On Sept. 28, 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo II Accords, also known as the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement. It provided for Israel’s withdrawal from the cities in Judea-Samaria (the West Bank), where 98 percent of the Palestinian Arabs reside. And in the weeks that followed, Israel did just that. Israel’s forces retreated from the cities of Nablus (Shechem), Jenin, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tulkarm, Jericho and almost all of Hebron. Later, they withdrew from 100 percent of the Gaza Strip. A new entity was established, the Palestinian Authority, which took over all those areas. For the past 20 years, the PA has policed the streets, collected the garbage, issued the building permits and administered the elections — that is, when the PA deigned to have elections at all. In Gaza, the PA ruled at first. Today, Hamas is in charge there. Israel and the Palestinians separated 20 years ago. The Israeli occupation of the Palestinians ended 20 years ago. Anybody who claims otherwise is either deluding himself or trying to delude the rest of us. The problem is not that Rabin’s vision of separation was never implemented. The problem is that it didn’t work. For decades, peace activists insisted that separation would lead to peace. “Stop occupying the Palestinians and they will live in peace with us,” they insisted. Prime Minister Rabin gave it a try.Instead of peace, Israel finds itself living next door to a Palestinian Authority regime that is actively inciting the murder of Jews, sheltering terrorists and hiring them for its police force, paying salaries to imprisoned terrorists, and naming its streets and parks after killers of Jews and Americans.

Separation? Been there, done that. Look where it got us.