Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened an extraordinary press conference in his chambers with Interior Minister Aryeh Deri on April 2. He presented to the Israeli public a dramatic agreement signed between Israel and the UN that is supposed to regulate migrant workers, tens of thousands of whom have entered Israel in the last decade from the African continent.

Netanyahu departed from his custom by allowing questions without setting a time limit, determined to convince the Israeli public of the agreement’s necessity and advantages. Israel had signed on the dotted line after all the other solutions failed. Rwanda reneged on its agreement with Israel (Rwanda officials claimed no agreement was signed), in which the country had agreed to absorb the illegal immigrants, and the Israeli leadership was left without any alternative. Netanyahu knew that he was right. It was a display of leadership and charisma by a prime minister who made an executive decision and resolved a long and tiresome saga with an agreement that was the lesser of two evils, even according to his political base.

But after not much more than four hours later, the prime minister announced on Facebook that he was “suspending” the agreement and would re-examine its advisability. He must have worked on it all night, because by the next day he announced that the agreement was null and void. The negotiating marathons by National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat and Chief of Staff Yoav Horowitz were dumped into the dustbin of history as Netanyahu got scared and ran. The UN’s refugee agency could hardly believe it was all happening.

Netanyahu was scared off by minor political difficulties: criticism from right-wing circles. There was no danger to Israel’s strategic interests, no new data that had came to light, yet Netanyahu choked. The social networks raged, orange emojis of anger peppering his Facebook page as Netanyahu regretfully shed the last vestiges of leadership and responsibility, and trail-blazing. Two tweets — one by his right-wing nemesis Education Minister Naftali Bennett and the other by his own party’s Gideon Saar — pummeled the prime minister into putty. It turned out that Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon and other Likud ministers were also less than enthusiastic about the agreement, but Netanyahu was elected to blaze new paths, to make important decisions and then mobilize political support for them.