Our Wednesday News Analysis | What happens if Israel ends the Oslo Accords?

In early May, the far-right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party submitted a bill calling for the formal revocation of the Oslo Accords, the framework governing relations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) since 1993.

The Gaza war, the erosion of prospects for statehood, and intensifying Israeli annexation rhetoric have combined to create perhaps
the deepest crisis facing the Palestinian political system since Oslo was first signed more than three decades ago.

The central question is no longer simply whether Israel can end Oslo,
but what kind of political order will emerge if the framework governing
Israeli-Palestinian relations since 1993 have finally collapsed altogether.

Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has postponed a vote on the bill, citing the need for further review, Palestinian analysts say that the proposal itself signals a broader shift in Israeli thinking since the Gaza war.

Since 7 October 2023, Israel’s political establishment has moved towards formalising the rejection of a Palestinian state while consolidating permanent control over the occupied West Bank and asserting security dominance over Gaza.

While the Oslo Accords have long ceased to function on the ground, they remain a legal and political constraint on de jure annexation, and their collapse would have profound implications.

A new reality

Israel’s far-right parties viewed the Gaza war as presenting a rare opportunity to fundamentally reshape the Palestinian political landscape.

Limor Son Har-Melech, the Otzma Yehudit lawmaker who introduced the bill, argued that the Oslo Accords had turned "the Land of Israel into a bargaining chip" and claimed that political conditions inside Israel now allow for steps that were previously impossible.

Abdul Majid Sweilem, a Palestinian political analyst from the West Bank, believes the Israeli far right is no longer merely threatening Oslo rhetorically, but actively attempting to create a new reality in the occupied territories.

"For the Israeli right wing, cancelling Oslo is not symbolic. It is a gateway to removing any legal or political obstacle to annexing large parts of the West Bank," Sweilem told The New Arab.

He said influential figures in Netanyahu's coalition, particularly Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, see the continued existence of the Palestinian Authority as incompatible with their long-term vision of imposing full Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank.

Although Netanyahu delayed the legislation amid fears of an international backlash and diplomatic consequences, Sweilem believes the idea itself remains firmly alive within the government...

Read more: What happens if Israel ends the Oslo Accords?

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ISRAEL’S PATH NOT TAKEN

Source: Seymour Hersh
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/israels-path-not-taken

Published May 15, 2026

A memoir by the son of an Israeli general who took up the Palestinian cause shows what might have been

PLO leader Yasser Arafat (3rd L) meets three members of the Israeli Peace Commettee, Yarcov Arnon (L), Uri Avnery (2nd L), and Matti Peled (3rd R), along with senior member of the PLO Issam Sartawi (2nd R), member of the executive committee of the PLO Mahmud Abbas (aka Abou Mazen, R), and Imad Chakkour, Arafat’s press councillor, on January 21, 1983, in Tunisia. / Photo by AFP via Getty Images.

“Taking the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights,” Miko writes, “was never part of any official plan.”

“For the first time in Israel’s history,” General Peled said, according to a newspaper report at the time, “we are face to face with the Palestinians, without other Arab countries dividing us.

Now we have a chance to offer the Palestinians a state of their own.”
He predicted that if Israel kept the lands, as he knew many generals wanted, “popular resistance to the occupation is sure to arise,
and Israel’s army would be used to quell that resistance, with disastrous and demoralizing results. . . .
This would turn the Jewish state into an increasingly brutal occupying power.”

… “just how deeply rooted the Zionist propaganda machine is in America. The Zionists knew all politics is local. They understood how important it was to get on local school boards and library boards . . . to get their people into philanthropy and into the media. The system is there, and it’s legal. You didn’t have to convince the politicians to support Israeli causes… They knew they had to do it.”

Palestinians in Gaza continue to suffer and die today, and I’ve always considered the horrors there since Hamas’s surprise attack inside Israel on October 7, 2023, to be the work of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. But he and the religious fanatics who keep him in office were not there at the beginning.

A memoir, The General’s Son by Miko Peled, first published in 2012 and reissued in 2022, focuses on the life and times of the author’s father, Matti Peled, an Israeli general who played a key role in the country’s early conquests in the Middle East, including the famed Six-Day War of 1967, in which Israel captured the whole of the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza in a little over one hundred hours of warfare, while also occupying the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Arab casualties were fifteen thousand; Israel suffered less than eight hundred combat losses. In the fanatical Zionist view that existed then and as it does today, these were 4,000-year-old biblical lands—Eretz Yisrael—that were finally being returned to Jewish hands.

General Peled followed his warfare success by arguing that the time had come for Israel to take its foot off the throat of the Palestinian community. His son writes that his father always believed the war he was leading was to be a limited one, with the intent of punishing the Egyptians for their breach of a recent ceasefire and to assert Israeli legitimacy and military might. “Taking the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights,” Miko writes, “was never part of any official plan.”...

Read more: ISRAEL’S PATH NOT TAKEN

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TERRITORIAL IMPERIALISM RETURNS: WHAT LIES BEHIND THE ISRAELI ASSAULT ON IRAN?

Source: Palestine Chronicle
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/territorial-imperialism-returns-what-lies-behind-the-israeli-assault-on-iran/

By Ilan Pappe
Published May 24, 2026

From Israel’s early alliance with the Shah’s Iran to the rise of messianic Zionism and expanding regional warfare, a pressing question has resurfaced amid the 2026 assault on Iran: what truly lies behind Israel’s confrontation with Tehran? In this critical reading, Ilan Pappé argues that the answer extends far beyond security or nuclear concerns, locating the conflict instead within a broader ideological project rooted in Zionism, territorial expansion, and the long-standing effort to reshape the Middle East in ways inseparable from the Palestinian question.

What truly lies behind Israel’s confrontation with Tehran? (Illustration: Palestine Chronicle)

Any analysis of Israel and Zionism needs to distinguish between patterns of continuity rooted in Israel’s ideological foundations and patterns of change resulting from circumstances and the passage of time.

More than anything else, Palestine and Gaza remain the core issues that ...

At the center of the Palestine issue is Zionism as a state ideology that informed the assault on Iran and Lebanon,
the current ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the continued incremental genocide of the people of Gaza,
and the growing pressure through quiet transfer on Palestinians in Israel to leave.

The lesson for Western political elites is that their comfortable assumption
—that only Palestinians, and perhaps some Arabs, are paying the price for Israeli policies—has proven misplaced.

… the world at large can be severely and negatively affected by the unabated aggression
from which Palestinians have suffered since the 1920s, aggression that was ignored and, in many cases, justified by the West.

Israel will not defeat Iran as such; its policies of annexation will be resisted in neighboring countries, and Palestinians will continue to show resilience.

...it is time to disrupt the narrative—still prevalent in too many places—that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, engaged in self-defense for its own sake and for that of “Western civilization.”

This is also true when we analyze Israel’s policies toward Iran, from the days of Israel’s inception until its current assault on Iran.

Until the fall of the Shah and his regime in 1979, Iran was an important member of the coalition of non-Arab countries that both Israel and the West tried to build against the influence of the Soviet Union and the emergence of progressive Arab regimes committed to pan-Arabism and the liberation of Palestine. This alliance led to the infamous connection between the Shabak, the Israeli secret service, and the Savak, the Iranian secret service, employing similar oppressive methods against Palestinians in the former case and against the regime’s dissidents in the latter.

This axis was dismantled after the Iranian Revolution. Iran identified with the Palestinian struggle for liberation and directly aided political Islamic groups that were offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Palestine, dating back to the early 1930s (hence, the Western narrative claiming that these groups were established by Iran is false).

After the Iranian Revolution, and particularly given the new regime’s commitment to the liberation of Palestine and its rejection of the idea of a Jewish state, the strategy against Iran resembled Israeli policy toward Arab countries that appeared determined to show solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

In the 20th century, this strategy focused on clandestine interference in the affairs of those states. This meant sowing divisions within societies and supporting minorities seeking to secede from the mother country...

Read more: Territorial Imperialism Returns: What Lies Behind the Israeli Assault on Iran?