We should not forget to remind every Moslem that when the Jews conquered the
Holy City in 1967, they stood on the threshold of the Aqsa Mosque and proclaimed
that “Mohammed is dead, and his descendants are all women.”...
SOURCE:Foundation for Middle East Peace, http://www.fmep.org/resources/official_documents/hamas_covenant_
1988.html.Oslo Accords
DOCUMENT IN CONTEXT
The Israeli elections held in June 1992 offered voters one of the starkest choices they
had faced since the landmark election of 1977, when the rightist Likud Party stormed
to power. In 1992 incumbent prime minister Yitzhak Shamir of Likud emphasized the
importance of “Greater Israel”—in other words, holding on to all of the territories
occupied in 1967 no matter the cost. Yitzhak Rabin, a former general who had served
as defense minister in Shamir’s unity government, assumed leadership of the Labor
Party and campaigned on a platform of negotiating for peace with the Palestinians
even if it meant relinquishing control of some of the territories.
Rabin won the elections with a broad enough margin to give him a mandate for
his platform. After taking office on July 13, 1992, he called for new talks between
Israel and a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. In his first speech to the Knesset, Rabin
also took the unusual step, for an Israeli prime minister, of addressing the Palestini-
ans directly, telling them (in a reference to the first intifada, which was then fading)
“you have failed in the war against us.” Rabin appealed to the Palestinians to “give
peace a chance—and to cease all violent and terrorist activity for the duration of the
negotiations on autonomy.”
Although demonstrating a new flexibility in negotiations with the Palestinians,
Rabin continued to take an iron-fisted approach to Palestinian violence. In Decem-
ber 1992, after the murder of an Israeli policeman, he ordered the deportation to
Lebanon of more than 400 Hamas activists, and in March 1993 he halted the entry
into Israel of some 30,000 Palestinian workers after members of Hamas and other
groups killed 13 Israelis. Meanwhile, bilateral talks between Israel and a Jordanian-
Palestinian delegation continued into 1993 but made no progress (Madrid Confer-
ence, p. 138).
In December 1992, while the Madrid talks plodded along, two Israeli academics
and a senior official from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) began a series
of informal sessions in Oslo, Norway, under the sponsorship of the Norwegian For-
eign Ministry. Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres and his deputy, Yossi Beilin,
ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS 213