September 13, 2023 marked the 30th anniversary of the Oslo Accords and we’ve all come a long way from that euphoric day on the White House lawn when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat shook hands and pledged to work together and embark on an ambitious “peace process” leading to a resolution of the Israel/Palestinian conflict.
Yet overwhelming evidence has since surfaced confirming that from the beginning Arafat never had any intention of making peace with Israel and even while assuring the Israelis and the West in the English language of his desire for peace, he reassured his fellow Palestinians and Arabs in Arabic that Oslo was but the inauguration of a plot to eliminate Israel, step-by-step. Yet by virtue of Oslo, Arafat was rescued from political obscurity and welcomed into the diplomatic world. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and he secured billions in aid from a mesmerized West – much of which he reportedly secreted in personal overseas bank accounts.
Indeed, it is an oft told story of perfidy of historic proportions. Since the beginning of the so-called peace process, thousands of Israelis have been killed, wounded and maimed by Palestinians based in Palestinian controlled areas. Current Palestinian leadership continues the deception: as recently as two weeks ago, PA President Mahmoud Abbas invoked worn antisemitic tropes and challenged the classical notion of Jewish peoplehood.
But Arafat could never have pulled off his swindle had it not been for the collaboration of the Jewish media and organizational world which did not take kindly to objections. Except for The Jewish Press which, from the get-go laid out the scam in chapter and verse over many months, the Jewish media was virtually unanimous in touting the virtues of Oslo. And all but three of the 51 members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations – the Zionist Organization of America, National Council of Young Israel and Emunah – were all in on the Oslo fraud. In fact, The Jewish Press and the three organizations were regularly attacked for their heresy with the organizations also threatened with expulsion from the Presidents Conference in an effort urged on by ADL’s then national director Abraham Foxman.
It is fair to say that anyone publicly expressing doubts about Oslo or Arafat was targeted and so most laid low. To be against the peace process was to be against peace and the same for the politicians. One shining exception was former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
As reported by The Observer, on Monday October 23, 1995, Mayor Giuliani noisily ejected PLO leader Yasser Arafat from a concert at Lincoln Center that had been scheduled by the city to entertain world leaders in town for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. President Clinton condemned Giuliani’s “embarrassing breach of international diplomacy” and former Mayors Dinkins and Koch joined the chorus of those expressing embarrassment that the mayor had injected politics into the celebration.
In many respects the “brook no dissent” embrace of Oslo by the media and organizational elite presaged the “fake news” of today, enabling the Biden administration to cover up and distort the truth. It then fostered the fictive reality that the Oslo Accords was the sliced bread of Mideast diplomacy. A compliant mainstream media and sycophantic woke organizational infrastructure plays the same role today. We saw how Oslo turned out. The Biden iteration will turn out no differently.
