Roughly 10 days have passed since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers held a festive Cabinet meeting in the Golan Heights on April 17, declaring that Israel would never give up the area and would remain there for eternity.

Words galore in many languages have been written since that dramatic move, which marked the launch of an orchestrated campaign by Netanyahu in a bid to convince top world leaders of the new reality: that there is no alternative but to cement Israel’s control of the Golan Heights.

Netanyahu contends that while Syria is being torn asunder by various jihadi factions and chaos reigns supreme, demanding that Israel return the Golan to the Damascus regime is unreal. The prime minister made several phone calls to several world leaders, including US Secretary of State John Kerry. On April 21, Netanyahu even traveled to Moscow to present his position to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The Golan is Israel’s ‘red line,’” he asserted in all those talks, noting that those demanding Israel return it to Syria are ignoring reality.

But it turns out that the only person who was ignoring reality was none other than the Israeli premier himself. Within 48 hours, almost all of those world leaders declared the Golan Heights to be occupied territory. The United States, Germany, Russia, the European Union and others all stated that they did not recognize Israel’s control of the Golan Heights and the only recognized border was the Green Line. The international community has rejected Israel’s attempt to take advantage of the current situation in order to annex territories it seized during the 1967 Six-Day War.