David Bar-Illan: Oslo, Dead or Alive

The following op-ed is reprinted with permission from The Jerusalem Post. Views expressed are not necessarily those of IRIS or its staff.

Jason and Leiah Elbaum

IRIS

<http://come.to/israels.security> <http://www.netaxs.com/~iris/>

By DAVID BAR-ILLAN

(The writer is director of communications in the Prime Minister's Office.)

(September 11) - The late Yitzhak Rabin used to say that the Oslo Agreements are full of holes. Yet the fundamental problem is not the inadequacy of the agreements' provisions, but the assumption that the Palestinian Authority intended to keep them.

What the Israeli architects of Oslo had in mind was recently made clear by Shimon Peres: Israel could not remain both Jewish and democratic if it continued to rule over close to two million Palestinians in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. Sooner or later, they would have the vote and turn the country into a binational state. The solution: Withdraw from "the territories" and let the Palestinians establish a state of their own, which would live peacefully side by side with Israel.

None of this is specified in Oslo, which was touted as a prelude to Palestinian autonomy or a confederation with Jordan. The talk of autonomy was obviously a palliative for an Israeli public warned for years - by Labor as much as by the Right - that a Palestinian state would threaten Israel's existence. Yet the real intent was a return to the partition plan, in the assumption that most Israelis prefer peaceful coexistence to being in Jenin and Kalkilya, or even in Beit El and Shilo - regardless of what this says about their dedication to the Zionist ideal.

Had the PLO subscribed to the Labor government's vision, the agreement would have been well on its way to realization. But something immediately went wrong. The worst wave of terrorism ever to hit Israel began even as the Declaration of Principles was being signed on the White House lawn. By March 1996, after Palestinian terrorists killed 220 Israelis, the process came to a screeching halt - not under Binyamin Netanyahu but under Shimon Peres. The talks with the Palestinians were suspended, the withdrawal from Hebron was cancelled, and total closure was imposed on the territories.

Unable to reconcile carnage with a peace process, Israelis voted in the May elections against the Oslo architects, despite a tremendous post-assassination wave of sympathy for Labor. "Territory for peace" seemed acceptable. Territory for terrorism decidedly was not. As Ha'aretz writer Ari Shavit put it: "It was not the rise of Netanyahu which caused the paralysis in the Oslo process, but the paralysis in the Oslo process which caused the rise of Netanyahu."

What troubled Israelis was not just the terrorist war, but the PA's attitude to it. Chairman Yasser Arafat would habitually wave off correspondents' queries about the slaughter of civilians with derisive laughter, and - with typical contempt for human credulity - he repeatedly accused "an OAS-like organization in the Israeli army headed by Ehud Barak" of collaborating with Islamic Jihad in killing Israeli soldiers.

The terrorist groups continued to recruit, train, and openly carry arms in PA areas. Known killers of Israelis joined the Palestinian armed forces. Members of the Palestinian Police were caught committing terrorist acts, their orders traced to Palestinian police chief Ghazi Jabali. A December 1995 PA agreement with Hamas permitted terrorist operations, provided they could not be traced to areas controlled by the PA. Arafat's Preventative Security chief Jibril Rajoub confirmed the existence of this arrangement in May and June of this year.

Not only Arafat's 1993 pledge to Rabin to combat terrorism was mocked. Arafat has done nothing about his other pledge: to reject the Covenant. Today only the terminally naive believe that the Palestinian Covenant, which calls for dismantling Israel, has been changed. The complete Covenant appears on a PA website on the Internet, and the even more outrageous Fatah constitution appears on the Fatah website. The PA has in effect admitted that the Covenant has not been changed, by accepting Dennis Ross's "Note for the Record" of January 1997, which includes a commitment to complete the Covenant's revision.

An unequivocal rejection of the Covenant would have an incalculable educational and psychological impact. The venom of this Palestinian constitution is reflected in every Palestinian textbook, patriotic song, and television program. To see seven-year-olds on a TV "children's club" vow to become suicide warriors and throw Israel into the sea, to hear Arafat publicly extolling "the Engineer" Yihye Ayyash, and to witness the burning of Israeli buses in effigy at public rallies sponsored by the PA is to realize that the Covenant's call for Israel's destruction is not a dead letter.

Is there hope for the Oslo Agreements? A year ago, President Ezer Weizman asked Arafat to declare in Arabic that the armed struggle is over. It is what Egyptian president Anwar Sadat did when he chose the path of peace. Arafat has yet to do so.

The path of peace is what Oslo is about. It is a decision to compromise rather than wage war, a decision to which the Netanyahu government is fully committed. When the Palestinians were faced with a similar decision 50 years ago, they chose war. The result was "the catastrophe," and a half-century of untold suffering for the Palestinian people.

Whether Oslo survives is up to them. If they see it, as Arafat repeatedly says, as part of their 1974 Plan of Stages for the destruction of Israel - a temporary accompaniment to the armed struggle aimed at lulling and weakening Israel - the suffering will continue. If they comply with their commitments to renounce violence and combat terrorism, the process can bring the peace and prosperity they could have had 50 years ago.

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