“We make peace with enemies,” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin reassured a concerned citizen shortly after the September 13, 1993 conclusion of the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (DOP, or Oslo I). “I would like to remind you that the [March 1979] peace treaty with Egypt had many opponents, and this peace has held for 15 years now.”[1] True enough. But peace can only be made with enemies who have been either comprehensively routed (e.g., post-World War II Germany and Japan) or disillusioned with the use of violence—not with those who remain wedded to conflict and war. And while Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was a “reformed enemy” eager to extricate his country from its futile conflict with Israel, Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership viewed the Oslo process not as a springboard to peace but as a “Trojan Horse” (in the words of prominent PLO official Faisal Husseini) designed to promote the organization’s strategic goal of “Palestine from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea”—that is, a Palestine in place of Israel.
Arafat admitted as much five days before signing the accords when he told an Israeli journalist, “In the future, Israel and Palestine will be one united state in which Israelis and Palestinians will live together”[3]—that is, Israel would cease to exist. And even as he shook Rabin’s hand on the White House lawn, the PLO chairman was assuring the Palestinians in a pre-recorded, Arabic-language message that the agreement was merely an implementation of the organization’s “phased strategy” of June 1974. This stipulated that the Palestinians would seize whatever territory Israel surrendered to them, then use it as a springboard for further territorial gains until achieving the “complete liberation of Palestine.”
Almost every Palestinian around wants a one-state solution. That’s bad because? A one-state solution is better than a two-state solution in every way possible, except in securing Israel’s Jewish majority state where they can practice apartheid.
It’s bad because if your goal is peace, it’s a non-starter. No moral judgement about either side, that’s just how it is. Maybe if we get peace through a two-state solution, 100 years from now there might be a chance for unification, but right now the wounds are too deep.
I mean Palestinians (including Hamas, believe it or not) are currently working towards (or would like to, but the other side is a genocidal state that has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo) a two-state solution, but the fact that one state encompassing all of Palestine is no secret. The article you linked uses that as a proof that the Oslo process was doomed from the start. That’s unadulterated bullshit. The Oslo peace process was the closest the conflict ever came to ending, until a Zionist terrorist assassinated Rabin. There’s just no way that can be blamed on the Palestinian side.
I agree, but the simple fact is Arafat and other Palestinian leaders were telling the people they were negotiating with one thing, and their own people another thing. The simple fact is neither side has ever wanted anything but “from the river to the sea”. The Oslo process wasn’t necessarily doomed, and it was the closest to peace we’ve been, but it would have been (if it had succeeded) far from the end of the peace process.
Palestinian leaders never accepted the 1967 borders until 1988. And even then it wasn’t genuine:
https://www.meforum.org/6264/why-the-oslo-process-doomed-peace
Almost every Palestinian around wants a one-state solution. That’s bad because? A one-state solution is better than a two-state solution in every way possible, except in securing Israel’s Jewish majority state where they can practice apartheid.
It’s bad because if your goal is peace, it’s a non-starter. No moral judgement about either side, that’s just how it is. Maybe if we get peace through a two-state solution, 100 years from now there might be a chance for unification, but right now the wounds are too deep.
I mean Palestinians (including Hamas, believe it or not) are currently working towards (or would like to, but the other side is a genocidal state that has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo) a two-state solution, but the fact that one state encompassing all of Palestine is no secret. The article you linked uses that as a proof that the Oslo process was doomed from the start. That’s unadulterated bullshit. The Oslo peace process was the closest the conflict ever came to ending, until a Zionist terrorist assassinated Rabin. There’s just no way that can be blamed on the Palestinian side.
I agree, but the simple fact is Arafat and other Palestinian leaders were telling the people they were negotiating with one thing, and their own people another thing. The simple fact is neither side has ever wanted anything but “from the river to the sea”. The Oslo process wasn’t necessarily doomed, and it was the closest to peace we’ve been, but it would have been (if it had succeeded) far from the end of the peace process.