that war were too fresh for the Arabs, and Israelis were too smitten by the prospect
of creating the Greater Israel of Zionist dreams—in other words, holding onto all of
the territory captured from the Arabs in 1967. One potential breakthrough was Egypt-
ian president Anwar al-Sadat’s decision to reach out to Israel in 1977, an act that led
to the first formal peace treaty between Israel and an Arab nation, in March 1979,
but resulted in no real progress on settling the issue of the Palestinians.
Thus far, the Oslo Accords are the closest the Palestinians and Israelis have come
to peace. In September 1993, the two sides signed agreements under which Israel offi-
cially recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the representative of
the Palestinians, and the PLO acknowledged Israel’s existence. Several subsequent
agreements sought to give the Palestinians authority to govern increasingly larger blocks
of territory. By action or inaction, however, both sides allowed the hope inspired by
Oslo to slip into the more-familiar despair. One of the greatest blows to the Oslo
peace process was the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in Novem-
ber 1995 by Yigal Amir, an Israeli Jew opposed to peace talks with the Palestinians.
In subsequent months a series of suicide bombings by Palestinians convinced Israelis
to elect a right-wing government, which stalled the peace process and expanded Jew-
ish settlements in the Palestinian territories. Meanwhile, the new Palestinian Author-
ity, under the leadership of Yasir Arafat, proved to be corrupt and incompetent, and
it squandered the limited opportunities available to it. By the time another chance for
peace arrived in 2000, attitudes had hardened again on both sides, and another cycle
of violence ensued.
Throughout the years, extremists on both sides have been a driving force in the
ongoing conflict. It is not surprising that in the land that produced the world’s three
great monotheistic religions, the hard-liners have used religion to pressure secular-
oriented leaders. On the Israeli side, religious nationalists pushed successive govern-
ments to establish Jewish settlements on the lands occupied by Israel in the June 1967
War; these settlements served to affirm historical Jewish claims to the land and to make
it more difficult for any government to trade the land for peace with the Arabs. Among
the Palestinians, frustration with the failures of Arafat’s leadership contributed to the
rise in the 1990s of Hamas and other Islamist groups, which added suicide bombing
to their jihad (holy war) against the Israelis.
By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the views and actions of the extrem-
ists on both sides had limited the options of their respective political leaderships. The
success of Hamas in winning Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 made this
dynamic all the more complex by deepening the turmoil in the Palestinian territories
and allowing Israelis to argue that they had no one to talk to on the other side; the
Israelis long had used this same argument when Arafat’s Fatah faction controlled the
Palestinian government. Yet another layer of complexity was added in mid-2007, when
conflict between Fatah and Hamas erupted into something close to a Palestinian civil
war, resulting in Hamas gaining full control of the Gaza Strip while Fatah held on to
the West Bank. It suddenly looked as if historic Palestine might be divided into three
entities—Israel and two Palestinian fiefdoms. This prospect appeared to make peace
even more remote.
The international community, notably Britain through its control of Palestine for
three decades, helped lay the groundwork for the eventual conflict between the Jews
of Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. Ever since 1948, the great powers (often acting
ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS 167