Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stirred controversy in Israel by reportedly comparing the scale of death during the October 7 attack to the deaths that occurred as a result of Palestinian terrorism in the wake of the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993.
Netanyahu’s remarks, apparently made during a Cabinet meeting, were leaked and have been the topic of debate within the Israeli media. Opponents have accused him of bringing up politics during wartime, which Israelis have been trying not to do for months.
But the question has arisen because of debates about what Gaza should look like after Israel completes its mission of destroying Hamas. Gaza was governed by the Palestinian Authority (PA) from 1994 to 2007, until Hamas toppled the PA in a violent coup.
The only reason the PA governed Gaza at all was because of the Oslo agreement, under which the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization, formerly a terrorist organization, was brought out of exile in Tunisia to run parts of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel took control of both territories as the result of the Six Day War in 1967, a defensive war in which Israel had launched a preemptive strike against Egypt (which was preparing to attack Israel) and fought back against Jordan (which did attack Israel).
Israel was initially open to trading these territories for peace, as it eventually did with Egypt and the Sinai peninsula, but Arab nations refused to do so. Israeli settlers began moving to the territories — in some cases, restoring communities in areas where Jews had once lived; in other cases, creating new towns.
For 20 years, the standard of living in Gaza and the West Bank grew — but Palestinians began to chafe under Israeli control, and the first intifada erupted in 1987, leading to riots and violent clashes.
By 1993, the intifada had largely subsided, and Palestinians had squandered their gains by backing Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War as he fired Scud missiles at Israel. A left-wing government in Israel saw an opportunity to reach an agreement, using links that had been established informally between Israeli and Palestinian officials, and the Oslo deal emerged.
But Hamas launched terror attacks against Israel to disrupt the peace, and an Israeli extremist assassinated Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin in 1995.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton hosted Israeli and Palestinian leaders in a last effort to reach a final agreement. But Palestinian terrorist-turned-chairman Yasser Arafat balked, even at extremely favorable terms, and launched the second intifada, which focused on deadly suicide bombings in Israel.
Over the course of several years, over 1,000 Israelis were murdered, most of them civilians. Israel built a barrier in the West Bank, and unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but rockets from Gaza continued.
Many Israelis, in the wake of 1,200 murders on October 7, have concluded that the Oslo Peace Accords, however well-intentioned, were a failure. Israel was safer before the Palestinian Authority and before Arafat and his corrupt, Soviet-trained clique arrived.
President Joe Biden and his administration have seen the ongoing war as an opportunity to bring the Palestinian Authority back to Gaza, after some kind of reform, and to put the Oslo process back on track toward creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
Many Israelis, including Netanyahu, are adamantly opposed to that idea, and would prefer an arrangement that gave Israel full security control of these territories, no matter what political structure is ultimately found regarding the Palestinians.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
