The responsibility for the survival and success of the Jewish people has always rested first and foremost on the Jewish family. One of the most fundamental lessons my siblings and I learned growing up in our parents’ house was the difference between reality and fantasy.
As children, the distinction seemed obvious to us. But apparently, the difference between the two is a lot less easy to discern than it would seem.
This must be the case because the fact of the matter is that today, for the second time in 12 years, a government of Israel – being led by an elderly politician with a distant past as a war hero – is basing its policies on fantasy rather than reality.
I made aliyah in May 1991 and joined the army. A couple of years after my service began, I found myself working as the coordinator of the negotiations with the PLO in the Ministry of Defense. In that position, I saw on a daily basis what life looks like in the world of fantasy.
On July 18, 1995 Ori Shachor and Ohad Bachrach, aged 18 and 19, were hiking in Wadi Kelt when they were murdered by Palestinian terrorists. They were each shot in the head and then, after they were dead, their throats were slit.
I remember their murders well. They were killed on a Friday morning. I was sitting at a hotel in Zichron Yaakov with the heads of the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams as they laid out the schedule for the next week of talks when we got word of the killings.
On Sunday morning while I was driving up the coastal highway to Zichron Yaakov, opponents of the Oslo process staged a creative demonstration. A convoy of cars, buses and trucks drove up the highway at 20 miles an hour with signs reading, “Rabin, Peres, go slow.”
I was deeply moved by the demonstration. I cried the whole way to Zichron. I was grateful to the protesters – who made me arrive an hour late at the talks. I was grateful to them for taking the time to show their loyalty to the memory of the young men; for maintaining the honor of our dead.
But when I got to the hotel, my tears were replaced by shock.
There, the heads of our delegation were livid at what they considered the chutzpahof the demonstrators for making us start our negotiations late. Uri Savir, then director general of the Foreign Ministry and head of our delegation, like the politicized IDF generals, apologized to the Palestinians for the inconvenience caused them by the demonstrators.
They apologized even as the murderers of Shachor and Bachrach had in the space of 36 hours been arrested and released by the Palestinian security forces. And they apologized even as their Palestinian counterparts were the commanders of the security services that released the young men’s killers.
For these Israeli leaders, the fantasy of the peace process was impervious to the screams of our murdered youths. For these so-called peacemakers, their murder was a simple inconvenience.
Yehudit Shachor, Ori’s mom, told reporters a couple of years later that when she tried to talk to Shimon Peres about the fact that her son’s murderers were walking free, Peres told her that there was nothing he could do about it because he was in the busines of signing peace treaties.
All he could offer was the suggestion that Mrs. Shachor speak with Yasir Arafat.
The fantasy of Oslo was that the Arabs want peace with Israel. This fantasy was laid to rest five years ago when the Palestinians began their terror war against Israel in earnest – with the support of the entire Arab world and Iran.
