This year marks the eighteenth anniversary of the Oslo Accords, and the fifteenth yahrtzeit of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, also known as Mr. Security. Now would be a good time to revisit the wisdom of signing those agreements. What we know today, and even knew then, is that in their current formulation the agreements have no chance of success. Get the Israel Hayom newsletter sent to your mailbox! What's more, the Palestinian Authority, which Israel created, survives by the good graces of the IDF. An Israeli pullout from Judea and Samaria would result in the PA's collapse, only to be supplanted by Hamas, which would point its guns at Israelis. Ben-Gurion International Airport and the greater Tel Aviv area would be within firing range. Israel has demanded that any future peace agreement be contingent on a the demilitarization of the newly created Palestinian state. But that is unrealistic, because there is no precedent for a state being forced to demilitarize, and second, because the Arabs will reject this demand. And third, and this is the heart of the matter, if the Arabs accept this demand - along with painful concessions - they will not keep their part of the deal, just like they systematically violated every possible clause of the Oslo Accords. For these reasons the gulf between Israel and Palestinians is unbridgeable. They want a state along the 1967 borders, up to the very last inch, with Jerusalem as its capital. They would like to obtainsovereignty over Jerusalem's Ramat Eshkol, Givat Hamivtar, and French Hill neighborhoods. They also want sovereignty over the Temple Mount, including the Western Wall. No Jewish government could ever agree to such demands. The Arabs have never given up their desire to annihilate Israel, and such aspirations are unlikely to go away anytime soon or in the foreseeable future. The so called Right of Return [of Palestinian refugees and their descendants into Israel proper] is the means to achieve this goal. Trying to beat Israel in battle is futile, but the womb of the Arab mother will do the job. Former PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat said that, and the PA leadership has repeated it ever since. Israel cannot afford to repatriate Arab refugees within its borders. One must keep in mind the Arabs' request on this matter. In any future peace agreement, Israel will allow the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But they have no interest in resettling Palestinians from abroad in this future state. They want to settle them inside the Jewish state. If you are looking for a warning sign that could attest to the fact that Palestinians continue to espouse Israel's elimination, this demographic red light is yet another indicator, on top several dozen troubling signs. And if that is not enough, the establishment of a Palestinian state would serve as the best path toward delegitimizing Israel. Palestine is not a state, and it never has been. It was the Israeli government at the time that elevated the name Palestine to a level that befits a state. At this current point in time, the Palestinians have no interest in establishing a state; they are focused on wiping Israel off the map. Delegitimization of Israel is the first step toward realizing this goal. In any event, the dismantling of additional Israeli settlements is not feasible. The general consensus would not tolerate the prospect of uprooting of about 100,000 people, following the ill-fated and traumatic pullout from Gush Katif in 2005. Such an undertaking could encounter harsh resistance, and lead to a civil war. Risking a civil war, for the sake of establishing a Palestinian state on the ruins of uprooted Jewish settlements without guaranteeing an end to the conflict, would be act of folly beyond the scope of the imagination. So how do we reach a solution? Arabs will forge peace with Israel only once they come to grips with the fact that it cannot be destroyed. Israel will never be able to make peace from a position of weakness. When Israel signed the Oslo Accords, it whetted the appetite of Arabs and Palestinians, making them believe that they could destroy Israel's not by traditional means, but under the guise of "peace." Undoing the damage would not be an easy endeavor; but it is plain obvious that this is the only way out of the mess we got ourselves into by signing the agreements. Prof. Abraham Sion is the chairman of the Center for Law and Mass Media at the Ariel University Center of Samaria.
There are multiple reasons why the Oslo Accords were doomed from the start. They were supposedly signed with the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, the PLO, but for all intents and purposes we negotiated with one of its factions, Fatah. Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other radical elements in the Arab world were not a party to the negotiations, which were deemed unacceptable by Hezbollah and Iran as well. Let us assume we agree to all of Fatah's demands. Then what? Hamas would make further demands of its own. And when Israel appeases Hamas, the PIJ will also ask for its share of the pie, or else continue staging terrorist attacks. And the same goes for Hezbollah. What we have is a bottomless pit. No agreement would resolve the conflict.