Please watch this interview and listen carefully with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might:
And then do this thought experiment.
Just imagine if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a press conference tomorrow and said something like this.
Watching the eruption of the yearning for democracy in the streets of Egypt that crosses all walks of life - age, class, gender, education, political orientation, and religion - we Israelis are both awed and frightened. We, as a democracy, are awed at the willingness of the Egyptian people to sacrifice for their freedom and for a democracy reflective of one of the greatest civilizations in history and we are frightened, whether justified or not, that what will emerge in the months to come will be an Egyptian government which will undermine the peace that Israel and Egypt have had for more than three decades which has been central to our security.
We do know that this peace has been called a cold peace and that it has in part been bought for at the cost of a dictatorship that has brutally oppressed Egyptians for these past thirty years. We have no animosity towards the Egyptian people rather watching the Egyptian people supporting each other and demonstrating passionately and peacefully in Tahir Square we feel humbled, respectful, and hopeful that the angels of Egypt will overcome the demons. While we will always have deep appreciation and respect for the late courageous President Anwar Sadat who was the first Arab leader to forge peace with Israel and for President Hosni Mubarak who maintained that peace after the assassination of President Sadat we unequivocally support the Egyptian people's desire for freedom and democracy and we choose to be hopeful.
We realize there is a powerful movement for change in the Arab world and this movement includes our neighbors the Palestinian community in the West Bank with whom we are committed to living in peace. We commend both President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salyam Fayyad for the courageous and difficult work they have done during the past few years to build civic institutions on the West Bank and to insure a level of security that has given our Intelligence and Defense leadership, as well as the Israeli people, a level of confidence that enables, no demands, that we us take a risk for peace. Because of this new reality and because of all that is happening in Egypt, the most important country in the Arab world with whom we have peace, we commit to a total freeze of settlements in the territory that we all know will not be part of Israel in any final peace agreement.
It is time for Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate the peace that we were so close to agreeing upon first in Taba in January 2001, then again in the Yossi Beillin - Yasser Abed-Rabbo Geneva Accords in Dec. 2003, and then again in the Olmert-Abbas negotiations reflected in the recent wiki leaks. It is time to for us - Israelis and Palestinians - to be on the right side of history and to make peace for the good of our children and grandchildren.