Israel/Palestine

...how about not continually harassing, repressing and immiserating the OTHER guy...you know, the other guy who, in this case, lives totally at your mercy. How about ceasing to try to KILL the other guy? How about no longer acting like "the other guy" has less right to be where he is than you do?

OH, and no, the Palestinians weren't continually rejecting Israel.

Arafat made offer after offer after offer to negotiate.

Those offers would have led to the PLO(and, if these offers were accepted when the PLO was at the height of its influence, rather than being only partially accepted in the Nineties when the PLO, in part as a result of years of Israeli efforts to try and discredit and remove it as the negotiating voice of Palestinians, was no longer in a position to fully enforce compliance on the Palestinian side, would have stuck), recognizing Israel in exchange for Israeli acceptance of a Palestinian state.

Israeli government after Israeli government refused to take him up on it, refused to accept the reality that there was no way any Palestinian leadership could ever agree to anything short of a real state for THEIR people(for most of the time from 1967 to 1994, all the Israeli side was willing to offer was Begin's "autonomy" proposal-a proposal every Palestinian knew would never give them any real say in their lives and could be revoked at a moment's notice, as Begin demonstrated when he arrested democratically-elected West Bank mayors and which Netanyahu permanently discredited by his arrogant insistence on sending the IDF in to retake the ENTIRE area and reduce the PA to a meaningless shadow government with no power to do anything), and refused to accept that there was never going to be any alternate Palestinian leadership which would ever be MORE flexible than the PLO. They also refused to accept the reality that a peace agreement without the PLO, or any other armed factions, would be intrinsically meaningless, since any side not included in the agreement would simply go on fighting and nobody would be able to do anything to stop them-and I think you'd have to concede the point, that it would never realistic or even remotely reasonable to expect a non-PLO Palestinian government to launch a military campaign to liquidate any Palestinian factions not party to an agreement-you can't ask a new state, as part of an independence agreement, to immediately start a civil war, for God's sakes. A new country can't come into existence with its leaders pledged to kill large groups of people living within its bounds.

And sometimes, the Israeli side had the most pointless, trivial grounds for refusing to negotiate imaginable...for example, what DIFFERENCE did it make if the PLO recognized Israel as soon as talks began(which was what Arafat usually proposed) rather than recognizing it BEFORE negotiating? It was recognition either way, and it meant the same thing either way.

And there were also the decades when the Israeli side refused to admit that Palestinian national identity was a thing or that Palestinians themselves had any real roots in the lands, insulting these people by pretending that they basically all came in on the night bus from Cairo in late 1946 or something just to be nasty, as well as pretending that their issues with the Israeli state were based on prejudice against Jews when it was clear that, while there were always some Palestinian anti-Semites, the anger Palestinians expressed was not mainly bigotry it was the anger any oppressed people would naturally people towards anyone who oppressed it.

It was never bigotry, for example, to be angry that Israeli soldiers destroyed your home, stole your olive or lemon trees, or caused your grandfather to die of a heart attack at a checkpoint in the name of maintaining their authority for no other reason than the sake of displaying "authority".

And it's not bigotry for Palestinians to refuse to accept a phraseology for recognizing Israel that would require them to recognize it as a state where some of their own relatives would effectively be treated as an inferior race-which is what the words Netanyahu demands would do. It would be impossible for Israeli Arabs to ever again be treated equally with other Israeli citizens under the law if Netanyahu's phraseology-words NO previous Israeli government ever demanded that Palestinians say-were imposed.