On words and actions - Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic:

‘“We can’t rely on miracles. We need action to eliminate the threat. Only one action will accomplish this, and that’s to topple the Hamas regime in Gaza.” These fighting words were uttered by Benjamin Netanyahu—in 2009, when he was running to become Israel’s next prime minister. “I want to say here and now: We won’t stop … We’ll complete the task. We’ll topple the regime of Hamas terror.” A few months after making this promise, Netanyahu took office. He did not, in fact, topple Hamas.
Fifteen years later, Netanyahu is about to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress. He’ll be the first foreign leader to have done so four times, more even than Winston Churchill. And nothing he says will matter.’

(…)

‘Consider Netanyahu’s landmark 2009 address at Bar-Ilan University, where the conservative prime minister—under pressure from a newly elected Obama—claimed to have embraced the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, after having spent his career opposing it. “In my vision of peace in this small land of ours, two peoples live freely, side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect,” he declared. “Each will have its own flag, its own national anthem, its own government. Neither will threaten the security or survival of the other.” Spoiler alert: Netanyahu did not advance the two-state solution in the years that followed. Running for reelection in 2015, he promised that there would be no Palestinian state on his watch. At a press conference in December 2023, Netanyahu told a reporter that he was “proud” to have thwarted the establishment of such a state “for almost 30 years,” because after the atrocities of October 7, “everybody understands what that Palestinian state could have been, now that we’ve seen the little Palestinian state in Gaza.”’

(…)

‘The truth is the reverse: What matters are not the words Netanyahu speaks but the actions he ultimately takes. The rest is noise, and—like his address today—can be safely tuned out.’

Read the article here.

Just noise, yes and no. The consequences of words are not immediately clear after all.

We die of fiction. But not all fiction is deadly.