For more than half a century, the greatest obstacle to Middle East peace has not been the absence of bold Palestinian overtures, but the relentless Israeli determination to bury them before they can take root.
Time and again - from the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) unprecedented 1988 recognition of Israel and renunciation of armed struggle, to Hamas leaders offering decade-long ceasefires - Palestinian leaders have placed historic compromises on the table.
And time and again, Israel has met these moments not with open hands, but with clenched fists, political sabotage, and assassinations. The pattern is so consistent, so deliberate, that “missing an opportunity for peace” has ceased to be a tragic accident and become a calculated doctrine.
In 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organisation gave Israel the most generous offer in Palestinian history. The PLO accepted the state of Israel, conceded 78% of historic Palestine to “a Jewish State,” and condemned “terrorism in all its forms” and asked in return for a state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.
This should’ve been Israel’s dream scenario: ending the conflict, the First Intifada, and its international isolation and securing its future in the region. However, Tel Aviv went into full panic mode instead.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir immediately rejected the PLO’s gesture, deeming it “crazy and dangerous” and vowing that Israel “will never permit the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories”.
His Defence Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, pledged to use “an iron fist” to crush this peace offering. Israel’s Foreign Ministry activated a damage control team to smear the PLO’s proposal. The one Israeli journalist, David Grossman, who dared to report the PLO’s decision was sacked from his radio job and attacked in the Knesset and all over Israeli media.
Israel’s government and US pro-Israeli organisations also criticised American Jews who met Yasser Arafat to build on his peace gesture. The US denied Arafat a visa to present his offer at the UN General Assembly.
Today, history repeats itself, as European countries try to offer Israel a way out of its heavily damaged image from the Gaza genocide.
Last May in Singapore, French President Emmanuel Macron described recognising Palestine as “a moral duty and a political necessity,” then rendered that statement effectively hollow by conditioning such a symbolic gesture on Hamas disarming, leaving Gaza, and not playing any role in Palestinian governance.
The Israeli government again panicked and instantly accused Macron of “leading a crusade against the Jewish state”.
Tel Aviv has since been similarly attacking every country that expressed an intent to recognise Palestine, accusing them of “rewarding” Hamas, sabotaging ceasefire negotiations, and pushing Israel towards “national suicide”.
Israel’s frantic backlash is telling. Israelis understand that recognition is a European manoeuvre to revive a façade of a long-dead peace process and avoid confronting or holding Israel accountable for its genocide.
The recognition would not have an impact on advancing Palestinian statehood, nor would it restrain Israel’s accelerated annexation of the West Bank.
Yet even a simple gesture like this causes panic in Israel because Netanyahu is trying to persuade his Western allies that the only solution to the Palestinian question is Gaza’s depopulation.
Western leaders try to blame Israel’s rejectionism on Netanyahu’s far-right government. However, every single Israeli Zionist political party, including the leftist Meretz-Labour, has made clear its opposition to the two state solution.
This rejectionism is not new or the result of 7 October but has been a consistent feature of successive Israeli governments since its occupation began in 1967.
Thwarting Palestinian 'peace offensives'
In 1976, the PLO and Arab countries pushed for a resolution at the UN Security Council that called for the two state solution. The resolution received support from all UNSC members, but Israel rejected it, so the US vetoed it.
In 1981, the PLO officially endorsed a proposal from the Soviet Union for Palestinian statehood in the 1967 territories and Israel’s “security and sovereignty”. Months later, Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd offered Israel the most generous proposal possible; Israel would be integrated into the region and guaranteed peace from all Arab countries if it accepted the two state solution.
This offer was reiterated in 2002 as the ‘Arab Peace Initiative’ and endorsed by 57 Muslim countries, Israel ignored it.
Israel saw a threat in this momentum and regarded it as a “peace offensive”; Palestinians were becoming too moderate, and Israel was running out of excuses for maintaining the occupation.
Tel Aviv responded with war on the PLO in Lebanon in order to apply the “fiercest military pressures” to undermine Palestinian moderates and make the PLO more hardline “to halt its rise to political respectability”.
Oslo and the peace process sham
In 1993, Israel was compelled to accept the Oslo Accords by its failure to violently crush the First Intifada and its inability to cope with international isolation, pressure, and the economic, diplomatic, and political damage resulting from its “breaking the bones” strategy against unarmed civilian protesters and children.
The world hailed Oslo as a new era of peace, but Israel put enough loopholes in the agreement to avoid allowing an end to the occupation. Prime Minister Rabin, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for Oslo, made it abundantly clear that it was merely about separation, not Palestinian statehood.
“We do not accept the Palestinian goal of an independent Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan. We believe there is a separate Palestinian entity short of a state,” he said.
Apartheid means 'separateness', and this is what transpired on the ground. Israeli settlements grew exponentially, and more settlers moved into the occupied territory during the “peace process” than before Oslo. Palestinians, meanwhile, were forced to police Israel’s occupation and thwart armed resistance, making apartheid cost-free for Tel Aviv.
In 2000, Israel made clear at Camp David that the maximum it would offer Palestinians was not a sovereign independent state, but rather three discontiguous Bantustans separated by Israeli settlements and military checkpoints without any right of return for Palestinian refugees.
Israel would retain control over Palestine’s airspace, radio, cellphone coverage, and borders with Jordan, and maintain its military bases in 13.3% of the West Bank while annexing 9% and even keeping three settlement blocks in Gaza that cut the enclave into separate pieces.
Israel’s own negotiator and foreign minister, Shlomo Ben Ami, said if he were Palestinian, he would have rejected Camp David’s insane terms. That hasn't stopped Israel ever since from claiming the 2000 summit was its “most generous offer” and repeating the canard “we have no peace partner in Palestine” to legitimise making apartheid permanent.
In 2005, Israel made clear that its redeployment of troops in Gaza and symbolic transfer of 9,000 settlers from Gaza to the West Bank was about “freezing the peace process” and “prevent[ing] the establishment of a Palestinian state”.
A year later, Ehud Olmert became Prime Minister, and PA President Abbas attempted to approach him for peace talks. A top Israeli official told The New Arab that Abbas spent 16 months imploring Olmert to talk to him and negotiate while the latter kept procrastinating.
Eventually, when Olmert’s legal troubles began to surface, he engaged in a legacy-shaping act of negotiating a proposal that was similar to Camp David, while simultaneously launching the bloodiest war on Gaza at the time, Operation Cast Lead.
After 36 meetings where Palestinians bent backwards to get an agreement, Olmert had to resign from his position, and Netanyahu succeeded him.
Hamas' repeated overtures
A cornerstone of Israel's talking points for maintaining apartheid has been the debunked canard that “we left Gaza and got Hamas rockets in return”.
Israel would also blame the collapse of the peace process on Hamas attacks in the 1990s, although the first major Hamas attack in 1994 at the Hadera bus station that killed five people came only after the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre, when 29 Palestinian worshipers were murdered during prayer by Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein.
Like the PLO, Hamas also made several peace offerings to Israel, although more cautiously. The group's leaders saw that the PA had recognised Israel, abandoned armed resistance, and collaborated with Israeli security agencies against fellow Palestinians, but had received nothing in return and lost any leverage or tools of pressure to get meaningful concessions from Israel.
Hence, Hamas’ starting point in the talks was a 10 to 30-year ceasefire that included a full mutual cessation of hostilities without disarmament.
When Hamas made this offer in 1997, Israel immediately responded by attempting to assassinate the group’s top political leader, Khaled Meshal, in Jordan. When Hamas’ founder Ahmed Yassin reiterated the offer in 2004, Israel assassinated him two months later. Israeli officials would later admit they could have made peace with Hamas under Yassin.
Similarly, when Hamas’ top military commander, Ahmad Al-Jabari, began to advance a permanent ceasefire proposal, Israel assassinated him in 2012. Haaretz called Jabari “Israel’s subcontractor in Gaza,” since he went to great lengths to provide Israel with calm during ceasefires and prevent other armed groups from violating this calm.
In 2006, as soon as Hamas formed a government, then Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh sent a letter to the Bush administration offering a compromise with Israel based on the two state solution.
Haniyeh’s advisor, Ahmad Yousef, made a peace proposal that was too lenient, with President Abbas’ Fatah party calling it “worse than the Balfour declaration”. It was premised on establishing a Palestinian state with temporary borders on a third of the West Bank (Area A and B) and the Gaza Strip, then slowly expanding the boundaries of the state through negotiations and diplomacy.
Israel responded by imposing a draconian siege on Gaza and pressuring Switzerland and the UK, which had hosted Yousef, to ban him and any Hamas leaders from entering their countries. It also withheld the PA’s revenues to bankrupt and collapse Hamas’ government in Gaza. Tel Aviv and the US then began plotting a coup to overthrow Hamas.
In 2008, Hamas engaged with an Israeli settler, Rabbi Menachem Froman, to formulate a ceasefire proposal that would lift Israel’s siege on Gaza and, in return, ensure a full cessation of hostilities.
Hamas accepted the final proposal, Israel rejected it out of hand, and later that year launched Operation Cast Lead, whose goal was to “punish, humiliate and terrorise” Gaza’s civilian population, per the UN.
The US Institute of Peace reported in 2009 that Hamas had “sent repeated signals that it may be ready to begin a process of coexisting with Israel”.
Even during Israel’s genocide on Gaza, Hamas has repeatedly stated its willingness to engage in a political process and offered to lay down its arms and dismantle its militant wing if Israel ends its occupation. They alternatively offered a 10-year truce, but Israel has repeatedly rejected those proposals.
A source close to the Gaza ceasefire negotiations told The New Arab that in 2024, Ismail Haniyeh engaged in talks with the US on restricting Hamas to a political party and engaging in a peace process. The source said Haniyeh’s interlocutor was CIA director Bill Burns. Israel immediately assassinated Haniyeh in Tehran as soon as those talks began.
History’s verdict on Israel’s rejectionism will not be written by propagandists in Tel Aviv or speechwriters in Washington - it will be inscribed in the long, bloodstained ledger of squandered chances, broken promises, and deliberate betrayals.
Every murdered negotiator, every scuttled accord, every panic-stricken backlash to even the most symbolic gesture of Palestinian statehood exposes a deeper truth: Israel’s leaders fear peace more than war, because peace would require equality, accountability, and an end to apartheid.
The question is no longer whether Palestinians will achieve freedom or accept coexistence, but how many more “missed opportunities” Israel will force the world to endure before that day arrives.
Muhammad Shehada is a Palestinian writer and analyst from Gaza and the EU Affairs Manager at Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
Follow him on Twitter: @muhammadshehad2