Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ylabidi 272 days ago
The context from the Palestinian side is quite different and comparing the two is flawed for many reasons:

There was never a consensus on the Oslo accords from both sides. While the Israeli Labor pushed for the process, the Likud and the rest of right wingers worked thoroughly to undermine it. And on the Palestinian side, the OLP, essentially Fatah, went on to accept terms every other Palestinian faction refused to adhere to (demilitarized state, practically land-locked on a mozaic of patches that amounts to a fraction of the country's total area and surrounded everywhere with ever-increasing Israeli settlement projects.

That effectively weakened Fatah's position which essentially morphed into a caretaker on behalf of the Israelis for the day-to-day. And the resistance weight shifted from secular factions to the Hamas.

1 comments

There was consensus in the Israeli public which fell apart gradually during Hamas suicide bombing campaign in the 1990s, while many Israelis naively believed in peace and refused to come to terms with Arafat actually leading the Second Intifada a few years into the Intifada.

Regarding a landlocked mosaic, that was the reality of the interim agreement but was far from the situation offered to the Palestinians in multiple subsequent peace plans, which were all rejected or effectively rejected through introducing terms that were untenable.

For example this map, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g0dv7rxxvo.

The issue was a combination of lack of popular support in the Palestine side, refusal to explain the terms of reality to their population and preferring to lean on the ethos of "resistance" which is an easier sale and cowardice in their leadership.

This of course does not talk about the Israeli leadership issues which are also numerous, but the issues I mentioned above go back to the forties and before, and Israeli leadership did achieve statehood, while the Palestinian one had always tried the all-or-nothing approach and were left with nothing.

Such ridiculous Hasbara. There was never an Israeli public consensus. That Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist tells you as much. Moreover, the Hebron mosque massacre preceded Hamas's suicide bombings. Jewish terrorism is as much to blame for derailing the peace process as Palestinian irredentism is. Then you have Benjamin Netanyahu, elected prime minister of Israel in 1997 who in 2001 boasted: "I de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords"

All while Israel was rapidly expanding its settlements on the West Bank. States generally don't build settlements on territory they intend to relinquish.