Netanyahu’s War Against Peace

Netanyahu’s War Against Peace

How Israel Sabotaged Oslo and Helped Hamas

At one point back in the 1990s it seemed that there may be an actual chance of reaching lasting peace between Israel and Palestine, a chance they could both coexist and stop the endless cycle of violence.

How you may ask?

The Oslo Accords.

They were a historic step in the right direction, and Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat stood side by side, shook hands.

Try to imagine that now, Netanyahu standing and shaking hands with Palestinian leadership, your probably can’t, and that’s the point.

At that time the PLO, led by Fatah, officially recognized Israel. And Israel, in turn, acknowledged the PLO as the legitimate voice of the Palestinian people.

That was as close as it ever got to real recognition.

That fragile window of opportunity didn’t close because Palestinians “never wanted peace,” the usual line we’re fed by Western media. It slammed shut Netanyahu and Israel’s own political class decided peace was the real danger to their goals.

Right at the center of the backlash was a younger Benjamin Netanyahu, ambitious, calculating, and already addicted to using fear for division and political gain.

He wasn’t yet the undisputed ruler of Israel, but he was building his brand the same way he still does it today, by dividing, sabotaging, and poisoning any chance at peace.

To him, Oslo was treason. Recognizing Fatah and the Palestinian Authority meant having to admit that Palestinians weren’t just a problem to be bulldozed or bombed, that they are an actual people with the right to a state and self determination.

That was intolerable to him. So he went to work.

Night after night, he led rallies where Rabin was branded a traitor. Posters painted the prime minister in a Nazi uniform. The crowds screamed for his head. Netanyahu didn’t have to pull the trigger, he just made sure the gunman had an atmosphere to breathe in.

By November 1995, one of those extremists, whipped into a frenzy, put a bullet in Rabin’s back and ended the last real shot at peace.

What came after was political sabotage.

Netanyahu figured out that Fatah, for all its compromises, was too dangerous to Israel, because it was moderate. If Fatah was accepted as a legitimate partner, Palestinians might actually get a seat at the table.

A state might actually emerge.

So Netanyahu and his allies played a different game, quietly propping up Hamas. Hamas, unlike Fatah, was religiously extreme and openly called for Israel’s destruction. To Netanyahu, that made them useful.

Hamas could be pointed to as proof that Palestinians “don’t want peace.” They could fire rockets, make threats, and serve as a perpetual excuse for why negotiations could never work.

A divided Palestinian movement was the perfect outcome for Israel: secular moderates in the West Bank isolated, extremists in Gaza demonized, and the dream of statehood dissolved.

It’s the kind of cynicism only Netanyahu could perfect, strengthen the very group you’ll later hold up as Exhibit A for why Palestinians can’t be trusted. Having Hamas in power is his greatest political gift. Netanyahu can massacre Gaza, bulldoze homes, and strangle the West Bank while still claiming he’s just “fighting terror.”

At this point they’ve programmed so much of the West to immediately associate Islamic symbols and people as “terrorists”, that’s not by accident.

Whenever Israel destroys a school or hospital, starves a child, or humiliates and abuses a Palestinian family at a checkpoint, they create more of the very extremism they claim to be trying to eradicate.

But they know this, they know that by brutalizing an entire population of people, you push them toward radicalism.

Netanyahu is well aware of this, and he depends on it.

Hamas rockets are his reelection campaign.

Netanyahu killed Oslo just as surely as Rabin’s assassin did. He buried the secular, diplomatic option for Palestinian statehood and then propped up Hamas as the perfect boogeyman to prove his point, that Palestinians were “too extreme” to ever be partners for peace.

You can take a look today, and can trace the blood back in a straight line.

The same man who incited crowds to chant for Rabin’s death now presides over the mass death of Palestinians in Gaza. The war crimes, the bombed refugee camps, the starvation, it’s the result of thirty years of sabotage, where every chance at coexistence was deliberately snuffed out to keep one man’s vision of eternal occupation alive.