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Imagine that these four leading western countries had recognised Palestine not in late 2025, when Palestine is in the final stages of being eradicated, but in the late 1990s, during a period of supposed Palestinian state-building.<\/p>\n
That was when\u00a0the Oslo accords<\/a>\u00a0were signed with western backing. The Palestinian Authority was established under Yasser Arafat with the apparent aim that Israel would gradually withdraw from the territories it still occupies in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem and begin ruling an emergent Palestinian state.<\/p>\n At Israel\u2019s insistence, let us note, the Oslo accords carefully avoided any mention of the ultimate destination of this process. Nonetheless, the message from western politicians and media was the same: this was heading towards a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel.<\/p>\n Looking back, it is evident why that did not happen when it still looked feasible.<\/p>\n The Israeli leader of the time, Yitzhak Rabin,\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0the Israeli parliament that his vision was not of a state but of \u201can entity which is less than a state\u201d: a glorified Palestinian local authority utterly dependent on its bigger neighbour, Israel, for its security and economic survival.<\/p>\n After Rabin was assassinated by a far-right Israeli gunman, his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, was propelled into power by a majority of the Israeli public on a mandate to stop the Oslo process in its tracks.<\/p>\n He repeatedly reneged on commitments to withdraw Israeli soldiers and Jewish settler-militias from the occupied West Bank. In fact, in this period of supposed \u201cpeace-making\u201d, Israel\u00a0colonised<\/a>\u00a0Palestinian land at the fastest rate ever.<\/p>\n In 2001, during his time in opposition, Netanyahu was\u00a0secretly caught on camera<\/a>, explaining how he achieved this reversal.<\/p>\n He said he had held on to Palestinian territory, in violation of the Oslo accords, by imposing \u201cmy own interpretation to the agreements\u201d so that vast swaths could continue to be defined as a \u201csecurity zones\u201d. He\u00a0added<\/a>: \u201cI halted the fulfilment of the Oslo accords.\u201d<\/p>\n Was there not pushback from western powers, he was asked. \u201cAmerica is something that you can easily manoeuvre and move in the right direction,\u201d he\u00a0replied<\/a>.<\/p>\nSabotaging peace<\/h3>\n
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