--December 19, 2023Netanyahu’s Unsustainable Oslo Ambivalence
The pattern of how Netanyahu approaches the Palestinian issue has been largely consistent over the course of his 30 years as a prominent figure in Israeli politics. As leader of the opposition in the mid-1990s, when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was leading the country through the landmark Oslo talks with the Palestinians, Netanyahu capitalized on and echoed the outrage of many right-wing Israelis who saw Rabin as not just politically misguided, but as a traitor to Zionism itself for his willingness to hand over land. But following Rabin’s murder, when Netanyahu ascended to the premiership for the first time in 1996, the young Likud leader slowed, but did not reverse, the progress toward expanding Palestinian self-rule. He ultimately signed the Hebron Protocol in 1997, which handed 80 percent of the flashpoint West Bank city to the Palestinian Authority. He also signed the Wye River Memorandum in 1998, which advanced the implementation of previous Oslo agreements. He coupled this tepid progress, however, with renewed settlement construction in the West Bank, undermining Palestinians’ trust in Israel’s intentions and the political horizon for a final-status agreement that would create an actual Palestinian state.
This past year, even as Netanyahu allowed his far-right partners to advance their annexationist agenda at an unprecedented pace, he allowed surrogates like National Security Advisor Tzahi Hanegbi to quietly advance minimal measures to keep the Palestinian Authority financially and operationally functional and prevent a complete security deterioration in the West Bank, including through de-escalation summits at Aqaba and Sharm el-Sheikh in February and March. Similarly, just this week, Netanyahu convened the security cabinet with the intention of approving the transfer of withheld tax revenues to the Palestinian Authority and allowing permit-holding West Bank Palestinians to resume work in Israel. Both of these measures are important steps to alleviate a deepening crisis facing the West Bank Palestinian economy. Netanyahu ultimately put off the vote because he did not have the support of a majority of ministers. Netanyahu entertains and advances these types of efforts to maintain Palestinian self-rule partially due to American entreaties, but also because he knows that preventing a full-scale meltdown in the West Bank requires a somewhat functional Palestinian Authority.
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