Netanyahu Postures in Prime Time Speech at Bar Ilan University (clips)

Benjamin Netanyahu did not quote from the Talmud. Listen, we are not impressed with a man who says after 61 years, "Let us begin..." And we ask ourselves whether this was just a vanity speech by a man who is saying to his party and his people, "Look at me. I am just like Obama. I can give a big policy speech." Differences? To start with, Obama had the courage to deliver his speech in Cairo. Netanyahu went all the way over to a right wing Israeli campus to speak.

We here at our blog are not diplomats. But Bibi must know that this is obvious to all calculating human beings. You need to first run your ideas up the flagpole by letting surrogates float them to the public. Then, and only then, you can deliver your pre-discussed ideas with some notion of what the rest of the universe thinks of them.

Especially because of the track record of the Palestinian leadership, specifically, e.g., dancing in the streets after 9/11, there will never be a Palestinian state. Neither the US, nor the Israelis, nor any other sane and normal body will allow such a worldview to govern a new entity of a sovereign nation.

When some diplomat finally says this in the open, we will have turned the corner. Then we can address the giant impediment to peace. Until then, when diplomats speak about peace in the middle east, we are listening only to prevarication and posturing.

Update from the Times -

Israeli Premier Backs State for Palestinians, With Caveats

Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday endorsed the principle of a Palestinian state for the first time, but Palestinians immediately rejected his conditions...

To which we ask - what is the point of speaking and caveat-making if you know that the other side will reject what you say before you finish saying it?