I was still in college on September 13, 1993, when President Bill Clinton brought Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat together for an Oslo Accords handshake at the White House. As seen from Clinton’s rhetoric that day, modest initial steps were matched with outsized long-term ambitions:
“Today the leadership of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization will sign a declaration of principles on interim Palestinian self-government. It charts a course toward reconciliation between two peoples who have both known the bitterness of exile. Now both pledge to put old sorrows and antagonisms behind them and to work for a shared future shaped by the values of the Torah, the Koran, and the Bible.”
“Interim self government” didn’t sound like a whole lot, but this was the basis for creating a Palestinian government that could eventually govern much of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Getting Israel to recognize Arafat’s PLO for this purpose was not easy. Nor was it easy to get the PLO to recognize Israel as its legitimate partner.
We can look back now 30 years later and point to this or that event that derailed everything, but it’s clear that the hope at the beginning was that eventually the Palestinians would take over full governing responsibility for their people and their territory. To make that happen, they needed more than to just build up institutions, they also needed to make the Israelis comfortable with ceding control.
The Israelis also had to keep their end of the bargain. If the Palestinian Authority demonstrated its competence and trustworthiness, the Palestinians then needed to inherit their territory. And this is where Benjamin Netanyahu comes in, because when he first took power in 1996, he did not believe in the agreements that had been struck back in 1993, and he did everything he could to prevent the Palestinians from getting a state. He’s bragging about this right now, in case you’re inclined to disbelieve me.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday said he would introduce legislation to match the cabinet decision rejecting “international diktats” seeking to push Palestinian statehood — boasting of his decades of thwarting any such move.
In a video statement, Netanyahu said Israel has for months resisted international calls to halt the war in Gaza against Hamas but is now facing new pressures, in particular “an attempt to force upon us the unilateral establishment of a Palestinian state which will endanger the existence of the State of Israel.”
“We flat out reject this,” he said.
After passing unanimously in the cabinet, where he noted “different opinions for a permanent arrangement,” Netanyahu said he was certain the Knesset legislation will receive wide support, “show[ing] the world that there is wide agreement in Israel against the international efforts to force on us a Palestinian state.”
The prime minister added that “everyone knows that I am the one who for decades blocked the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger our existence.”
For Netanyahu and perhaps most Israelis, the October 7 invasion from the Gaza Strip demonstrated precisely why Israel can’t adequately defend itself against a future Palestinian state. For the rest of the world, it appears to have to led to the opposite conclusion, which is that denying the Palestinians a state leads inevitably to insecurity for Israel and violence and upheaval for the whole Middle East.
These lessons are not easily reconcilable. But I can say unreservedly that Israelis won’t politically support leaders who seem to reward Hamas’s October 7 attack by embracing a reinvigorated two-state solution process. Israelis blame Netanyahu for allowing October 7, but his decades-long opposition to a Palestinian state actually looks prescient to them now.
So, the United States is in a pickle. We want a reinvigorated tw0-state solution, and our Arab allies are on board with that. But Israel is absolutely not on board with it, and the opposition is from the political right, center and most of the left.
Just today, the U.S. exercised its United Nations Security Council veto to kill off a resolution calling for a cease fire in Gaza. It’s true that we offered an alternative that is tougher on Israel than anything I’ve ever seen us do at the UN, but most of the world just sees us as enabling genocide against starving Palestinians.
People who want peace or a cease fire need to recognize that the less secure Israelis feel, the less likely it is that violence will stop. And that’s been true and will remain true whether there’s an active war on or not.
The U.S. may have a rupture with Israel soon over this basic disconnect. And I don’t think Netanyahu is the root of the problem, sadly. No Israeli is more responsible than Bibi for three decades of failed peace process, but the consequences are here with or without him. For now, Israelis cannot envision being safe in a two-state world, and a lot would have to change to prove them wrong.
This is going to lead to pariah status and isolation for Israel, but they can’t pull their allies along for the ride any longer. And their allies don’t have a magic wand to make things turn out okay.
Israel is incredibly isolated but only because we’ve coddle and protected them for so long. They think there’s zero consequence for their behavior. They’ve not paid a price for intransigence and ongoing theft of Palestinian land. This will not go on forever. The Democratic party is, for now, a mix of constituencies but the future of both the party, and ultimately our country, is one far less sympathetic to Zionism. Israel needs to wake up and cut a deal before they lose their leverage.