Thread by @ShMMor

FIRST THREAD:

Rosh Hashana 20 years ago and the Second Intifada broke out. Some events were historical accident and coincidental, some were fully intentional, even if the consequences weren’t.

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But the rejection of a two-state peace agreement and historic reconciliation between two peoples was a Palestinian act, not an Israeli or American one, and a costly one at that.

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Anyone who claims to care about the Palestinians and the cause of Palestinian liberation needs to take stock of what was gained in the seven years before the outbreak of hostilities and what was sacrificed to sustain it.

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In the 1990’s the first ever Palestinian Arab government was established in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It issued the first ever Palestinian passports and the first ever Palestinian postage stamps (Arab Palestinian, not UK Mandatory).

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It drew up and armed the first ever Palestinian security forces and laid the groundwork for the first ever Palestinian parliament on a site in Abu Dis 3 km east of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (the Israeli Knesset, btw, is exactly 3 km west of the same revered holy site).

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It operated the first ever Palestinian airport in the Gaza Strip and the first ever Palestinian airline (not counting the Zionist Palestine Airways of the 1930’s), as well as a host of proto-state institutions.

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By 1996 it governed every city in the West Bank and Gaza Strip save Hebron, added a year later. Not only was there no Israeli presence in the areas of self-government (except Hebron), but passage from the West Bank into Israel was almost completely free ...

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... (there were occasional closures after suicide bombings). It was a common sight on Israeli highways to see cars with Palestinian license plates, just as it was common for Israelis to visit Palestinian towns on weekends (especially Jericho).

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All this was given up with the Second Intifada— much more than this, even. The violence broke out on the backdrop of a Palestinian rejection of a final status proposal which would have seen them establish a state on all of Gaza and nearly all of the West Bank, ...

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...with a position in Jerusalem and a massive evacuation of Israeli settlers from both territories. It’s important to remember that rejecting this offer was widely popular across political factions, not protested in real time by anyone, ...

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...and not publicly abjured since by any major Palestinian political actor or even, and this is crucial, by the broader community of pro-Palestinian activists, intellectuals, academic, and journalists outside the region.

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The hallmark act of those years was the suicide bombing—an apt metaphor for the entire enterprise if there ever was one.

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Between choosing a life of dignity, self-determination, and liberation, or blowing up one’s own society in a mad descent of death cultism just for the pleasure of murdering others, the Palestinians chose the latter, ...

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...enabled by an intellectual community in the West who think that by glorying in Palestinian suffering they are engaged in a reverse cowboys-and-Indians adventure or, worse yet, somehow negating the taint of the Shoah.

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You can pick apart the Barak proposal or the Clinton Parameters for all the ways they were inadequate from a Palestinian perspective, but ultimately the choice was between that and what happened instead. Was it a good choice?

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