Approximately 5 years ago Bibi gave his famous Bar Ilan speech where he declared that we want peace with the Arabs and that he supports a 2 state solution. Now many people were very upset at this (myself included) but he was to his credit very careful to stick in the clause that it must be a demilitarized state. This idea of a clauses or more appropriate clauses is the subject of this blog entry. In my opinion Bibi decided that he was stuck. He decided that he needed the world's support (and most importantly the USA) in the Iran issue but that he wanted to be firm on the Domestic Arab issues. So it is possible that he chose to put in difficult clauses so as to make it almost impossible for a 2nd state to be formed.
The first clause as I mentioned was the demilitarized state. Now no Arab leader is going to agree to this. Matter of fact they can't agree to this because their mission statement says that they will work to destroy the Jewish state. Now even if they do agree to this we will have more clauses as you will see.
The next clause wasn't really a clause but just refusing to have preconditions. He felt the Arabs stood to lose by negotiating and so he was calling their bluff by refusing to have preconditions. He was right actually but through American pressure the Arabs finally decided to call Bibi's bluff and come to the negotiation table.
Now here we are today and you might say well now what. If you were to go with the theme so far then you would think that Bibi would just be disingenuous in the talks. He would refuse things that he shouldn't. Not agree to anything. He may do this to some degree or it may appear this way but he is smarter than that. He knows that everyone will see through it and that he will lose the American support he was after. So he did something very smart and unexpected.
He declared that any agreement will go to a referendum. Now he knows that any agreement will have to be voted on. He knows that Israelis don't support peace with the Arabs because we don't trust them. Not only that he can be very bold. He can agree to give up more than he would want because he knows it will go to a referendum and he knows that the worse the agreement is the less chance it has of passing. He also knows that leftists will have a hard time complaining because the people are choosing. He knows he has nothing to worry about with Tzipi Livni because of the referendum. No leftist can say he was to the right because all he did was let the people decide. He might be committing political suicide on the right but he has lots of friends and he can always make the very agreement that I am making now.
In closing I would like to say that I could be wrong. I also don't like this approach because it puts us in a position where we look like we are willing to give away land. We really should just say that we are not willing. We need to say, you want peace fine. We are not shooting at you unless you shoot at us. You want our land? Well that's something else. You need to give up on that because it's ours. We won it fair and square in many wars over the years. People forget that the Arabs were threatening to throw us into the sea before 1967. I am too young to remember this but according to many veteran Israelis, in 1967 the joke was that the last one should not forget to turn off the light at Ben Gurion Airport. We were done. We had no chance. The State of Israel was about to be nothing but a part of history. We did the unthinkable. We preemptively struck them. It was a defensive strike though. We had no choice. Now they want it back. I digress. We maybe have the next best thing. Netanyahu and his clauses.
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