Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supporters, admirers and enthusiasts on the right understand that he is in a frenzy to impress them. At a time when his political and legal future is uncertain, he is doing everything to give them the impression that he is the king of the world, hopping from the White House to the Kremlin like one of the family.   

It started last week at the Jan. 23 “Holocaust festival” in Jerusalem — the fifth Holocaust Forum — continued with the presentation of the “deal of the century” at the White House, accompanied by a hasty Netanyahu promise to immediately annex West Bank territories, and ended with an especially embarrassing visit of the Israeli prime minister to Moscow. The official excuse was to advise Russian President Vladimir Putin about the US peace plan, but all Netanyahu wished to do was bring the young Israeli Naama Issachar home, on his plane, upon her release from a Russian prison. Issachar was convicted on a light drug charge and sentenced disproportionately to 7½ years in prison. But between the injustice of her case and her becoming an Israeli hero — whom the prime minister himself frees from prison and brings home as a hero, as if she was sent to defend her people and her country — the distance is huge.

In the midst of all this, Netanyahu made one big mistake. The ceremonious press conference at the White House had not yet ended and he already ran to announce to the people of Israel that on that very Sunday, Feb. 2, he intended to bring the vote to annex the territories to the government. Apparently, the dream of the right in Israel was about to come true about a month before the March 2 election — but the haste was the devil. The hurried announcement turned out to be a fatal error.

Under normal circumstances, Netanyahu would surely have enjoyed every second after the presentation of the deal of the century, let the days go by and offered every paragraph and letter in the plan as his personal achievement. Then, after some consideration and preparation by the security establishment and the Foreign Ministry in order to “soften” those who needed to be before such a critical announcement (the king of Jordan, the president of Egypt), he would have brought the annexation for a vote in the government. But Netanyahu has no time. The clock is ticking to the most crucial election of his life, and the polls are far from guaranteeing him victory. For him, this quick annexation is the biggest rabbit he could have pulled from his hat right now. And thus, mere moments after the presentation of the plan he gathered the Israeli journalists who accompanied him to Washington and declared “annexation now.”