The Israeli Cabinet’s decision to halt negotiations with the Palestinians – or to “suspend” them, to be precise – brings back the memory of Shamir with one big difference: Shamir did not pretend to leave no stone unturned in search for an agreement with the Palestinians, he did not support the two-state idea, and he did not play make-believe. He wanted to keep all territories under Israeli sovereignty and give the Palestinians autonomy, and nothing else.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, has been running on the court with the Palestinians in the past five years: He froze construction in the settlements, released murderers from Israel’s prisons, almost released additional murderers, including Israeli Arabs – and in the end he got nothing from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. He wanted people to believe him that we would soon reach the signing ceremony on the White House lawn, although in fact he created the impression that every evening he was making sure that the ceremony would be postponed to an unknown date.

Some will say that the four years of his second term and the first year of his third term will go down in history as lost years. Years in which nothing was done. Survival for the sake of survival. Let me just mention the demand that the Palestinians must recognize Israel as the Jews’ nation state, while at the same time continuing the massive construction in the territories.

But we must not belittle Abbas’ responsibility for the current crisis. In the past few weeks, which were so critical for the future of the negotiations, he sabotaged the possibility of reaching any type of agreement with his own hands. It began with the appeal to the United Nations, which impeded the Jonathan Pollard deal, and on Wednesday with the hug he gave Hamas, which in the meantime has put the lid on extending the negotiations after April 29.

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