(Amitai Etzioni-Haaretz opinion)- If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had walked out of the White House on May 18 and announced that he accepted President Barack Obama's demands to freeze all settlement construction, he would merely have forced the president to demand some other significant concession from Israel. Obama was urged not only by Arab leaders, but also by many so-called progressive Jewish ones to show "even-handedness," to stop the U.S. tilt in favor of Israel in order to become a credible broker for peace in the Middle East.
Arguably even more important if true give-and-take is to occur, Netanyahu succeeded overnight in taking back a very major concession that previous Israeli governments had made and turning it into a significant bargaining chip. For years - surely ever since Ehud Barak made his famous magnanimous peace offer - Israeli support for a two-state solution was more or less taken for granted. In a surprisingly short period, Netanyahu has put Israel into a position in which if it agrees to two states, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan will be able to say that they and Obama have wrested a major concession from Israel's "right-wing government."
BR Note: Unlike Kadima, that offered 97% of Judea & Samaria and were rejected, offered a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem and were rejected, Netanyahu intends to offer a concession from one side by agreeing to a Palestinian state in the end of the process but with conditions and without preemptive concessions that will turn in the peace negotiations to a give and get and not a give and give offer, and to secure the borders and the Israeli nation from Terror and rocket attacks, Had Netanyahu agreed to the two State solution to Livni, or to Obama in the early stages, He would have had to offer more concessions ,and the Obama legacy of reaching out a hand to the Muslim world with pressure on Israel would have gone far into dismantling legal Settlements and returning to the 67 border as a un-negotiable condition.
