A senior official of Fatah, the ruling faction of the Palestinian Authority, has openly called for a return to an “armed struggle” against Israel to establish a new Arab state within Israel’s current borders. He stated that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) approved an “armed struggle” in a meeting this past August.
Nabil Sha'ath, who was the PA’s first foreign minister when the late PLO chief Yasser Arafat was in power, told an Arabic-language newspaper, "We tried for 18 years through negotiations despite Israel’s aggressiveness against us and attempts to destroy our rights,” he asserted.
He called the current period “dangerous” and said it requires a populist and international effort to clamp a boycott on Israel similar to the embargo on South Africa when it was ruled by a white minority.
The “diplomatic process” began in 1991, when former Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, under international threat of a boycott of Israel following the beginning of the First Intifada that began in Gaza, debated Arafat in Madrid. As the Arab uprising intensified, the United States guided the Rabin administration (in which President Shimon Peres was then Israel's Foreign Minister) into negotiations with Arafat, resulting in the Oslo Accords that called for both sides to negotiate the future of eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.
The PA escalated its armed struggle, using sniper attacks and suicide bombings as the subsequent administration of then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak made further concessions, culminating in Barak's offer for a new Arab state on more than 95 percent of eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. Arafat rejected the proposal and launched the Second Intifada, also known as the Oslo War, in September 2000.
A United States “Roadmap” plan early six years ago spurred resumed negotiations, which broke off following the Hamas militia war against Fatah in the Gaza region, which has since remained under the iron grip of Hamas. PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has refused to resume talks unless the Netanyahu government agrees to enforce a total building freeze for Jews in eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.