In His Own Words: Netanyahu derailed the Oslo Accords by Tricking America

Netanyahu brags about derailing Oslo accords with political trickery

“I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily"

As resistance to American military support for Israel grows, a 2001 hidden-camera video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shows him speaking candidly about aggressive military action against Palestinians.

The video shows Netanyahu bragging "of having derailed the Oslo accords with political trickery."

The almost six-minute segment stems from a video filmed in 2001, following Netanyahu's first term as prime minister from 1996 to 1999.  The film was shot, apparently without Netanyahu's knowledge, when the government of Ariel Sharon had started reinvading the main cities of the West Bank to crush Palestinian resistance in the early stages of the second intifada, a period of increased violence between Palestinians and Israelis from 2000 to 2005 following the failure of peace negotiations and the reoccupation of Palestinian lands by Israeli troops.

In the video, Netanyahu made a series of unguarded admissions about his first term as prime minister, from 1996 to 1999.

The Oslo Accords provided a framework for negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

One of the major hurdles in that process, which began in 1993, concerned Israel's military occupation of Hebron — a significant West Bank city with an aggressive and violent Jewish settlement. Under Netanyahu's predecessor Yitzhak Rabin, Israel agreed in 1995 to remove Israeli troops from Hebron in phases subject to certain terms and conditions.

When Netanyahu took power in 1996, he told then-U.S. President Bill Clinton that he would honor the Hebron agreement reached under the previous administration. In the video, Netanyahu said that the correct policy toward Palestinians should be to hit them "hard" with blows "that are so painful the price will be too heavy to be borne," thus rendering them more amenable to Israeli demands. In the video, one of Netanyahu's hosts asked whether the former prime minister would fear the response from America with such a move. Netanyahu shrugged off the notion that America would do anything but support Israel, stating that America is something that "can easily be moved."

To make this point forcefully, Netanyahu continued by bragging about having manipulated Clinton and used deceptive tactics to intentionally destroy the Oslo peace process.

Netanyahu … bragged how he undercut the peace process when he was prime minister during the Clinton administration. "They asked me before the election if I'd honor [the Oslo Accords]," he said. "I said I would, but … I'm going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the '67 borders”.

Netanyahu raised this anecdote and explained to those gathered around him that "I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily".

Seated on a sofa in the house, Netanyahu tells the family that he deceived the US president of the time, Bill Clinton, into believing he was helping implement the Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestinians, by making minor withdrawals from the West Bank while actually entrenching the occupation. He boasts that he thereby destroyed the Oslo process.

He dismisses the US as "easily moved to the right direction" and calls high levels of popular American support for Israel "absurd". He also suggests that, far from being defensive, Israel's harsh military repression of the Palestinian uprising was designed chiefly to crush the Palestinian Authority led by Yasser Arafat so that it could be made more pliable for Israeli diktats. In parallel, Netanyahu was courting Hamas in Gaza by allowing financial and military assistance to flow to it from Qatar to drive a wedge between the West Bank's Palestinian Authority and Hamas in Gaza.

The broader significance of the video is that it showed Netanyahu openly stating that he could manipulate American foreign policy and that he was willing to negotiate in bad faith.