One reads of a plan to push forward thousands of new settlements in the occupied West Bank, centered on roughly 3,400 homes in the E1 corridor between East Jerusalem and Maale Adumim. Berlin and other capitals quickly denounce it as a violation of international law, UN Security Council resolutions, and the ICJ’s call for moderation and a two-state path. The ministerial proclamation is cast as a monument to resolve by some, while others warn it would bisect the territory, destroy the geography needed for any viable Palestinian state, and imperil the fragile peace process. The European Union condemns it as a legal breach that inflames tensions; the UN cautions it would divide the land and end the two-state solution; Turkey voices its opposition; the Palestinian Authority pleads for international action and sanctions. The same day, settlers attack two villages, underscoring a cycle of violence and impunity that accompanies these gambits. Taken together, the episode reinforces the international consensus that settlements complicate any return to 1967 borders and jeopardize peace.

Really, the theatre could hardly be more brazen, and yet one must indulge the spectacle to understand the priorities of those who pretend to run great powers. The proclamation—a boast that it “buries” a Palestinian state—reads like a boyish flaunt from someone who mistakes coercion for strategy. The world’s stern faces—EU officials, UN diplomats, and the like—deliver their lectures with impeccable syntax and moralizing cadence, while the measured, patient work of diplomacy remains as hope-soft as a rumor. And what, pray, is the plan beyond the bravado? A straight line of housing across a corridor that would sever a contiguous Palestinian territory, a map-redrawing of political life that assumes the convenience of borders over the realities of people. To pretend that such a move advances peace is to mistake theater for governance, and to confuse the artless thundering of a minister with statesmanship of the highest order.

Let us dispense with the melodrama: annexation threats tossed about if a Palestinian state is recognized by September are not the language of prudent statecraft but of reckless posture. They reveal a mindset fixated on unilateral sovereignty rather than negotiated settlement, a fixation on display rather than durable policy. The more this rhetoric echoes through chancelleries, the more it convinces the world that certain actors prefer disruption to any form of compromise. And then, in the same breath, one sees the parsimonious courage to condemn violence on the ground as if it were a mere nuisance rather than the predictable consequence of policies that treat land as conquest rather than partnership. The attackers who strike villages after such announcements do not inaugurate a new era of legitimacy; they are a predictable echo of a politics that rewards bravura declarations while eroding the very foundation of coexistence.

What, then, should be the response of a world that fancies itself mature, cosmopolitan, and uninterested in grandstanding? Not moralistic lectures to the choir, but a disciplined insistence on results: a genuine, enforceable path toward a negotiated peace, a credible commitment to two states living side by side in security and dignity, and a refusal to reward or normalize steps that carve the map into irreparable thirds. The international community ought to hold firmly to the letter of international law while recognizing the human costs of continued settlement expansion. If Berlin, Brussels, and the UN genuinely seek a durable solution, they should elevate practical steps—trust-building, security arrangements, economic corridors, accountability for violence—over slogans about law and justice that vanish in the noise of a political spectacle.

I am surrounded by people who mistake the bravado of headlines for leadership, who pretend that distance from the front pages equates to moral authority. Yet the enduring truth is unglamorous: durable peace cannot be born of unilateral moves that redraw borders as if history were a dry erase board. A real statesman—or a man who understands the gravity of power—would insist on patient, enforceable progress toward a two-state framework, with credible guarantees and consequences for violations, not on proclamations designed to be cheered in press rooms and dismissed on the ground. Until such discipline returns to the discussion, all the moral gravity in the world will be spent on words, while the land—into which the lives of real people are folded—drifts further from the possibility of reconciliation.