As the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords on September 13 is nearing, Palestinian Media Watch has uncovered yet another statement by a Palestinian leader who admitted, or more correctly, bragged, that PLO leader Yasser Arafat successfully deceived the Israeli leadership into signing a peace agreement that he had no intention of fulfilling. According to PA Parliament Member Munib Al-Masri Arafat’s intention from the first day, was that the Accords would be another step in his stages plan to destroy all of the State of Israel.
In a recent interview, Al-Masri explained that Arafat told him to relax when he was upset over the Accords. Arafat confided in him that his intention was only to sign the agreement as “a temporary solution.” He only intended “the two-state solution as a first stage”:
PA Parliament Member Munib Al-Masri: “When [former PA President] Yasser Arafat presented the two-state solution at Oslo, I was very angry at him, because it said 22% for the Palestinians and the rest for the Israelis. I came to him in Tunis, and he told me: ‘[Calm] down.’ Our thought in all this was the two-state solution as a first stage, until the Arabs learn-”
Falestinona host: “A temporary solution.”
Munib Al-Masri: “A temporary solution, until [the Palestinians] will live comfortably and are satisfied, and there will be the right of return and the like, and we will live in one democratic state (i.e., in place of Israel).”
[Falestinona, Fatah’s Information and Culture Commission in Lebanon, YouTube channel, May 24, 2023]
PMW has exposed many testimonies of people close to Arafat confirming that Arafat was deceitful and that he was never a sincere peace partner for Israel. Already in 1994, right after signing Oslo, Arafat compared the agreement to Islam’s prophet Muhammad’s Hudaybiyyah peace treaty – a 10-year truce between Muhammad and the Quraish Tribe of Mecca, which Muhammad broke two years later when he attacked them and conquered Mecca:
Yasser Arafat: “This agreement, I am not considering it more than the agreement which had been signed between our Prophet Muhammad and Quraish, and you remember the Caliph Omar had refused this agreement and considered it “Sulha Dania” [a despicable truce]. But Muhammad had accepted it and we are accepting now this [Oslo] peace accord.”
[Speech in Johannesburg, private recording, May 10, 1994]
Palestinian journalist and editor Abd Al-Bari Atwan who met with Arafat when he was in exile in Tunis also confirmed that Arafat told him that he merely wanted to use the Oslo Accords as a way to bring back “the PLO and the resistance” to “Palestine” – in other words: a way to return terror to Israel:
“I remember that he [former PLO and PA President Yasser Arafat] took me aside when we left his office in the Jugurtha neighborhood of Tunis – on the pretext of going out for a walk and in order to get away from the listening devices – and he told me: ‘I want to tell you something that I ask you not to note or attribute to me, except after my death.’ He let out a sigh and said: ‘I am entering Palestine through the door of Oslo, despite all my reservations, in order to return the PLO and the resistance to it, and I promise you that you will see the Jews fleeing from Palestine like mice fleeing from a sinking ship. This will not happen in my lifetime, but it will happen in your lifetime.’”
[Rai Al-Youm, independent Arab news website, Sept. 13, 2018]
One of the clearest enunciations that Oslo’s purpose was to facilitate terror was reported by PMW just months before Arafat launched the terror Intifada in 2000, and it was articulated by a PA government minister:
“The Palestinian people accepted the Oslo Accords as a first step and not as a permanent settlement, based on the premise that the war and struggle in the land is more efficient than a struggle from a distant land (i.e. Tunisia) … the Palestinian people will continue the revolution until they achieve the goals of the ‘65 revolution… (i.e., destruction of Israel).” [Abd Al-Aziz Shahin, PA Minister of Supplies, Al-Ayyam, May 30, 2000].
PA Minister Shahin could not have been more explicit about Oslo’s goal being increased terror. The PLO had trouble directing terror from Tunisia and signed the Olso Accords to facilitate PLO terror. The terror that has plagued Israel for the last 30 years was facilitated by Israel when it agreed to creating the Palestinian Authority.
An even earlier promise of terror came from the top of the PA leadership. Already in 1996, Nabil Shaath, chief PLO negotiator for the Oslo Accords, assured Palestinians that the automatic rifles that Israel gave the PA police would be turned against Israelis. “This is the strategy… If and when Israel says ‘enough,’ namely – ‘we won’t discuss Jerusalem, we won’t return refugees, we won’t dismantle settlements, we won’t withdraw to the [1967] borders,’ in that case we will return to violence. But this time, it will be with 30,000 armed Palestinian soldiers and in a land with elements of freedom.” [Private recording of Shaath meeting, exposed by PMW, Jan. 15, 1996]
Israelis look at the great tragedies that were enabled by the Oslo Accords, including more than 2,000 Israelis murdered in three decades of Palestinian terror with no end in sight, and categorize the Oslo Accords as a monumental failure, while the Palestinians look at the terror and have been hailing Oslo as a success for that exact reason. Ziyad Abu Ein, then PA Deputy Minister of Prisoners’ Affairs explained:
“Oslo is the effective and potent greenhouse which embraced the Palestinian resistance. Without Oslo, there would never have been resistance. In all the occupied territories, we could not move a single pistol from place to place. Without Oslo and being armed through Oslo… we would not have been able to create this great Palestinian Intifada.”
[Al-Alam TV (Iran), July 4, 2006]
Another Fatah leader said the same in different words. Sultan Abu Al-Einein, then member of the Fatah Central Committee and subsequently an advisor to Abbas explained:
“The arms (i.e., more than 40,000 rifles) that were used against the Israeli enemy in Gaza and in other places were brought [into the PA] in accordance with [the Oslo] Accords. When we refer to the negative aspects of the Oslo Accords, we should also look at their other aspects.”
[Al-Quds TV, April 6, 2009]
Oslo was a trap that has fundamentally changed Israel’s security predicament until today. For the PLO, the Oslo Accords were an overwhelming success at facilitating terror. For Israel, the Oslo Accords didn’t fail – the peace process Israel imagined never even existed.
{Reposted from PMW}
