu is determined for the people of the world to know that Jerusalem is Israel’s eternal capital, and most importantly for the Israeli people to know which Israeli leader made the world’s biggest superpower move its embassy there in recognition of that fact. That effort, too, has gone well for him. On May 14, Netanyahu will celebrate the inauguration of the US Embassy in Jerusalem. Most Israelis will join him. According to the Peace Index compiled by the Evens Program in Mediation and Conflict Resolution at Tel Aviv University and the Israel Democracy Institute, 68% of Jewish Israelis regard the move of the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as a positive step for Israel’s interests, although the Palestinians view it as a severe blow.

Netanyahu is determined to eliminate the term “occupied territories.” Here, too, he can take credit for a major victory: Last month's annual State Department report on human rights around the world replaced “occupied territories” with “Israel, the Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza.” If there’s no occupation, Israel can do whatever it wants in these territories, including theft of Palestinian lands, abuse of its residents and even deportation. If there is no occupation, Palestinians can be uprooted to make way for Jewish settlements, the 1993 Oslo Accord can be erased from the history books and such trivialities as international law can be ignored. After all, when Trump announced the US withdrawal from the Iranian agreement, he was showing the world that international pacts signed by his country are at best a recommendation.

The Peace Index indicates that Netanyahu need not concern himself with public pressure on the Palestinian issue, as 67% of the Jewish Israelis surveyed do not feel that Israel should relax its curbs on the Gaza Strip given the dire economic situation of its 2 million Palestinian residents. A sweeping majority of those polled, 83%, support Israel’s policy of using live fire to disperse Palestinian protesters along the Gaza border fence. Most Israelis don’t want to know what their government is doing in their name in the Jordan Valley, which makes up a third of the West Bank territory. They slept peacefully in the pre-dawn hours of May 8 while Israeli forces raided the village of Khirbet Humsa in the northern Jordan Valley and evicted five Palestinian families from their tent homes. This was the third such eviction within two weeks in order to carry out military drills in the area, and among the 29 residents were 19 minors, including a baby and a child with Down syndrome.