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Last week marked the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords (September 13, 1993) at the South Lawn of the White House. Israel’s Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin and his nemesis, Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) were the focus of the event. Rabin was reluctant to shake Arafat’s bloodied hands but urged by President Bill Clinton, he reluctantly stretched out his hand. The moment appeared to the international community and the media as a “miracle in the making,” but the yearned for peace that the Accords promised was dead on arrival.
Arafat never intended to make peace with the Jewish State, he only wanted to enact the “peace of Hudaybiyyah,” a ten-year treaty the Prophet Mohammad made with the Meccan Quraysh tribe in 628CE. Weakened and shunned by the international community, including most of the Arab world for his support for the Iraqi dictator Sadam Hussein’s brutal invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Arafat was isolated in his Tunis bunker. He was rescued by the follies of the Israeli Labor party dreamers, including Yossi Beilin, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Yair Hirschfeld, Ron Pundak, and Yoel Singer, Rabin’s confidant. Uri Savir headed the Israeli negotiating team. On the Palestinian side, Ahmed Qurei, aka Abu Ala was the chief negotiator. The Israelis figured that in his weakened position, Arafat might be amenable to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In September 1993, just prior to the White House signing of the Accords, Israel and the PLO signed the Declaration of Principles on Palestinian Self Rule, the first agreement between the two sides that became known as the Oslo Accords. The US was kept in the dark about the ongoing negotiations in Oslo, the Norwegian capital. Once the Oslo negotiators completed their work, both Rabin and Arafat were happy to embrace US President Bill Clinton as the facilitator. Clinton was naturally delighted to host the occasion of the signing of the Accords at the White House, and the prestige the occasion provided him.
Ironically, when this reporter interviewed Rabin earlier, the PM was adamant that he would not negotiate with Arafat. It took some persuasion from Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, Rabin’s arch-rival in the Labor Party, and the positive movement in Oslo negotiations, that persuaded Rabin to accept the negotiation process. Rabin didn’t trust Peres, and Arafat even less.
It didn’t take long after the signing of the Oslo Accords at the White House that Arafat, in a speech at a Johannesburg South African mosque, called for Jihad to liberate Jerusalem. The speech was secretly recorded by a South African journalist and subsequently broadcast on Israeli radio. Arafat’s remarks came just days after the signing of the Gaza-Jericho Agreement in Cairo, and only three days before the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were to withdraw from Jericho.
Arafat declared that the Jihad would continue, and that Jerusalem is not only for the Palestinian people but for the entire Muslim Uma. Arafat compared the unpopularity of the agreement with Israel among Muslims with the Hudaybiyyah Treaty in which Mohammad agreed to a 10-year truce with the Quraysh tribe and then when he got stronger in Medina, he conquered Mecca. Arafat’s message to his listeners was clear: just as Mohammad was waiting for the right moment to violate the Hudaybiyyah Treaty, he (Arafat) was waiting for the right moment to violate the Oslo Accords with Israel.
The Israelis, nevertheless, wanted to believe in a breakthrough with the Palestinians despite Arafat’s making his intentions clear. For Arafat, the Oslo Accords was the Trojan Horse that would give him entry to the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel. What ensued in the subsequent years was terror by suicide bombers and the “revolving prison door.” Arafat would pretend to arrest a Palestinian terrorist murderer for show, and immediately release him/her with a blessing for his/her good work.
Three decades after the signing of the Declaration of Principles which led to the Oslo Accords, Israelis are still divided on whether Oslo was a positive development or the opposite. One positive that came out of the Accords was that Israelis are now certain that no one can provide security for Israeli citizens but Israelis. The thought that Arafat’s or Mahmoud Abbas’ security services could effectively deal with Palestinian terror, an idea entertained at the time by Rabin, proved to be wrong and harmful. For Itzhak Rabin the Oslo Accords were a way to separate Israel from the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. In Rabin’s mind, the demographic factor played a significant role. He was fearful that Israel might turn from a Jewish and democratic state to a bi-national state. This, however, is no longer a major concern since Jewish birthrates have neared that of the Palestinians. In any case, with 95% of the Palestinians now under the Palestinian Authority jurisdiction, the Oslo Accords served as the instrument for the separation.
The Oslo process made it clear to the majority of Israelis and its leadership that there is no chance to reach a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or conclude a peace treaty with the Palestinian national movement, in the near future. The current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the late PM Itzhak Rabin held similar views regarding a Palestinian state. Rabin opposed a Palestinian state but was for a “state-minus,” whereby Israel would continue to control the Jordan alley, and the settlement blocs. Netanyahu is opposed to a Palestinian state because it would be a terrorist state, and ultimately controlled by Hamas.
The Oslo process meant to end Palestinian terror and provide security for Israel and sovereignty for the Palestinians. But for Arafat and his successor, replacing Israel rather than living side-by-side with it is the ultimate goal. Moreover, now unlike in 1993, there are two Palestinian states; the Islamist Hamas ruling Gaza with an uncompromising agenda to destroy the Jewish state, and Abbas’ Palestinian Authority that failed its people.
At the signing of the Oslo Accords, President Bill Clinton said “The children of Abraham have embarked together on a bold journey.” That journey was never seriously undertaken by Arafat or his successor Mahmoud Abbas. This was proven in July 2000, at the Camp David summit, when Arafat refused to “end the conflict,” and launched the second Intifada, despite far-reaching concessions made by Israeli PM Ehud Barak. In 2008, Abbas similarly refused to end the conflict when offered even more extensive concessions. Thus, three-decades later invoking the “Oslo process” conjures up a feeling of defeat.
Of course peace is possible.
Seek out & miserably destroy islamist “Palestinians”; eject all remaining islamists from Israeli soil, and Israelis won’t have to worry about rockets or bombed ambulances, buses, or pizza parlors.
Such determined focus worked well in August of 1945. It can work again.
(30 years ago, the emotionally laden & foolish attempt was made to yoke food with arsenic. It produced the foreseen results.)
During the Second Intifada, the Swedes put on an “art” exhibit “Snow White and the Madness of Truth” celebrating a Palestinian female suicide bomber who resembled Snow White and who murdered 31 Israelis, including several children. The Israeli ambassador was so outraged by this he unplugged the exhibit. The smug Swedes reacted far more violently to his “vandalism” than to the terrorism celebrated by this art, or than they would if an ecoterrorist slopped paint on a Van Gogh or Renoir.
I can imagine who the insufferable, virtue signaling “humanitarian superpower” Sweden would reacted it if they were suicide bombings as a daily occurrence in Sweden and Israelis celebrated the perpetrators.
I had always assumed, that the U.S. State Department, was the force driving that awful Oslo “deal.”
It shouldn’t go unmentioned, the obvious and glaring reality that European, Leftist dhimmis and American Dhimmi-crats are responsible for enabling, lavishly funding and whitewashing Hamas’s and Fatah’s terrorism and corruption, and, for failing to hold them to account for their repeated failures to change their belligerent attitudes and behavior.
A gullible Israeli Prime Minister and a rabid Palestinian dog can never make peace especially when one is a habitual liar and killer. And of course there is Bill Clinton, one of history’s great con artists
Arafat certainly lied promiscuously, but the ink on Oslo was barely dry when he admitted (in Johannesburg and aptly, Stockholm) that he had no intention of ever reconciling himself or the PLO to Israel’s existence. He likened Oslo to the Treaty of Khayber, a hudna or temporary truce Muhammad made with Jews in the region of Medina in Arabia. When the hudna ceased to be expedient, the Jews were annihilated. A chilling analogy.
He also freely admitted launching the Second Intifada, which resulted in hundreds of Israelis killed in suicide bombings (which were practically a daily occurrence until Israel built the separation barrier the Left so opposes). Arafat thought and hoped that the suicide bombings would result in a massive wave of Israeli Jews fleeing to facilitate Israel’s destruction. Additionally, while the Palestinians shed a few patently fake crocodile tears in statements to the international media in English deploring “the violence”, it celebrated suicide bombings as “martyrdom operations” in the Palestinian media. School yards and playgrounds were decorated with mural of exploding Egged buses. To this day, the Palestinian Authority (which often fails to pay its employees for months on end and is hundreds of millions of shekels in arrears in paying for the electricity Israel unaccountably provides) pays the families of suicide bombers, car rammers and knife attack “activists” an average of $ 35,000 USD for killing Jews
Oriana Fallaci the famed interviewer and canary in the coal mine about Islam says that of ALL the ‘leaders’ she met Yassir Arafat was “by far the most repulsive, he was transparently nothing but a gangster”. He was so evil she found it physically repulsive to be in his presence.
She was persecuted in Europe for her views after decades of respect.
The Oslo Accords led to nothing but violence. Never again.
Forgiveness and love, two things the Arabs cannot grasp: Mark 12:30~31 And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.
And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.
MarK 11:26 But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses.
Love one another and forgive.
Back in 2003, when Israel was enduring the nightmare of almost daily terror attacks, a Palestinian friend (from a nearby village in Samaria) was watching the TV news with me, as they reported the latest horror.
He turned to me and said, “You know, you Israelis have no one to blame for this but yourselves.”
Before I could recover from my shock, he went on:
“You were the ones who invited Arafat to come here from Tunis with his gang and take us over. We never wanted him – we always saw him as a thug from Cairo. But no one asked us what we wanted. Now we are miserable, and so are you.”
I later found out that other Palestinians in Samaria agreed… but quietly, after looking around and making sure no one else was listening. People they knew were being jailed and tortured by the PA for less.