Netanyahu’s Unsustainable Oslo Ambivalence

“The number of people killed on Oct. 7 and after the Oslo Accords are the same,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly proclaimed in a closed-door meeting of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee last week. This tone-deaf statement garnered widespread criticism in Israel. Nonetheless, it is part of an effort by Netanyahu to affirm his hawkish bona fides and salvage his political future at a time when an overwhelming number of Israelis hold him responsible for the failures that led to Oct. 7.

 Netanyahu is resorting to a familiar political strategy of portraying himself as a reliable opponent of the Oslo paradigm, or the idea that Israel’s security can be served by ceding territory and responsibility to the Palestinians. It is also, by extension, a criticism of Oslo’s flagship innovation, the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank and was designed to serve as the vehicle for eventually establishing a sovereign Palestinian state. This political debate is especially relevant now as Israel is working to destroy Hamas in Gaza without a clear plan for what should replace it.

Netanyahu has repeatedly gone on the record opposing the Palestinian Authority returning to Gaza, contrary to President Joe Biden’s stated priorities. He has publicly rebuked the Palestinian Authority as a terror-supporting enemy fundamentally unfit to rule Gaza. In a bid to shore up support among backbenchers in his Likud party, he reportedly proclaimed that he alone holds the ability to prevent a Palestinian state. Netanyahu’s pitch, essentially, is that Palestinian self-rule created Israel’s current predicament, and he is the only one who can prevent Israel from returning to that path.

Yet this hardline messaging reflects more how Netanyahu wants to be perceived domestically rather than his actual politics. Netanyahu’s relationship with the Oslo paradigm and the Palestinian Authority is far more ambivalent and nuanced than is politically expedient for him to express. This is not to say that Netanyahu isn’t genuinely opposed to Palestinian statehood: He is, and the divergence between his and Biden’s desired outcomes is real.

But Netanyahu knows as well as anyone that a functioning Palestinian Authority is an Israeli interest. His record over his decades in power is not one of decisively rejecting the Oslo framework due to an ideological to Jewish sovereignty throughout the historic land of Israel, including the West Bank. Instead, he has sought to enable Oslo’s gradual deterioration, while keeping it on life support to advance his political interests. The problem arises from Netanyahu’s adherence to a playbook whose viability has long expired, and it soon may hasten both the demise of the Palestinian Authority and his own political career. Crucially, the end result could be an internationally isolated Israel indefinitely occupying a destitute and understandably resentful 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza upon the war’s conclusion. 

A Familiar Pattern

The pattern of how Netanyahu approaches the Palestinian issue has been largely consistent over the course of his 30 years as a prominent figure in Israeli politics. As leader of the opposition in the mid-1990s, when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was leading the country through the landmark Oslo talks with the Palestinians, Netanyahu capitalized on and echoed the outrage of many right-wing Israelis who saw Rabin as not just politically misguided, but as a traitor to Zionism itself for his willingness to hand over land. But following Rabin’s murder, when Netanyahu ascended to the premiership for the first time in 1996, the young Likud leader slowed, but did not reverse, the progress toward expanding Palestinian self-rule. He ultimately signed the Hebron Protocol in 1997, which handed 80 percent of the flashpoint West Bank city to the Palestinian Authority. He also signed the Wye River Memorandum in 1998, which advanced the implementation of previous Oslo agreements. He coupled this tepid progress, however, with renewed settlement construction in the West Bank, undermining Palestinians’ trust in Israel’s intentions and the political horizon for a final-status agreement that would create an actual Palestinian state.

Since his return to the premiership in 2009, Netanyahu has accepted and understood the benefits of Israel outsourcing much of its previous responsibilities in the West Bank and most of its responsibilities in Gaza. He took for granted that the Palestinian Authority would be there to collect the trash in Ramallah, run the hospitals in Bethlehem, and bust terror cells in Nablus — and stay out of the way when the Israel Defense Forces did decide to conduct security operations. He paid lip service to former Secretary of State John Kerry’s ill-fated peace talks and, on rare occasions, mouthed empty statements about supporting a vaguely defined two-state framework. All the while, he undermined the Palestinian Authority’s ability to actually deliver on the promise of statehood by maintaining Hamas governance in Gaza, bolstering settlement construction deep in the West Bank, proclaiming his intention to annex parts of the West Bank, and allying himself with far-right religious radicals. In his messaging, he helped to normalize the widespread view that the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian national movement inherently run counter to Israel’s national interests. In doing so, he laid the groundwork for the situation that has endured to the present day: a shaky Palestinian autonomy buckling under the weight of enduring Israeli occupation.

The Influence of the Far Right

This past year, even as Netanyahu allowed his far-right partners to advance their annexationist agenda at an unprecedented pace, he allowed surrogates like National Security Advisor Tzahi Hanegbi to quietly advance minimal measures to keep the Palestinian Authority financially and operationally functional and prevent a complete security deterioration in the West Bank, including through de-escalation summits at Aqaba and Sharm el-Sheikh in February and March. Similarly, just this week, Netanyahu convened the security cabinet with the intention of approving the transfer of withheld tax revenues to the Palestinian Authority and allowing permit-holding West Bank Palestinians to resume work in Israel. Both of these measures are important steps to alleviate a deepening crisis facing the West Bank Palestinian economy. Netanyahu ultimately put off the vote because he did not have the support of a majority of ministers. Netanyahu entertains and advances these types of efforts to maintain Palestinian self-rule partially due to American entreaties, but also because he knows that preventing a full-scale meltdown in the West Bank requires a somewhat functional Palestinian Authority.

More than anything else, however, Netanyahu is motivated by self-preservation. This effort has been driving his staunch anti-Palestinian Authority rhetoric in the weeks following the Oct. 7 attacks. Well aware of his cratering popularity, his priority is to shore up his coalition and delay new elections, which in all likelihood he would lose. His far-right partners — the parties of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir — see the Palestinian Authority as just as much of an enemy as Hamas and would gladly light the West Bank on fire to facilitate its collapse and destroy any possibility of Palestinian statehood. For Netanyahu, preventing a coalition crisis is worth publicly arguing with Israel’s most important ally by firmly rejecting the possibility of the Palestinian Authority returning to Gaza.

Yet Netanyahu is running out the clock on this Janus-faced approach. Since Oct. 7, he has hemorrhaged support on the moderate right over his perceived mismanagement of Israel’s security and unwillingness to take responsibility. At the same time, the far right is well aware that Netanyahu does not ascribe to their worldview. Radical elements within the government are already going out of their way to distinguish themselves from Netanyahu and ramp up pressure from the right. Even minimal steps to strengthen the Palestinian Authority that Netanyahu is inclined to advance under U.S. pressure, like the aforementioned tax revenue issue, could ultimately be too much for the radical Israeli right — Ben Gvir and Smotrich — to swallow. The Palestinian Authority, meanwhile, is running on borrowed time and facing a serious domestic legitimacy crisis, both due to its own corrupt and ineffective governance and as a result of Israel treating it more as a vassal than a partner.

 As my colleague Michael Koplow explained, Netanyahu is delusional if he thinks Israel will get any help from its neighbors in cleaning up the mess in Gaza without empowering the Palestinian Authority — returning in good faith to the original premise of Oslo.

In the coming weeks and months, the far right may actually issue an ultimatum to make Netanyahu choose between preserving the government he now leads and adhering to bare-minimum Biden administration requests to keep the Palestinian Authority afloat. There’s a real possibility he could choose the former, which could seriously endanger thePalestinian Authority’s viability and result in a significant escalation in the West Bank. It would also kill any prospects for the Palestinian Authority’s return to Gaza. Unable to mobilize any meaningful regional or international investment in a Gaza day-after plan that doesn’t provide a credible political horizon for Palestinians, Israel would be left with the choice of leaving Gaza prematurely or occupying it indefinitely. Both scenarios would create conditions incredibly ripe for a re-empowered Hamas — as a regime or a popular insurgency — essentially rendering Israel’s war for naught. Netanyahu’s quest to stay in power comes at the expense of articulating a credible vision for Gaza’s future. Hamas and the territorially maximalist Israeli far right are the ones who ultimately stand to gain.

This issue is of utmost concern for the Biden administration, which is doubtlessly counting on eventual new leadership in Israel more amenable to its post-war priorities but needs to keep the situation as stable as possible in the meantime. As much as Netanyahu can’t afford to alienate the far right, a country at war can’t afford to alienate its most important ally. Biden’s best hope is that his pressure wins out over Israel’s radical right.

Alex Lederman is Israel Policy Forum’s Senior Policy and Communications Associate. His analysis has been featured in CNN, Time, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Israel Policy Exchange, and other outlets. He is a graduate of Yale University.

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