On Dec. 8 Al-Monitor quoted a promise by Hillary Rodham Clinton, former US secretary of state and potential presidential candidate: “The US government will continue its support of Israel regardless of which party wins the elections.” Clinton didn’t have to wait long to get a taste of the kind of leadership Israel could get on March 17, 2015. In the audience when she made her remarks at the Saban Forum in Washington sat Israeli Minister of Economy and Trade Naftali Bennett. In a speech delivered from the same stage, Bennett didn’t try to hide the essence of the leadership he is offering Israel.

Bennett spoke against the two-state solution — the formula Clinton argued was an “important and essential concept” in all that relates to ending the occupation and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “One cannot be an occupier in a country that belongs to you,” said Bennett. He stood behind his plan to annex Area C, lands constituting 60% of the West Bank that have remained under Israeli control since the signing of the Oslo Accords.

Bennett revealed that he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed not to attack each other during the election campaign, which suggests that the Likud Party will not be criticizing the idea of annexation. After all, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, a member of Likud, said things no less rude about Secretary of State John Kerry, who dared to promote the two-state solution. Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, until recently a partner in the ruling party's Knesset faction, never misses an opportunity to present Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — who is clinging to the two-state solution with his remaining strength — as conducting “diplomatic terror.” Then there are the legislative initiatives of the chairwoman of the Knesset’s Committee for Internal Affairs, Miri Regev of the Likud, to annex the Jordan Valley, in addition to the settlement boom in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

On March 17, the fog will lift from the ballot boxes across Israel and all that relates to the key issue that Israeli society faces — relations with its neighbors and permanent borders. We will no longer hear the tiresome theories that appear every election campaign — only the right can make peace, and only the left can make war. In its last term, the right, with help from the centrist parties, made war and drove away peace. Netanyahu’s campaign slogan for the 1996 elections, “Making a Secure Peace,” has been cast into the garbage bin at Metzudat Ze’ev (Likud headquarters). Almost 20 years have passed, and he hasn't seen fit to fulfill his promise of a secure peace.