The terror did propel Likud, under Benjamin Netanyahu, to victory in the 1996 election. Netanyahu made an issue of the PA’s failure to live up to its obligations to forgo and indeed fight terror, dismantle terrorist infrastructures and end the incitement that prevailed in Palestinian media, mosques and schools. But when he demanded that the PA fulfill its prior formal commitments on these vital matters before he would agree to further Israeli concessions, he was attacked by the opposition for creating obstacles to “peace.” Indeed, half the nation remained caught up in the delusions of the Oslo process until Arafat’s launching of his terror war in September, 2000, and many have remained devotees of those delusions even through the terror war.
But if the terror war has disabused most Israelis of the delusions of Oslo, can this awakening be sustained? There is no end of the Arab siege in sight. The promotion of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, and indeed broadly xenophobic opinion serves purposes of domestic and inter-state politics in the Arab world and there is scant evidence of this changing in the foreseeable future. Israel has an interest in separating itself from the Palestinian Arabs and good reason to pursue some path to separation that takes account of the ongoing dangers it will face and leaves it in a position to defend its population both from continued terror attacks and conventional assault. But some in Israel even now are eager to resuscitate Oslo and insist that peace is presently at hand if the nation will only make sufficient concessions.
The ongoing Arab siege does cast a shadow over the lives of Israelis. At the same time, they have created a free, vibrant, extraordinarily successful society. It remains to be seen whether they are prepared to go on nurturing what they have built as they await changes in the Arab world that will open it to genuine peace, or they will instead, in their eagerness for “normalcy” and an end to the siege, once more delude themselves into pursuing fantasies of peace that will threaten everything they have created.
