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"In 1993, after months of behinds-the-scenes negotiations, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) negotiator Mahmoud Abbas reached agreement on the Oslo Accords. President Bill Clinton presided over as signing ceremony at the White House culminating with a reluctant handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat.
At the time of the deal’s announcement, Arafat and the PLO hierarchy were resident in Tunisia, where the group had been expelled a decade earlier as part of a deal to remove them from Lebanon.
While Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had formed the PLO in 1964, there was initially very little Palestinian about it. Arafat was born in Cairo and was an Egyptian citizen serving in the Egyptian army when Nasser chose him for his new role.
Israel, meanwhile, took control over the Old City of Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza during the 1967 Six-Day War. Until that point, Egypt controlled Gaza and Jordan, the West Bank and Old City. During their control, neither Cairo nor Amman declared a Palestinian state.
In 1987, the First Intifada erupted. Palestinians were frustrated, and a traffic accident was the spark that set society alight. The First Intifada was a largely grassroots affair. Many of the Palestinians participating spoke Hebrew, worked in Israel, and/or served time in Israeli prisons; they understood how Israelis thought. ...
The Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority in exchange for Arafat’s recognition of Israel and foreswearing terrorism. Once the Palestinian Authority established itself, first in Gaza and then in the West Bank, it would begin negotiating final-status issues such as claims to Jerusalem and the “right of return.” Settlement would come in direct talks, not in end-runs to the United Nations or other governments.
In 2000, Clinton believed he had achieved a comprehensive peace deal. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators had hashed out an agreement. Clinton invited everyone to Camp David to dot the I’s and cross the T’s; he was furious when Arafat, soon after arriving, backtracked from commitments Palestinian negotiators had made in his name, and even angrier when Arafat refused to make any counter offer or enunciate adjustments he would demand. ...
Hamas apologists like to claim the group’s grounding in Gaza is the result of 2006 Palestinian elections; they ignore that Hamas then turned on other Palestinian groups in a violent and murderous coup to consolidate their Islamist dictatorship. Hamas rejected the principles of Oslo, both rejecting Israel’s right to exist and openly supporting terror. Even the most ardent flat-earthers cannot deny Hamas’s role on October 7, 2023, the greatest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Israel was within its rights, then, to return to the status quo ante and end the Palestinian Authority. After all, it had openly rejected its core principles. That Arafat, and later Abbas, were from a different political movement than Hamas is irrelevant. All Palestinian political activity rests on a platform created by Oslo. ..."
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