Israel has never offered an agreement giving full national status to the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. UN Security Council Resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973), each one after a war, affirm the necessity of “guaranteeing the territorial inviolability and political independence of every State in the area.” Palestine isn’t mentioned, but it was understood that Palestinians would eventually have the state denied to them between 1948 and 1967 by Egypt (Gaza) and Jordan (the West Bank).
A peace process begun in Madrid in 1991 resulted in the Oslo Accords two years later. It was an interim agreement on security which reaffirmed Resolutions 242 and 338 while promoting negotiations that would result in a permanent settlement of all issues between Israel and the Palestinians. It stipulates “that the outcome of the permanent status negotiations should not be prejudiced or preempted by agreements reached for the interim period.”
Article VIII of the interim agreement, which concerns “Public Order and Security,” doesn’t include full statehood for Palestine. It reads:
In order to guarantee public order and internal security for the Palestinians of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Council will establish a strong police force, while Israel will continue to carry the responsibility for defending against external threats, as well as the responsibility for overall security of Israelis for the purpose of safeguarding their internal security and public order.Israelis didn't want to grant full statehood to Palestine out of fear that it would be used as a launchpad for attacks on Israel, and that position hasn't changed.
Many people favorable to Israel blame Palestinians for the failure to reach agreement on a two-state solution during peace talks hosted by President Clinton in December 2000. However, the offer of such a solution was never even given to the parties in writing. Clinton’s ideas, however, were reconstructed the following year from memory and appeared in the newspaper Haaretz (English), January 1, 2001. These terms do NOT envision a fully sovereign state of Palestine.
Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which are as illegal by international law as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, would remain. Israel would maintain three military facilities in the West Bank as “early warning stations subject to review every 10 years.” Clinton is remembered as saying that he would call Palestine a "non-militarized state." Clinton also remarked, “Imminent and demonstrable threats to Israel's national security of a military nature” would justify an Israeli military response. He did not say the same of Palestine. Thus, Israel would be a fully sovereign state, but not Palestine, as Palestine’s use of force would be subject to Israeli control.
In short, there was no document or even a verbal offer to Palestinians of a fully sovereign Palestinian state in 2000, or at any other time, by either the US or Israel. Yet even today people blame Palestinians for rejecting such an offer. Israel has since that time resisted a two-state solution by increasingly encouraging violent settlers to occupy the West Bank and in 2020 seriously considering annexing much of that territory.
To see how incompatible Israel’s actions are with a lasting peace, imagine that the United States took similar steps in relation to Mexico, which does pose security risks to us. Mexico is politically corrupt, and large areas are ruled by drug cartels. Mexico is a launchpad for migrants approaching our southern border and for smuggled drugs entering our country after being manufactured in Mexico. Such drugs kill tens of thousands of Americans every year. Proportionally, 40,000 drug-induced deaths in the US is about equivalent to the 1,200 Israelis killed on October 7, 2023. Those deaths occur here EVERY YEAR.
If we followed something like Israel’s method of insuring our security, we would use our overwhelming military force to conquer Mexico and have them administer internal security under our direction. We would control Mexico’s borders and decide who could enter and who must be expelled. We would allow interested American citizens, called “settlers,” to enter Mexico and start towns of their own where Mexicans are forbidden to live.
If Mexicans rebelled violently against these arrangements, as certainly they would, we would deprive them of the right to be armed and apply to them a set of laws and legal procedures that would be unconstitutional in the US, but they would apply only to Mexicans in Mexico. Teenagers could be detained indefinitely for throwing rocks at American tanks. Settlers would seldom be prosecuted for acts of violence against Mexicans, acts that are technically illegal.
If you think this would improve our country’s security then you would think that Israel has acted appropriately over the last 56 years. But of course, that’s absurd. Just as Mexico’s sovereignty must be respected, so must the Palestinians have a respected state of their own to facilitate a lasting peace.
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