Comment by edanm
2 years ago
> Israel left Gaza and then blockaded it, and has carried out major bombing campaigns against Gaza and ground invasions several times.
The blockade is for fear of Hamas gaining even more weapons, a fear that seems incredibly justified given what Hamas did. The bombing campaigns were mostly responses to Hamas firing rocket attacks at Israel.
> The conflict is not limited to Gaza. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel continues to build its illegal settlements, to subject the Palestinian population to a humiliating and brutal military occupation, and to kill Palestinians regularly (several hundred in the West Bank this year).
Yes, I completely agree that Israel's actions in the West Bank, the settlement program and the resultant military rule are terrible and should be condemned.
> The Palestinians have tried every way to obtain their freedom: protest, negotiation, armed resistance. Nothing works. Israel is, by far, the stronger party, and it does what it wants to the Palestinians with no consequences.
I'm sorry, but this is a misread of history. The Palestinians have been offered a state multiple times, and have walked away from the negotiations every time. Israel has successfully negotiated a peace with historic enemies like Egypt, given back huge amounts of land in the process, these peace agreements have lasted for 40 years now.
Only with the Palestinians this negotiation has not worked, despite Israel having offered between 95% and 99% of the land Palestinians claimed they wanted.
Though to be clear, Hamas's official position, near as I can tell, remains that Israel itself must be completely destroyed and all the land given "back" to Palestinians.
The backdrop of most Israeli's having "given up" on the idea of a peace agreement was the failure of multiple attempts at reaching a deal, attempts that the Palestinians walked away from, and that resulted in terror attacks killing Israeli citizens.
That all said, Israel has more-or-less checked out of the peace process for the last 15 years, if not actively undermined it by weakening any serious leader that could've helped achieve peace. And given that Israel is the stronger party, I think it's not morally justified to "give up", Israel must keep striving for peace, and trying to make conditions on the ground that will allow for an eventual peace agreement.
> The Palestinians have been offered a state multiple times ...
No Israeli government has yet offered the Palestinians a sovereign state. The offers that have been made have been for some sort of entity with limited autonomy, but under effective Israeli control. The Palestinians have not simply "walked away" from negotiations. They have repeatedly tried to negotiate something better. After the Camp David negotiations broke down, the Palestinians returned to negotiate at Taba. Those talks ended because of the upcoming Israeli elections (which were won by the hard Right, which absolutely opposes any Palestinian state).
If you go back and read about the history of the Oslo process, the Israelis systematically reneged on their promises throughout the 1990s. The PLO made major concessions which were not reciprocated, and it ultimately got nothing.
Israel didn't just make peace with Egypt out of the goodness of its heart. Egypt gave Israel an enormous scare in the 1973 war. That experience made the Israelis realize that it was possible for them to lose a war against Egypt in the future. The Israelis have no such fear of the Palestinians now. If the Palestinians had an army like Egypt, things would be very different.
Israel is also able to make peace with Egypt, Jordan and the other Arab states because Israel doesn't covet their land. But the desire to have all of historic Palestine is fundamental to Zionism, and Israel never intends to leave the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
> No Israeli government has yet offered the Palestinians a sovereign state.
I'm not sure why you think that, that's exactly what the peace process of the 1990s and early 2000s was about. E.g. the Camp David Summit.
> If you go back and read about the history of the Oslo process, the Israelis systematically reneged on their promises throughout the 1990s. The PLO made major concessions which were not reciprocated, and it ultimately got nothing.
That's not at all true. The Palestinian Authority was formed and given control in the West Bank, independently of this Israel left Gaza and gave Palestinians control there. The peace process broke down in part due to the terror attacks that were happening in Israel, many carried out by Hamas in order to stop the peace process.
> But the desire to have all of historic Palestine is fundamental to Zionism, and Israel never intends to leave the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Some people in Israel certainly think this. Not a majority of Israelis. And the peace processes did offer land to the Palestinians including the WB.
I'm not saying Israel has done everything right, it's certainly done a lot of things wrong, and the for the last fifteen years has done things against the peace process. But it is still a true fact, attested to by people involved in the peace processes, that Israel did make offers, the Palestinians did reject them and walk away. And that has happened multiple times, including the founding of the state of Israel. (People like to relitigate this one, and there's certainly a compelling reason that Palestinians disliked the UN's partition plan - but it's still a fact that the Palestinians and Arabs generally rejected the peaceful offer, chose war instead, lost the war, and therefore lost more territories than they could've had had they accepted the partition plan to begin with.)
> I'm not sure why you think that, that's exactly what the peace process of the 1990s and early 2000s was about. E.g. the Camp David Summit.
Actually, one of the fundamental flaws of the Oslo process was that Israel did not have to commit, at the outset, to recognizing a Palestinian state. The PLO recognized the state of Israel, and in return, Israel agreed to negotiate with the PLO. What the final status of the Palestinians would be was very much up in the air.
Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo Accords, said that there would be a Palestinian "entity," by which he meant something with partial sovereignty, under significant Israeli control.
Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli right-wing extremist, and Netanyahu came to power. Netanyahu was totally opposed to the peace process, and both he and his party have always fundamentally opposed any Palestinian sovereignty. Netanyahu refused to carry out the promised military withdrawals, and generally stalled and sabotaged the peace process at every turn. He simply didn't believe in the process.
Ehud Barak won the elections in 1999, and tried to revive the Oslo process. However, he was unwilling to make an offer that met the Palestinians' bottom line: a sovereign Palestinian state based on 1967 borders. The "state" that the Palestinians were offered in 2000 at Camp David would not have controlled its own borders, airspace or water. The Israeli military would have maintained bases in the Palestinian state, overseen the Palestinian borders, and had the right to conduct military incursions into the Palestinian state. The Palestinian state would have been demilitarized (except for the IDF, of course), and the Israelis would have had veto power over its foreign policy.
Beyond that, Barak was demanding major territorial concessions (the Palestinians would have had to give up the most important parts of East Jerusalem, and Palestinian territory would have been cut up by corridors annexed to Israel), and refused any meaningful right of return for Palestinian refugees. That's the offer the Palestinians rejected at Camp David.
The Palestinians continued negotiating with Israel in 2001 at Taba, but those negotiations ended because Barak was facing another election.
The hard Right won again in the Israeli elections in 2001, and that was really the end of any peace process.
> The Palestinian Authority was formed and given control in the West Bank, independently of this Israel left Gaza
The PA was given partial control in a minority of the West Bank. To put it crudely, the Israelis offloaded the duty to take out the garbage and do the laundry to the PA, but maintained ultimate control. The PA has no army, and its police forces act to a large extent as auxiliaries of the Israelis, tasked with keeping the Palestinians quiet.
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