Political debate in Israel is not only about borders, security or identity. It is also about collective memory, and about the question of who is entitled to use history – and, above all, how. Israel’s right has a consistent method: when it needs to explain a failure, disaster or crisis, the blame is found on the left side of the political map, because of mistakes it made in the past. When it needs to justify a controversial policy in the present, history is turned on its head, and actions taken by the left in the past suddenly become a precedent that confers legitimacy.
The most prominent example is the Oslo Accords. In right-wing discourse, Oslo is not a diplomatic process that failed to mature into a permanent-status agreement, but a fundamental mistake that can explain every failure. Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed that Oslo is the “mother of all sins,” and has even drawn a distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority in which the only difference is the pace of our annihilation at their hands, not their intent. In December 2023, Netanyahu even compared the number of people killed since the Oslo Accords with the October 7 massacre, in an attempt to assign responsibility for the disaster to those accords (The Times of Israel, December 12, 2023). This is not merely a historical interpretation; it is a conceptual framework according to which the left brought terrorism – including October 7. And there are people who buy it, even though Netanyahu himself has served as prime minister since 2009.
Throughout those years, right-wing governments adhered to the same diplomatic and security outlook, within which the historical context of the early 1990s, the broad international support for the talks and the effort to reach an agreement, and the fact that the Oslo Accords were designed from the outset as a gradual process dependent on difficult decisions later on – decisions that Israel, too, and not only the Palestinian side, refused to make – have almost entirely disappeared. Instead of examining what worked, what failed, and what was designed in a way that required additional decisions in order to succeed, one total conclusion is asserted: it was a disaster, and therefore any future diplomatic initiative is doomed to reproduce that disaster.
A similar pattern applies to the disengagement from the Gaza Strip. Although the move was carried out by a right-wing government headed by Ariel Sharon, and was not intended to advance an agreement but rather – as his bureau chief, Dov Weisglass, put it – to “put the diplomatic process in formaldehyde,” the political right adopted the disengagement as a symbol of the “doctrine of withdrawals” and regards it as proof that every withdrawal from territory necessarily leads to a security threat.
The disengagement, too, is presented apart from its context: a unilateral move, without an agreement, without coordination and without international accompaniment. At the same time, the debate erases the separation policy pursued by Netanyahu and his successors, the explicit assertion that “Hamas is an asset” (precisely because of its opposition to a diplomatic solution), and the strategic choice to manage the conflict rather than resolve it.
Instead of conducting a substantive discussion of the disengagement and the conditions necessary for any diplomatic move, it has become a warning sign that need only be raised to shut down any discussion. Thus, almost absurdly, a move intended to prevent a diplomatic agreement is used as proof that any future diplomatic agreement will necessarily be a disaster. The basic distinction between a unilateral withdrawal and a diplomatic agreement has been erased in favor of a simple and effective narrative of fear.
Yet when the right wants to justify controversial steps in the present, it uses history in the opposite direction. Thus, for example, when Bezalel Smotrich said from the Knesset podium that Ben-Gurion should have “finished the job” and expelled all the Arabs (The Times of Israel, October 13, 2021), the debate was not only about the statement itself, but about the psychological mechanism it activates: David Ben-Gurion, the father of the Labor movement, who advocated compromises, is used by the right to justify extremism. If the left of that time was complicit in the injustices of 1948, the argument goes, then today’s left has no moral right to preach. This is not a historical reading, but a cynical use of the past, detached from the complexity in which Ben-Gurion operated on the eve of the state’s establishment and from the existential circumstances of that period.
The same logic is also applied to the settlement enterprise. When criticism is voiced, the right’s standard response is: “Who started it? The left.” Indeed, between 1967 and 1977, dozens of settlements were established in accordance with the Allon Plan. But the context is cut away. Against the background of the continuing Arab refusal to recognize Israel and the threat of a potential eastern front, the Allon Plan was intended to minimize, as far as possible, the inclusion of a Palestinian population under Israeli sovereignty.
It was no coincidence that Yitzhak Rabin wrote in his book The Rabin Memoirs: “We must not push Jewish settlers into the heart of the West Bank, which is densely populated by Arabs.” To say “the left started it” without saying how, where and why is not history, but a slogan intended for consumers of ignorance.
One cannot argue simultaneously that the left is dangerous because it made mistakes in the past, and that the right’s policy is legitimate because it continues what the left did in the past. Either the past is a warning that requires correction, or it is a precedent that legitimizes continuation. Each time, the right chooses the option that serves its immediate purpose: delegitimizing its rival when it needs to place responsibility on it, and legitimizing itself when it seeks to validate a problematic move.
The political center and the ultra-Orthodox parties also participate in this game. The centrist parties adopt convenient parts of the right-wing narrative, distance themselves from Oslo as a decision made under different conditions, yet avoid defending the very idea of a diplomatic agreement. In doing so, they enable the right to entrench Oslo as an absolute failure without offering an alternative.
Among the ultra-Orthodox parties, the use of history is even more pragmatic: when military service, education or budgets are at issue, they enthusiastically embrace Ben-Gurion’s legacy and the status quo (Ben-Gurion’s letters to Agudat Yisrael, 1947). When settlements, annexation or diplomatic confrontation are at issue, they align themselves with the right and claim that this is a “Zionist continuity” that must not be challenged (coalition agreements with Likud in the years 2015-2023). The fact that Ben-Gurion himself, that secular socialist leader, is both the father of the status quo and the man identified with the Nakba allows the ultra-Orthodox parties to move freely between narratives. For them, history is not a moral or ideological anchor, but a repository of useful quotations.
This selective use of history comes at a heavy public and diplomatic price. When every diplomatic initiative is rejected in advance as a continuation of the “Oslo disaster,” discussion of the future is blocked. Instead of asking what has changed, what structural flaws existed in the Oslo Accords, and what mechanisms were missing from them, Israeli politics contents itself with a single slogan: we already tried. That is not a historical lesson, but an evasion of thought.
The contradiction becomes even sharper in view of the fact that, since 2009, Israel has been governed almost continuously by right-wing or center-right governments. During this period, no diplomatic agreements were advanced, Israeli control over the West Bank deepened, and the conflict became more complicated. Yet whenever a failure occurs – culminating in October 7 – the finger points backward: to Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and the Oslo Accords. History serves here as a kind of political insurance policy that prevents a genuine discussion of responsibility in the present.
The left is not free of mistakes, and the right is not wrong in all its claims. The problem lies in the use of history as a mechanism of explanation and justification. Mobilized history is narrow and detached from context. The past becomes a political commodity, and as a result, the future, too, remains directionless. A state that argues about history without holding it in its entirety finds it difficult to formulate a vision.
First published in Haaretz, 04.06.2026
