Editorial: A decade to forget

It has been 10 years since the Jewish state made its largest-ever diplomatic gamble, and the storms it generated have yet to abate.

In fact, as a diverse group of writers collectively attest in this edition, the stakes today are much higher than they were back when Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres took the fateful decision to recognize the PLO, allow its entry into Israeli-held land, and set in motion a mechanism that would potentially lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

In a country famous for responding to international situations rather than creating them, the move made at Oslo was seen by many as a breath of fresh air, in that it sought to actively address Israel's worst predicament the conflict with the Arab world.

With the benefit of hindsight, it has long become the Israeli consensus that the Oslo gamble has failed. The accords' underlying assumption, that Yasser Arafat and the rest of those who joined him in Tunisia had come to terms with Israel's existence and were prepared to formally accept it, has proven unfounded.

This reevalutation did not happen overnight. On the contrary, as recently as four years ago the Israeli electorate handed Ehud Barak a landslide victory and allowed him to go all the way to Camp David, where it silently watched him offer Arafat, in the presence of Bill Clinton, the deal that until then had been assumed irresistible to a Palestinian leader: 95 percent of the West Bank, east Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, and a swath of pre-'67 Israel.

For some Israelis, including avowedly secular ones, Arafat's insistence during those negotiations that no Jewish Temples ever stood on the Temple Mount lit a red light. For others, his blunt rejection of Barak's deal meant that he had never meant to accommodate the Jewish state to begin with.

Others became disillusioned when they realized that Arafat had not only rejected Barak's deal, but also failed to respond to it with a counter-proposal. Some lost faith in Arafat already in 1996 when, referring to that year's wave of suicide bus bombings, he shouted to a big crowd in Gaza, "We are all suicides." Yet to most Israelis the straw that broke the camel's back was the launching three years ago of the current war. Not only was that move clearly spearheaded by the PA's own organizations, like the Fatah Hawks, and not only did the call to arms starkly violate the 1993 commitment to never again resort to violence, but the Palestinian war effort systematically and openly targeted, and still targets, the Israeli population itself.

The technical principle behind the Oslo vision, land for peace, was not implausible in itself, and, having been previously introduced in the peace accords with Egypt, was not even novel. What was novel was the decision to strike a deal with an enemy that proved unreconstructed. Impartial experts, like Channel 2 commentator Ehud Ya'ari and Hebrew University historian Yehoshua Porath (see Page B1), argued already before the current war's eruption that Arafat's aims were not those his Israeli interlocutors were insisting they were.

The same was true for the broader vision behind Oslo that the entire Middle East was ripe for major transformation, and that this drama would be touched off by an Israeli move.

Considering that the New Middle East vision was introduced not long after Mikhail Gorbachev and F.W. De Klerk had joined hands respectively with Andre Sakharov and Nelson Mandela to change their parts of the world, there was some logic in the belief that the Middle East's Arab leaders, too, would join hands with their Israeli colleagues and allow the free movement of people, capital, goods, and ideas that they had obstructed ever since the dawn of the post-colonial era.

Alas, the Israeli public, and its leaders, soon learned that the Arab Gorbachev and De Klerk, not to mention the Arab Sakharov and Mandela had yet to appear. The most stinging proof of that came when the late Hafez Assad bluntly rejected Bill Clinton's peace-for-the-Golan offer during their meeting in Geneva in 2000. There, as elsewhere among the Arab world's elites, the thinking remains that freedom is a Western value and a political threat. Evidently, there is a relationship between this pan-Arab attitude and the particular Palestinian shunning of the Oslo vision.

It is sad enough that the Arab world remains as unreconstructed as the past decade's events have proven it to be. Yet it is just as sad that Israel's assessment of its neighbors' peace intentions in 1993 was about as accurate as its assessment of their war intentions in 1973. One can only hope that in the future our understanding of our neighbors will be more sober, and that our neighbors' understanding of the world will be less anachronistic.

'The technical principle behind the Oslo vision, land for peace, was not implausible in itself, and, having been previously introduced in the peace accords with Egypt, was not even novel. What was novel was the decision to strike a deal with an enemy that proved unreconstructed. Impartial experts, like Channel 2 commentator Ehud Ya'ari and Hebrew University historian Yehoshua Porath (see Page B1), argued already before the current war's eruption that Arafat's aims were not those his Israeli interlocutors were insisting they were. "

and as rabin said then PARAPHRASING "if it doesnt work out we can always take the land back". well its time to start taking. the surprising part is that anyone EVER believed air a fat would be anything other than a filthy savage. those same leftists today feel unashamed and ready to experiment once again with the future of israel and safety of the jewish people. these post-zionists, post jews cant admit their socialist ideals and utopianistic normalizing of the jewish people (in peresian language) is mistaken. israel will not be loved by the world until moshiac (soon we hope). until then, let us resolve and pray that israel will live safely in her dangerous 'hood, not threatened with blackmail (whether from the arabs or washington)and secure enough to reignite her high tech industries.

Yet it is just as sad that Israel's assessment of its neighbors' peace intentions in 1993 was about as accurate as its assessment of their war intentions in 1973.

The miscalculation in 1973 almost cost Israel its existance.

It necessitated the provision of arms to Israel by the US and interceding by the US to stay the USSR's intervention: it instigated the highest alert worldwide of US forces since the Cuban Missile Crisis and brought us to the brink of a nuclear standoff.

Since then, Israel, to its detriment, has been a client state of the US.

It had better get a realistic grip on its calculations, as another miscalculation may not leave it enough time to be rescued.

PLEASE Israel, look after your own and be ruthless in doing what needs to be done, whether in Ramallah or in Iran.

Also important to realize that if Israel did not have control of Judea, Samaria (West Bank) and Gaza, hundreds of thousands of Israelis, would have probably been killed in the ensuing Arab invasion, because the Arabs would have marched right into the heart of Israel's population.

This is another reason that the West Bank and Gaza must remain, rightfully, in Israeli hands.

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