"I believe that we are doing the right things. It would be worthwhile to pay attention not only to what we are saying, but to what we are doing,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on a July 17 visit to the IDF Gaza Division. So what are Israel's leaders doing to ensure the welfare of the Israelis living along the Gaza border and to protect their fields against the flaming kites destroying their crops? The answer lies in the newspapers’ archives. They are doing exactly what they did the previous time warning sirens blared and sent the children in the border town of Sderot running to shelters. They will probably do the same again next time.

The scene never changes: threats, airstrikes, closing of border crossings to Gaza, limiting Gaza’s fishing, imposing a fuel embargo, more threats. If Education Minister Naftali Bennett surges in the polls after riding the wave of suffering of Gaza’s 2 million residents and the hysterical media coverage, Netanyahu will be forced to order a ground operation in Gaza. In a few months, perhaps a year or two, rockets will once again whistle over Sderot accompanied by blaring sirens, the prime minister’s office will invite reporters to accompany him on a tour of the battered town and to hear him suggest yet again that Israelis pay attention “to what we’re doing.” Until the next time.

On July 15, Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz demanded that the defense Cabinet be presented with a proposal for "clear" Gaza policy. The message of Katz’ criticism as well as of sharp attacks by the leadership of the opposition parties is that Netanyahu’s Gaza policy suffers from strategic shallowness. Haaretz' military analyst Amos Harel borrowed the name of Barbara Tuchman’s tour de force about the folly of government decisions throughout history to characterize the situation: March of Folly. There is certainly room to criticize the way Netanyahu is managing the conflict with the Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank. The problem, however, does not lie in lack of policy, but rather in Netanyahu’s policy that is based on an inherently dangerous worldview.

Signs of this policy are strewn along the path of Netanyahu’s political career. They shout out from the pages of his book “A Place among the Nations,” published 25 years ago, all the way to his conversation this week with local leaders in Gaza border communities. “The Jews are no longer helpless,” the young Netanyahu wrote. They are able “to again seize their destiny, to again control their fate. And if that ability is still in the making, if the Jewish people needs time to shed its apolitical habits of thought and behavior acquired in years of exile, this process will have to be substantially accelerated,” explained the son of historian Ben-Zion Netanyahu, an acolyte of the Revisionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky.