There has been a lot of debate over the years about who was at fault for the failure of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords. I will posit here that they were never meant to succeed. Here are excerpts from an article that appeared in Sept. 2023 in the Guardian by Avi Shlaim which puts it squarely on Netanyahu’s shoulders (link below). I remember reflecting on how he was behind the burgeoning land grabbing and building of massive settlements in the West Bank in the early 2000s and thinking, back then, what a travesty and act of defiance that was. A couple salient quotes from the article and link below.

Controversy surrounded Oslo from the moment it saw the light of day. The 21 October 1993 issue of the London Review of Books ran two articles; Edward Said put the case against in the first. He called the agreement “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles”, arguing that it set aside international legality and compromised the fundamental national rights of the Palestinian people. It could not advance genuine Palestinian self-determination because that meant freedom, sovereignty, and equality, rather than perpetual subservience to Israel.

Yet the PLO went along with it anyway.

Particularly destructive of the peace project was the [Israeli, not part of the Accords – my words] policy of expanding Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian territory. These settlements are illegal under international law and constitute a huge obstacle to peace.

The so-called security barrier that Israel has been building on the West Bank since 2002 further encroaches on Palestinian land. Land-grabbing and peace-making do not go together.

The rate of settlement growth in the West Bank and Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem is staggering. At the end of 1993 there were 115,700 Israeli settlers in the occupied territories. Their number doubled during the following decade.

Today the number of Israeli settlers on the West Bank exceeds 350,000. There are an additional 300,000 Jews living in settlements across the pre-1967 border in East Jerusalem. Thousands more settlement homes are planned or under construction.

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If anyone advocating for the Palestinians during the Oslo Accords (if there even was any advocacy) had read the Likud Party platform, they could have foreseen this. This is taken directly from the first paragraph of their platform.

Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.

In essence, not only as Edward Saed so ominously lamented that the Oslo Accords were an instrument of Palestinian surrender, in the eyes of Israel, it was a farce never intended to give an inch to the millions of Palestinians under its iron fist

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/12/oslo-israel-reneged-colonial-palestine

I’ve been advocating for Palestinian rights for around 15 years now. In the process of delving into the issue, I’ve grown weary and frustrated about the pernicious effect of Zionist propaganda that has served to shut down discourse on the issue for so many years. Now finally, it took a horrible, bloody attack by an extremist Palestinian group to serve as a wake up call to the world that perhaps there is more than one side here, and perhaps we should be listening to the grievances of the other side. I was Googling the term “Zionist propaganda” and I came across the article, from of all places, the CIA, below written by a man I had never heard of before, James Abourezk, a Lebanonese-American.

James Abourezk served one term each as a US senator and a Congressman in South Dakota, but left politics because he felt like a fish swimming upstream and thought he could better put his intellect to service in the private sector. He fought for Indian rights, as well as for normalizing relations with Cuba and Iran – a tried and true leftist and good person. How interesting that this meticulously detailed article about how US/Zionist propaganda has clouded the truth of Israel’s bloody formation and continued occupation was published in Penthouse magazine. I’ve got to wonder if that’s because he couldn’t find a more mainstream, reputable venue. In any event, I’ve posted it here for myself as much as anyone else as a go-to resource when I get my dates and facts about this non-ending struggle muddled.

Sadly he died just this year. RIP James Abourezk.

Here’s the definition of genocide from the US Holocaust museum memorial.

1. Killing members of the group
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

All of the bullet points except possibly No. 5 apply to what Israel is doing and has been doing to the Palestinians under its control. It is tragically ironic that the group famous for “never again” have become the genociders. When I visited Vad Yashem several years ago, I was struck by the same thing – how many of the stories could be read as if they came from Palestinian victims rather than Jewish ones. Here are a few quotes from the exhibits there that I had jotted down at the time.

“In Western Europe the Nazis did not establish ghettos for the Jews, but rathe reinforced racist legislation and a policy of Arayanization and discrimination. The anti-Jewish policy was applied gradually taking into account the attitudes of the local population.”

“I decided I would be a predator in order to survive.” Testimony from the film, Culture without walls

“They wanted to make the lives of the Jews so unbearable that they simply would want to leave.” Narration from an exhibit

“In eastern Europe, the Germans incarcerated the Jews in severely overcorowded ghettos behind fences and wall. They cut the Jews off from their surroundings and their sources of livelihood and condemned them to a life of humiliation, degeneration, poverty and death.” From a placard on an exhibit

The only way that anyone who considers themselves left leaning or liberal can condone Israel’s Zionist structure, and particularly what Israel is doing in Gaza now requires turning an absolutely blind eye to the plight of Palestinians. Otherwise, the cognitive dissonance is just too overwhelming.

What is Genocide? – United States Holocaust Memorial Museum