When Arafat signed the Oslo agreement, he signed over more than 70 percent of the Palestinians' historic homeland. There has been plenty of rhetoric on both sides, including many on the Israeli side calling for all Palestinians to be removed from what is now Israel and the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. If such rhetoric is going to be noted on one side, it is equally valid to note similar rhetoric on the other side...

"It goes without saying that the Gush consider any American-sponsored Arab-Israeli peaceful settlement to be a virtual impossibility; but furthermore, any attempt to achieve that impossibility should be actively sabotaged. For them, the Oslo Accords, and the prospect of the "re-division" of the "Land of Israel," was a profound, existential shock. It was, said Rabbi Yair Dreyfus, an "apostasy" which, the day it came into effect, would mark "the end of the Jewish-Zionist era [from 1948 to 1993] in the sacred history of the Land of Israel." The Gush and their allies declared a "Jewish intifada" against it. The grisly climax came when, in the Ramadan of February 1994, a doctor, Baruch Goldstein, Israeli but Brooklyn-born-and-bred, machine-gunned Muslim worshippers in Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque, killing 29 of them before he was killed himself. This was no mere isolated act of a madman. Goldstein was a follower of New York's Lubavitcher Rebbe. But what he did reflected and exemplified the whole milieu from which he sprang, the religious settlers, and the National Religious Party behind them. There was no more eloquent demonstration of that than the immediate, spontaneous responses to the mass murder; these yielded nothing, in breadth or intensity, to the Palestinians' responses to their fundamentalist suicide bombings, when these first got going in the wake of it. Many were the rabbis who praised this "act," "event" or "occurrence," as they delicately called it. Within two days the walls of Jerusalem's religious neighborhoods were covered with posters extolling Goldstein's virtues and lamenting that the toll of dead Palestinians had not been higher. In fact, the satisfaction extended well beyond the religious camp in general; polls said that 50 percent of the Israeli people, and especially the young, more or less approved of it.

The "Jewish intifada" also turned on other Jews. Yigal Amir, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995, was no less a product than Goldstein of the milieu from which the latter sprang. As in other religious traditions, the hatred Jewish fundamentalists nurtured for Jewish "traitors" and "apostates" was perhaps even greater than it was for non-Jews. Rabin, and the "left," were indeed traitors in their eyes; they were "worshippers of the Golden Calf of a delusory peace." And in a clear example of their deep emotional kinship with the fundamentalists, Sharon and several other Likud and far-right secular nationalist leaders joined the hue and cry against Rabin and his government of "criminals," "Nazis" and "Quislings." Declaring that "there are tyrants at the gate," Sharon likened Oslo to the collaboration between France's Marshal Pétain and Hitler and said that Rabin and his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, were both "crazed" in their indifference to the slaughter of Jews.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040216&s=hirst