Let's talk about what's happened since the Oslo Peace Process started in 1993. Prime Minister Rabin and Arch-terrorist Arafart signed an agreement. The Israelis recognized the so-called "Palestinians" and started withdrawing from parts of the country. My leftist, and rather stupid, relatives in Israel were euphoric--and they really believed peace was at hand. But a very strange thing happened. The more land Israel gave up, the more suicide bombers blew themselves up in pizza parlors, cafes and bus stations. A woman and her father on her wedding day. A man losing his wife and 4 girls (and an unborn baby boy in the womb). A family decimated sitting down to a Passover Seder. Minister Peres called them "sacrifices for peace", but there was no peace--and Israel was giving up its heartland for nothing. The tiny country of Israel was experiencing a miniature 9/11 on an almost daily basis. So the "peace process" is stalled. My relatives became disillusioned and turned rightist. What is Israel supposed to do, Tinmore? You tell me.
Israel didn’t “give up” any land as a result of Oslo. It did the opposite - it took more and more.
At Oslo in 1993, Palestinians were required to make their offer up front - recognize Israel, change the PLO charter calling for the removal of Israel from historic Palestine, renounce terror, and make the most enormous concession of all: recognize Israeli sovereignty not just in the territory allocated to the Jewish state by the U.N. partition, but over all the land Israel had illegally seized in 1947-1948 from the area allocated for the Arab State.
Arafat agreed to it all - he officially recognized Israeli sovereignty over 78% of historic Palestine, and agreed that the Palestinian state would be established on only 22% - the 1967 borders of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
However, Israel was not required to offer anything except agree to recognize the Palestinian Authority as the representative of the Palestinian people.
Israel did not offer a single tangible concession on any key issue. In return for merely “agreeing to negotiate,” Israel insisted that the borders, the settlements, the status of Jerusalem, the resolution of the refugee problem, water rights, etc. would be set aside, to be discussed in “final status” negotiations at an undetermined future time.
The Palestinians had been led to believe that at least a moratorium on settlements would take place. But instead, Israel actually increased the pace of its settlement building.
Since Oslo, Israel has been building furiously - appropriating more and more Palestinian land, and more than quadrupling the number of its illegal settlers in the West Bank.
As Ariel Sharon stated in 1996, “Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can…Everything we don’t grab will go to them.” (The "Gaza disengagement" was Sharon's plan to consolidate Israeli control of the West Bank, especially around East Jerusalem. He was in fact "trading" a densely populated Palestinian area that he could not easily control - Gaza - for choicer areas in the West Bank.)
Israel‘s consistent strategy has been to delay actual negotiations and diplomacy for as long as possible while it continues to create “facts on the ground,” seizing as many strategic areas in the West Bank as possible - prime agricultural land, huge chunks along the Green Line and around East Jerusalem, a massive swath along the entire border with Jordan, as well as the water resources.
Israel confiscates this Palestinian land claiming military or security purposes, then builds “Jewish only“ settlements on it and transfers its own civilian population into them. It seizes even more territory to build “Jewish-only” roads to connect the illegal settlements to each other and to Israel “proper.”
This is an ongoing strategy intended to bisect the potential Palestinian state into separate “cantons” and make a viable, continguous, independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza completely impossible.
As Sharon bragged way back in 1973, “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlement, in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlement, right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years time, neither the United Nations, nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”
Palestinian suicide bombings were a direct response to the failed peace process, the failure to stop Israel's encroachment on Palestinian land, the escalation of Israel's violent military occupation, and the continuation of its illegal settlement enterprise.
BTW the very first successful Palestinian suicide bombing was a retaliation for Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein's massacre of 29 Palestinians during Ramadan prayers inside the Ibrahim Mosque in Hebron, in February 1994.
