What passes for the Palestinian majority position has been de facto recognition of Israel’s right to exist since 1994, and explicit recognition of Israel since 2011.
The Palestinians adopted that position in 1994 in exchange for limited self-rule and the belief in a process whereby Israel would ultimately recognize a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and Palestinian rights in Jerusalem.
What happened instead was that over the next ten years Israel doubled the number of settlers in the West Bank, and today they occupy 42% of all the land in the West Bank and have 4 times the number of settlers than they did at the time of the Oslo deal.
Somewhere along the way it became obvious to the Palestinians that Israel had no intention of ever giving up the West Bank or tolerating an independent sovereign Palestinian state there. Who can blame them for believing that?
Yes, that’s basically what Netanyahu’s tweet says. What do you think that deal looks like? Describe it, please, and point to any evidence the Israelis will honor it.
The Palestinians elected Hamas, who still control Gaza. Hamas threatened Israel with more rocket attacks a day ago.
And theirin lies the problem. The Palestinians have no coherent governing body who is capable of creating security in their region, and thus Israel cannot trust them.
And part of the tragic reality is that you have external groups like Hezbollah who have a vested interest in continued conflict. They don’t care, at all, about the Palestinian people.
Thing is, they’re not remotely strong enough to ever do that. It’s a Catch 22. They need to be strong enough to deal with terrorists, but they can’t ever get that strong because terrorists undermine them constantly (I’m talking historically and big picture, let’s overlook that they elected fucking Hamas for the moment and assume a world of magical utopia where the Palestinians elect a literal saint and everyone follows him 100% for the moment).
It’s akin in some ways to protests in the US. If you protest something, literally anything, all it takes is one moron throwing a brick through a window for whoever you’re protesting to point at it and say, “See they’re just violent thugs anyway.”
Now the Palestinians have tons of issues, but all it takes to completely negate anything they might accomplish is one dude with a bomb or rocket. And there is an entire organization of those guys funded by an actual State out there. So they can never get anywhere because the second they look like they might, that organization will derail everything in less than an hour.
It’s a fucked up situation that really will never be solved imo. Israel can’t let Hezbollah launch rockets and blow up cafes without reprisal and Palestine can’t stop Hamas from doing it if they wanted to.
Well, Hamas didn’t exist before Israel, but no, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that Israel followed up Oslo by continuing to take Palestinian land in the West Bank and Gaza and building more settlements there. The Palestinians got frustrated, and the election of a Hamas government was the result.
Hamas are bad, no question. But there were 12 years of opportunity between Oslo and the election of Hamas, and Israel used it to pursue the goal of Greater Israel, at the expense of any possible Palestinian state. What did they think was going to happen?
That was eleven years after Oslo. At the time they removed those settlements, 4000 settlers in Gaza controlled 70% of the territory in Gaza, a place with a Palestinian population of some 1.8 million and only 140 square miles. Is it any wonder they were irritated enough to vote in Hamas?
Look, it’s pretty clear that because of the tragedy and well learned lessons of WWII, the Jewish people need to secure Lebensraum outside of their borders (which country was pretty much forcibly taken from an indigenous people in the first place) in order to feel secure and to secure their future as a people.
I can’t imagine why this Weltanschauung is a problem for anyone. I mean, the Palestinians have specific, concentrated, walled in areas they’re allowed to live on. For now.
