Israel’s Labor Party is set to join with the Likud in a coalition that returns Shimon Peres to a position of power as deputy premier. Peres is of course the former prime minister of Israel; as Yitzhak Rabin’s foreign minister he was an architect of the Oslo Accords that brought Yasir Arafat and the PLO to power on the West Bank and Gaza. In 1994 Peres shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Arafat.
Rabin and Peres made the cynical calculation that Arafat’s brutal thuggery would be turned on the Arabs in the territories that had become a burden for Israel to govern under civilized constraints. Their bargain with Arafat must be judged one of the twentieth century’s most misguided acts of statesmanship – misguided statesmanship for which Israel and others continue to pay the price.
As a distant lover of Israel I have been genuinely puzzled by its failure to produce a statesman equal to the challenges faced by the country over the past 20 years. In every area of modern life the country boasts a genius that on a per capita basis must be unrivaled. Yet on the world stage its politicians seem almost retarded.
The country has never had a public accounting for the utter disaster that was Oslo. Its politicians seem to keep the country’s citizens in the dark about the nature of its national security strategy and the actions taken to pursue it. Ariel Sharon’s deal with Peres seems to me a metaphorical expression of the problem.
Symptomatic of the delusional political thinking that has brought Israel so much grief is the fact that there has as yet been no public accounting for the disaster of Oslo itself. Vital advocates of Oslo such as Shimon Peres are still respectable public figures playing significant roles and urging the same policy. It is as if Neville Chamberlain (if he had still been alive – he had the grace to die in 1940) were still advising Winston Churchill on the statesmanship of appeasement in 1942.
Michael Oren is a serious historian for whom the retrospective view comes naturally and who has taken the measure of Oslo. If you don’t know who Oren is go buy a copy of Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East which has been issued in paperback with a new afterword. In a column for the Wall Street Journal ( Oslo’s Legacy: A Road Map to Nowhere ) last year Oren wrote:
[T]he trouble wrought by the Oslo Accords – so-called after the city where they were mediated – has been incalculable. Instead of a New Middle East [touted by then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres] with peace between Israel and an independent Palestinian state war has ravaged the area devastating economies killing and maiming thousands. Rarely has an agreement been so celebrated – Rabin and Arafat won Nobel prizes – generated such vast expectations and occupied so many presidential days only to utterly fail. Now in the wake of Mahmoud Abbas’s resignation as Palestinian prime minister one must ask why.
There are many answers the most obvious of which is accountability. Israel was not held accountable for expanding its West Bank and Gaza settlements in excess of Oslo’s proviso for their natural growth. But while Israelis may have exploited the treaty’s spirit the Palestinians flagrantly disregarded its letter. No sooner had Arafat returned from Washington than he began smuggling explosives and weapons into the territories harboring wanted terrorists and educating Palestinian children to destroy Israel – all blatant breaches of Oslo. In the mid-’90s Arafat’s Palestinian Authority failed to stop and in some cases abetted the suicide bombers who killed hundreds of Israelis. Yet in spite of these gross violations neither Arafat nor his Authority was ever called to task. Advocates of Oslo equivocated that the Palestinians would comply with the accords but only after they had achieved statehood and until then they were too weak to clamp down on terrorism or even to cease incitement. The many Israelis who died in the interim were dubbed perversely victims of peace.