The Oslo process was supposed to usher in, finally, peace and normalcy between Israelis and Palestinians. It brought instead the worst terrorist violence in Israel’s history, and pundits and policy analysts have yet to explain satisfactorily why the catastrophic failure occurred. They have uniformly avoided addressing what should be obvious questions.
Why did Israel embrace Yasir Arafat as its “peace partner,” even as Arafat continued, amid the fanfare of White House signings and handshakes, to assure his own people and the Arab world his goal remained Israel’s annihilation? Why were Israel’s leaders undeterred even when, in the wake of the initial Oslo accords, the Palestinians unleashed what was then an unprecedented wave of anti-Israel terror? Why was the response more Israeli concessions?
Nissim Zvilli, a Labor MK and member of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee at the time, recalled in 2002, “I remember myself lecturing in Paris and saying that Arafat’s double-talk had to be understood. That was our thesis, proved [later] as nonsense. Arafat meant every word, and we were naive.”
But naivete hardly captures the self-delusions that underlay Oslo.
In 1997, Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit, himself a former Oslo enthusiast, wrote of the course forged by Israel’s political elite and passionately embraced by its intellectual and cultural elites, “In the early ’90’s… we, the enlightened Israelis, were infected with a messianic craze… All of a sudden, we believed that… the end of the old Middle East was near. The end of history, the end of wars, the end of conflict… We fooled ourselves with illusions. We were bedazzled into committing a collective act of messianic drunkenness.”
But while Shavit’s “messianism” gives a label to Oslo-era thinking, it does not explain it.
The explanation lies in psychological responses common among chronically besieged populations, whether minorities subjected to defamation, discrimination and assault or small nations under persistent attack by their neighbors. People living under such stressful conditions often choose to accept at face value the indictments of their accusers in the hope of thereby escaping their predicament.
They may seek to reform their community in a manner consistent with the attackers’ accusations. Or they may simply abandon what they have come to see as a tainted identity. Or they may join the attackers as a means of more thoroughly separating themselves from their status as target.
Such reactions have been a staple of Diaspora Jews’ responses to besiegement over the centuries. They can be seen throughout the Middle Ages, for example. But strong Jewish communal institutions served then as a counterweight to the corrosive psychological impact of tormentors’ accusations. Those institutions helped Jews sustain a sense of their own and their community’s essential validity despite the drumbeat of deprecation directed against them by their neighbors.
The weakening of institutional bulwarks in recent centuries left Jews more psychologically vulnerable. A hundred years ago, so commonplace was Jews’ taking to heart anti-Jewish caricatures and canards that the early Zionist Max Nordau famously observed, “It is the gretest triumph for anti-Semitism that it has brought the Jews to view themselves with anti-Semitic eyes.”
Nordau could have added that if Jews saw themselves as the haters saw them, they often viewed other Jews as fitting those stereotypes even more. Apostates tended to see all those who remained Jews in such a light; German Jews not infrequently viewed Polish Jews as the true and deserving butt of Jew-hatred; secularized Jews regarded religious Jews similarly; and unionized working class Jews held comparable opinions of the Jewish bourgeoisie. Of course, those who looked at others across the various social divides in this way, and who believed that separating themselves from those others would win them acceptance by the wider society, did not acknowledge that their biases reflected a pleading for gentile acceptance. Rather they cast their prejudices as representing a more progressive and enlightened path.
