What enabled the Oslo accords? Israeli intelligence with its deep penetration of Palestinian organizations of course was well aware that the PLO adhered to the Phased Plan (1974 Ten point program). Israel agreed to the idea of Palestinian autonomy in Judea/Samaria and Gaza already in the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty which means that both left and right were in favor of the idea. Israeli intelligence apparently come up with the idea of reducing the PLO to collaborators by letting them create the “Palestinian National Authority” as envisioned in the Phased Plan. The advantage was that the leaders of the autonomy would have legitimacy among the Palestinian public.
Both Israel and the PLO of course knew that it was not possible to solve the conflict through Israeli-Palestinian engagement but both sides played along to promote its own particular interests due to a temporary confluence of interests. Israel planned for the PA (Palestinian Authority) to exist for decades until Israel’s Jewish population had grown sufficiently to permit Israel to redeem and enfranchise the entire Judea and Samaria. For Israel was the advantage with the PA that Israel would not have to be militarily present in densely populated urban and suburban Palestinian areas while Israel would still militarily control most rural areas of Judea and Samaria.
The fact that this temporary confluence of interests enabled the Oslo accords has misled the international community into believing that it was possible to reach an end-of-claims final status agreement. The PA has worked for good and bad precisely according to Israeli expectations. The PA does not want to dissolve itself as its leadership does not want to lose its kleptocratic privileges, yet the PA has not turned into the vehicle for destroying Israel that the PLO leadership imagined in the Phased Plan. The PLO of course believed that they were deceiving naive leftwing Israeli leaders and the Israelis played along knowing of course that the PLO leadership believed that they were deceiving the Israelis.
When the time came for final status negotiations, the Israelis knew that any final status proposal would be rejected by the Palestinian side since the PLO/PA always opposed agreeing to an end-of-claims final status agreement as that would require giving up the demand for flooding the Jewish state with millions of Anti-Zionists in thus ending the Zionist project and the Jewish state, leading inexorably to full displacement of the entire Jewish population and a Second Holocaust. The PLO of course would not have agreed to the Oslo accords if they had known that they were the ones who were being deceived as they thought they were the ones who were deceiving.
Two decades after final status negotiations were commenced, there has been zero diplomatic progress although the government of Israel and the Palestian Authority, each for their own diplomatic reasons, gave the international community the patently false impression that a final status agreement was feasible. While the PA does not want an end-of-claims final status agreement because they want to destroy Israel in accordance with the Phased Plan, the Israeli government is pursuing its own strategy of construction in Judea and Samaria to prepare for what will eventually be Israel’s full incorporation of the entire Judea and Samaria.
Would Israel be interested in an end-of-claims final status agreement with the PA if the Palestinian side had peaceful intentions? The question is entirely hypothetical since that is not the case but if real peace with defensible borders was possible through engagement with the PA, the Israeli public would certainly be in favor. As the situation is however, do neither side sincerely support a permanent two-state solution which neither side believes is in its respective interest. Meanwhile, the international community seems content with being deceived by both sides and hence the persistent international irrational messianic belief in the antiquated two-state illusion.
Aliyah Organization 