What was the alternative? It still remains the case that, to get to a sustainable peace, Israel is going to have to get "buy-in" from the armed factions, since military victory in any form is impossible in this conflict.
To have any chance of that, the PLO leadership had to be allowed back into Gaza and the West Bank. And, unlike the actions the supposedly "dovish" Israeli governments of the NIneties repeatedly chose, the PLO needed to be able to show that agreeing to co-exist with the Israelis would not mean being humiliated or losing face. Even Peres and Rabin refused to do what was necessary to facilitate that- they refused to impose a permanent freeze on settlement expansion, refused to treat the Palestinian leadership as equals in the negotiating process- the Northern Irish concept of "parity of esteem" was never used in this Nineties, and should have been- and refused even to accept that peace would HAVE to mean accepting the creation of a viable, sustainable Palestinian state made up of the West Bank and Gaza. Rabin refused to even use the words "Palestinian state", and in that decade Israeli propaganda continued to push the inflammatory lie that support for Palestinian self-determination was "Anti-Semitic".
And the whole time, Israeli governments of all parties never gave up on their pointless obsession with removing the PLO as the negotiating voice of the Palestinian people- and STILL won't admit that that was proven to be a mistake by the rise of Hamas, the faction Likud in particular did all it could to bolster as an alternative to the PLO.
Hamas is horrible. Hezbollah is horrible. But their rise in Palestinian politics is a direct result of the Israeli government's absurd insistence on trying to dictate who the Palestinian leadership would be, even though they knew the whole time that all that approach could ever lead to was the emergence of somethjing like Hamas or something worse.
Ordinary Palestinians and ordinary Israelis are reaping the whirlwind sowed by this approach.
The Israeli government has ended up the country it governs into a pariah state, by insisting, in defiance or any level of reason, that the only way the rest of the world can prove we don't support the persecution of people who are Jewish is by defending the right of a state which purports to exist in their name, whether those people back what that state does or not, to persecute another people- a people- the Palestinians- who bear no responsibility whatsoever for the historic persecution and misery inflicted so barbarically on the world's Jewish communities- persecution and misery inflicted, in the overwhelming majority of cases, by light-skinned European, British and North American "Christians".
