According to Hebrew-language press reports, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu addressed the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday, and said a lot of things that were not surprising but caused news nonetheless. Netanyahu’s position on the ultimate resolution for Gaza is by this point well-known; he does not want Israel to occupy Gaza permanently, he wants Israel to retain security control over the territory, and—depending on which week it is—he wants no Palestinian Authority role in Gaza or is willing to accept a PA-role under a set of specific and limited circumstances. The various components of Netanyahu’s position make sense to many Israelis, who are more consumed with security than ever, who do not want to see the IDF get bogged down in Gaza until the end of time, and who are not trusting of any Palestinian institution, or even Palestinians, in what for them is still the harsh morning light of October 8. The fact that Netanyahu is arguing with President Joe Biden over the long-term issue of the PA’s eventual return to Gaza presents a problem, but one that is not yet ripe for resolution given that any long-term arrangements are still in the distant future. The real danger is not over Gaza’s eventual future, but about what happens the day after the fighting is over during a transitional phase, and it is here where Netanyahu is engaged in fantastical nonsense about what the realistic outcomes are.

Netanyahu did not lay out only his well-worn positions before the Knesset committee about what he does not want. He also talked about what he does want, which is Gaza’s rehabilitation being led by regional states. And this is where Netanyahu’s vision starts to twist back onto itself in knots, since Israel’s neighbors in both its near and far abroad want no part of the mess in Gaza if Netanyahu is not going to be responsive to their concerns. Netanyahu wants Israel to conduct its military operation and conclude it on its own timetable, then pull back to an established buffer zone in Gaza and treat it as a no-man’s land, launch daily continuous raids into Palestinian population centers in Gaza as Israel does now in the West Bank, and also prevent any role for the PA in establishing a functioning administration in Gaza. And after all this, Netanyahu’s comments indicate that he believes that the countries who have been fuming on the sidelines—some silently, some less silently—will waltz into Gaza and provide services, rebuild it, and set up a government. This comes from an Israeli leader who has for years rightly pointed out that Arab states have mostly fallen short in helping the Palestinians beyond condemning Israel, and now seems to expect that they will be jumping at the opportunity to enter a situation that most of them have assiduously avoided in far less turbulent times.

The transitional phase in Gaza will be the most dangerous and critical given the high likelihood of a vacuum where everything goes even more off the rails. As Shira Efron and I laid out in the new report we released this week, avoiding this will involve a complex set of security, humanitarian, and administrative arrangements that require buy-in from the U.S., Israel, regional actors, Palestinians in Gaza, and yes, the PA. If Israel wants to prevent an open-ended occupation of Gaza from being the likeliest post-war scenario, Netanyahu will have to face the fact that he cannot have everything he wants while facing no tradeoffs. The states that Netanyahu thinks he can just offload the burden onto have less than zero interest in helping Israel out without a change in Israeli policies and rhetoric. Netanyahu seems to have convinced himself that the Abraham Accords have so transformed Israel’s relationships that everyone else will swoop in as soon as the fighting is over. In fact, the only state potentially interested at the moment in sending troops to Gaza is Turkey, and Israel will reject that offer before it is even out of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s mouth. The reality is that the regional states are angry at Netanyahu, have absorbed the genuine anger from their populations arising from the casualty count in Gaza, and are not going to throw money at Gaza without a larger, workable vision. That has to be something other than a half-formed plan to avoid a full Israeli military occupation without anything else behind it.

As is his predilection, Netanyahu also couldn’t help but take an unnecessary dig at the U.S. in an effort to puff himself up in the midst of an unprecedented campaign of administration support for Israel and the IDF. In response to Likud MK Tally Gotliv’s question about why Netanyahu is taking U.S. requests on humanitarian assistance into account and asserting that doing so makes him defeatist, Netanyahu claimed that Gotliv has things wrong and that it is actually he who is pressuring the U.S. and not the other way around. He naturally brought up his allegedly legendary pressure campaign on President Barack Obama—one that quite obviously backfired in a number of ways—and put his American media blitz into that context, saying that his father had taught him that you must constantly apply pressure and his public relations campaign in the U.S. is designed to do precisely that on the Biden administration.

If the bit about the U.S. were not so heavily divorced from reality, maybe it would be funny. In the world that actually exists, Israel’s absolute dependence on the U.S. and the good graces of Biden and his administration has never been clearer. Whether it be the 200 military airlifts that the U.S. has sent to Israel or the recent Security Council veto of a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, to display anything but appreciation for the U.S. and its efforts in this moment is obscene. Netanyahu’s answer to Gotliv should have been that she is delusional and wildly out of line, and that the most important thing that Israel can do going forward is heed U.S. requests on things like humanitarian assistance and plans for post-war Gaza. Instead, he demagogued, and assumes that it won’t matter, or that he will fix it later, and pretends that everything that he needs over the next few months, if not years, won’t depend in some measure on U.S. willingness to help and U.S. alignment. This is particularly so in the transitional phase in Gaza, where only the U.S. has the ability to wrangle regional actors, convince them to participate in helpful ways, and look out for Israeli security in the process. Anything and everything will be a heavy lift, but for Netanyahu’s dream of the UAE and Saudi Arabia helping him out of his jam to have any chance of being realized, talking about the U.S. as if Israel can afford to discard its wishes is monumentally reckless and worthy of nothing beyond a fever dream.

To Netanyahu’s credit, he did bat down the mad revanchist fantasies of Otzma Yehudit MK Limor Sonn Har Melech and the most fanatical right-wing ideologues among his chosen coalition partners in stating that reoccupying and resettling Gaza is not worth the cost that Israel would have to bear. That is at least reassurance that Netanyahu has not yielded completely to the craziest dreams of the worst elements in his government. But he is advancing his own set of magical scenarios with no path to get there. If he does not start making difficult decisions soon, he will have left his successor—whether he acknowledges that he will soon have one or not—with a mess that nobody else is coming to mop up.