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Tuesday, January 31, 2023

How Hard Is it To Create Peace Talks between Palestinians and Israelis?

 Nadene Goldfoot                     

               Prime Ministers Rabin and Peres

Way back in 1992, Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres had worked together.  Peres had accepted Rabin's offer but the promised deadline of 6 to 9 months had had no progress.  The talks in Washington between Israel and the Palestinians from Judea-Samaria and east Jerusalem thought Israel offered too little and Israel thought their opponents were asking too much--notably to have East Jerusalem which Israel had taken back in 1967.  (Who wants to argue about Jerusalem being King David's city?)  


Then it happened, an incident that stopped the talks in 1992.  

On December 11, 1992, Nissim Toledano, a 29 year old Israeli border policeman was kidnapped as he was leaving home in Lod.  6 hours later, 2 masked men entered the office of the Muslim counterpart of the Red Cross, the Red Crescent in Judea-Samaria's town of El Bira.    The abduction and killing of Nissim Toledano began on 13 December 1992, when a squad of Hamas abducted Israeli border policeman Senior Sergeant Nissim Toledano in Lod. Although the captors demanded the release of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin for Toledano, Toledano was killed by his captors.   

 At about 4:30 am, 13 December 1992, a squad of Hamas terrorists kidnapped 29-year-old Israeli border policeman Senior Sergeant Nissim Toledano in Lod, as he walked from his home to attend his administrative job.  During the same day Hamas demanded that Sheikh Ahmed Yassin be released the same day until 9:00 pm in exchange for Toledano. Toledano's captors threatened to kill Toledano unless Yasin would be freed.Israel refused to negotiate until it received evidence that Toledano was alive and well.  Two days later, on 15 December 1992, Toledano's body was discovered near the communal Israeli settlement in the West Bank Kfar Adumim.Toledano's body was found bound and stabbed. Pathological findings indicated that Toledano was murdered two-to-six hours after the ultimatum expired. In addition, the findings indicated that the strangulation and stab wounds were not carried out at the site at which Toledano's body was discovered.                                  Nissim Toledano, Son of Meir and Hasiba. Meir was born in the city of Meknes, Morocco, on March 9, 1931. He studied in the “Kol Israel Haverim” school there, and was a member of a youth movement, from which he aspired to immigrate to Israel. They saw his enthusiasm as fleeting, but it was not long before he reached the age of seventeen, managed to escape from the family and together with his friends to the movement came to Israel in peace; This was in 1948. Upon arriving on the shores of Eretz Israel, he joined the combat  systems of the War of Independence. In 1951, after his parents’ pressure to return to them, he had to fulfill their request out of respect for them. Shortly after his arrival he took a wife on condition that his honeymoon be spent in Israel. Finally, he established his home in Israel and lived there, and found his bread in glass work. He fell on the 12th of Shvat 5719 (21.1.1959) while fulfilling his duties and was put to rest at the military cemetery in Kiryat Shaul. He left a wife and a daughter.                 

                                    Sheikh Ahmed Yassin

The kidnappers announced that they were members of Hamas's Islamic Resistance Movement and left a photocopy of Toledano's  identity card and a letter for the Israeli authorities demanding the release of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.  Since 1989, Yassin been serving a life sentence in an Israeli jail.  He was released in 1997. 

In 1987, during the First IntifadaHamas carried out its first attack against Israel in which two Israeli soldiers were abducted and killed. The Israel Defense Forces immediately arrested the founder of Hamas Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and sentenced him to life in prison for masterminding terrorist attacks. Hamas then began planning the capture of an Israeli soldier in order to seek the release of Yassin in a swap. 

The Sheikh was a quadriplegic and a fundamentalist clergyman  and leader of Hamas, which he had established in February 1988 in Gaza.  Like other Arabs, the sheikh rejected the state of Israel and so was against peace talks with it.  However, he was a rival of the PLO.  He, in competition, called on the Arabs to help him establish an Islamic state in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank (Judea-Samaria).  He had lots of followers who attacked, killed and kidnapped Israelis.  

In retaliation, Israel captured and jailed him, hoping that Hamas would collapse without his leadership.  That's when the Sheikh's followers then kidnapped Toledano to force Israel to release their leader.     

     Here, Arafat, Rabin and Peres received Oslo 1994 joint Nobel Peace Prize       

Oslo Peace Talks in 1993    The Oslo Accord in 1993  was an attempt in 1993 to set up a framework that would lead to the resolution of the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It was the first face-to-face agreement between the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) 

Arab Men who kidnapped and murdered Israeli teenagers, school teachers and off-duty soldiers, Palestinian fighters who killed suspected collaborators and men from the West Bank and Gaza Strip with whom they had worked or lived side-by-side with for years are among the 104 prisoners expected to be released as a gesture to the PA for the resumption of peace talks.

A glance at the lists published by the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club (PPC) and leaked to Israeli websites by Israeli officials shows Arab men responsible for terror attacks ranging from complicated, planned-out operations to hastily crafted acts of brutal violence directed at Israelis.

Deep within the list are the names of two Gaza Strip natives, Yusef Said al-Al and Ayman Taleb Abu Sitteh, who late at night on December 31, 1993, broke into the Ramle house of David Bublil after he and an acquaintance, Haim Weitzman, had turned in for the night. They stabbed the two men to death as they slept and then mutilated their bodies, cutting off their ears as souvenirs.


Resource; 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimon_Peres#:~:text=Shimon%20Peres%20(%2F%CA%83i%CB%90%CB%8C,Israel%20from%202007%20to%202014.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abduction_and_killing_of_Nissim_Toledano

Book:  Israel and Arabs by Ahron Bregman, and Jihan El-Tahri , p275-277.  

https://honorisraelsfallen.com/fallen/toledano-nissim/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_I_Accord

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