A settler, bombers, and a law student — how Oslo was killed | WHO KILLED THE PEACE? Part 5

History Onion · Part 5 · 2:59

At dawn on 25 February 1994, an Israeli doctor named Baruch Goldstein walked into the mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron in army uniform and opened fire on Palestinians at prayer. About 29 were killed; Palestinian accounts put the toll at 50–70. Six weeks later Hamas carried out its first suicide bombing inside Israel, and called it revenge for Hebron. That is the mechanism this episode is about. Oslo faced what political scientists call spoilers on BOTH sides at once — people who believed any compromise was surrender, who never coordinated with each other, and who never needed to. Each side's violence recruited for the other's. The chain runs through the bus bombings on Dizengoff Street and at Beit Lid, through the rallies where Yitzhak Rabin was called a traitor, to 4 November 1995, when a 25-year-old law student shot the Prime Minister at a peace rally in Tel Aviv — and then to the nine days in 1996 when three bombings killed around sixty people and flipped an election by roughly 29,000 votes. No verdict here. The question goes to you.