It is said that the prophets of Israel found their task difficult because their messages were far too often ignored.
When the concept of a “two-state solution” gained momentum with the Oslo Accords 30 years ago, there were many who experienced something similar. They spoke out about the danger and folly of such a disastrous agreement, but were ignored.
Now, it is clear that they saw something the peace process industry did not.
While most of those who attempted to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the Oslo Accords had good intentions, they appear to have been ignorant of the history of war and peace. Throughout history, wars have ended only when one side gave up because it realized it could never achieve its war aims.
The Arab war against the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish people’s indigenous and ancestral homeland is now entering its second century and has not abated for one moment. It is a war of violent rejectionism and terror that does not seek a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state but instead of a Jewish state.
This was clear from the beginning of the Oslo process. Indeed, the Palestinians made no attempt to conceal it.
Before the ink on the Oslo Accords was dry, PLO leader Yasser Arafat traveled to South Africa and spoke at a mosque in Johannesburg. He made his real views very clear.
“This has to be understood by everybody,” he said. “The permanent State of Israel? No! The permanent state of Palestine! This agreement, I am not considering it more than the agreement which had been signed between our Prophet Muhammad and Quraysh.”
As we know, the agreement with the Quraysh tribe was merely a ruse that allowed Muhammad to consolidate power and defeat the tribe at a later date.
Clearly, then, the Palestinians have never accepted the existence and permanence of the State of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people. Any agreements they signed were ruses. They pocketed the concessions and honored none of their commitments.
This strategy was not new. It was adopted by the PLO in 1974 as the so-called “Phased Program,” which called for the establishment of a national authority “over every part of Palestinian territory that is liberated” with the aim of “completing the liberation of all Palestinian territory.”
And just like the Quraysh agreement, it would be achieved by bloodshed and slaughter.
All of this was well-known at the time, but proponents of Oslo silenced any and all dissent. They did not want to hear the truth.
As if the Second Intifada that broke out in 2000 were not enough, the Oct. 7 rampage by Hamas death squads destroyed this illusion forever.
Unfortunately, the only thing new about the Simchat Torah pogrom was the sheer intensity of the bloodletting. The butchery of over 1,200 Israelis; the rape, torture and injury of thousands more; and the abduction of 240 people to Gaza was a day unparalleled in Jewish history since the end of the Holocaust.
But once again, such barbarism was not new. It had occurred on a smaller scale throughout the three decades of Oslo. Whether in the Dizengoff Street bus bombing of 1994, the Passover massacre of 2002, the butchery of the Fogel family in 2011 or hundreds of other acts of savagery and cruelty, thousands of Jews were massacred.
It must be noted that, during the slaughter of Oct. 7, the bestial perpetrators did not proclaim their fealty to the Palestinian national cause. Instead, they cried “Allahu Akbar”—“God is the greatest.”
These monsters, those who sent them and those who celebrated their atrocities see their cause through a fanatically religious prism. This conflict is not national; it is not about borders; and it is not about a Palestinian state, much to the consternation of the murderers’ Western apologists on the streets and university campuses.
Some might say that this may be true of Hamas, but not the Palestinian Authority. But according to Palestinian Media Watch, on the Thursday after the pogrom, the P.A. Ministry of Religious Affairs posted guidelines for preachers regarding the content they should include in their Friday sermons. The instructions included a quote from a hadith that teaches that the end of time, the redemption of humanity is contingent on Muslims exterminating all Jews.
In other words, the P.A., Hamas and Islamic Jihad are all the same. Given the opportunity, each and every one of them and their supporters would perpetrate many more Oct. 7-style massacres.
We must not give them the opportunity. Accordingly, we must finally abandon the two-state delusion. There is no chance that a Palestinian state would not be a threat to the Jewish state.
Oslo’s opponents knew this all along because we listened to the Palestinians and believed what they said. But our attempts to point out the Palestinians’ continuous genocidal incitement in schools, mosques and the media were ignored. The P.A.’s “pay-to-slay” program incentivizing mass murder was tolerated. Those murdered by Palestinian terrorists were belittled as “sacrifices for peace.”
We were told not to be “warmongers” and to “give peace a chance.”
Post-Oct. 7, Israel must reassess our security, political and diplomatic paradigms. We should start by accepting that the war against Jewish sovereignty will only end when the will of our enemies to destroy us has been permanently broken by unambiguous Israeli victory. And we must give up our delusion of a Palestinian state.
Ohad Tal is a member of Knesset for the Religious Zionist Party and chairman of the Knesset Committee for Public Enterprises.
