The Oslo process was wrecked by terrorism

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday April 25, 2002 00:12 by David Horovitz - Jerusalem Report and Irish Times

Israel has been responding to Arafat-sponsored terrorism, lies and betrayal, writes David Horovitz, in Jerusalem. It is time European governments and blinkered commentators looked at the facts

On CNN a few days ago Leila Shahid, the PLO's representative in Paris, asserted that when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister of Israel there were "no terrorist acts". It was a small throwaway line, dropped casually into an interview with anchor Jim Clancy in which Ms Shahid mounted a familiar Palestinian assault on the aggressive policies of the government of the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon.

And Mr Clancy failed to point out that it was a lie: there were, in fact, numerous acts of Palestinian terrorism in the 1992-1995 years when Mr Rabin governed Israel, of which an October 1994 bombing in Tel Aviv that killed 22 Israelis, and another the following January at the Beit Lid junction that killed 21, were only two of the more grievous.

A small, throwaway line, but a significant one. For Ms Shahid was attempting to create the impression that when the Palestinian Authority President, Yasser Arafat, had a more forthcoming Israeli peace partner such as Mr Rabin, he was willing and able to denounce and thwart attacks on Israelis.

If only that had been the case. In fact, even in the Rabin years, partnering an Israeli government that had legitimised the PLO rehabilitated him personally and halted large-scale settlement activity in the occupied territories, Mr Arafat proved unwilling to thwart the bombers. Indeed, it was his disinclination to do so that saw the 60 per cent Israeli support for the Oslo peace process, as registered in September 1993 when he and Mr Rabin shook hands publicly on the White House lawn, fall to 50 per cent over the next two years, and prompted the internal Israeli debate over Mr Arafat's viability as a peace partner that overheated murderously into Mr Rabin's assassination in November 1995.

Today, in a world turned upside down, Israel stands accused by some in the international journalistic community of "war crimes"; the European Parliament votes for trade sanctions against it; and purported humanitarians call for Mr Rabin's fellow peace trail-blazer - not Mr Arafat, but the Israeli Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres - to be stripped of his Nobel Prize.

But the real cause of the collapse of the Oslo process, and the root cause of Israel's unprecedented military incursions this month into areas of the West Bank it had long since relinquished to Mr Arafat's control, is terrorism: the terrorism that Mr Arafat initially chose not to confront and, more recently, encouraged, initiated and financed.

Despite the bus bombings and shootings that punctuated the Rabin years and Mr Peres's brief post-assassination prime ministership, Israelis voted a second time for peace-making with the impossible Mr Arafat in 1999. This was all the more remarkable given that, between 1996 and 1999, when Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister, there was a marked decline in attacks. Israelis felt safe, and yet they ousted Mr Netanyahu in favour of a political rookie, Ehud Barak, who was elected by a massive 12 per cent majority on a one-plank campaign platform: to reach a permanent peace accord with Mr Arafat.

Contrary to the pervasive myth now routinely peddled by too many ill-informed Middle East commentators, Mr Barak offered Mr Arafat everything short of Israeli national suicide in his failed attempt to secure that accord at the July 2000 Camp David summit and subsequent rounds of negotiations.

The opening day map, the starting point, already showed 88 per cent of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip in Palestinian hands. As the talks progressed, Mr Barak raised the offer to more than 90 per cent - contiguous territory, not cantons, as the revisionists claim. He agreed to share Jerusalem with the Palestinians, something hitherto unthinkable to Israelis. And he set out a formula for a limited influx of Palestinian refugees into Israel.

These were terms more generous than even Israelis who voted for Mr Barak had expected him to offer. But they were not sufficiently generous for Mr Arafat. As President Clinton can confirm, he derided the notion of any Jewish link to the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, and demanded full Palestinian sovereignty there. And he sought a "right of return" for close to four million Palestinian refugees; not, as would have been reasonable, to the new state of Palestine which Mr Barak wanted to partner him toward establishing, but to Israel.

Since Israel has a population of roughly five million Jews and one million Arabs, that demand amounted to a bid to destroy Israel by sheer weight of numbers. It indicated that Mr Arafat, far from seeking co-existence between a new Palestine and Israel, as he had claimed, was seeking both a new Palestine and an Israel that would rapidly turn into Palestine as well.

Since then, only one prominent Palestinian leader, Mr Arafat's Jerusalem representative, Sari Nusseibeh, has had the guts to say, in Arabic, that Mr Arafat's stance on the refugee issue is tantamount to a call for Israel's destruction, and thus fatally undercuts the purported commitment to co-existence. With Mr Nusseibeh, Israel could probably make peace.

Even if, for the purposes of argument, one were to accept the myth that Mr Barak offered far less generous terms than those set out above, a genuine peace-maker would have continued negotiating with him. Mr Arafat did not do that.

When the then irrelevant Israeli opposition leader, Ariel Sharon, visited the Temple Mount in late September 2000, Mr Arafat launched the so-called al-Aksa intifada against Israel. This was no spontaneous explosion of popular protest against an occupying power; Israeli troops had withdrawn from major West Bank cities almost five years earlier, leaving more than 90 per cent of the Palestinians in areas fully controlled by Mr Arafat.

Nor was it an uncontrollable outburst of rage at Mr Sharon's visit; the man did not so much as set foot inside the mosques atop the mount. No, it was, as members of Mr Arafat's own cabinet would subsequently confirm, a deliberate resort to violence, with schoolchildren bussed to hot spots and gunmen firing from among them, designed to terrorise Israel into concessions and, eventually, to overwhelm Israel altogether.

The very fact that the bombers have not solely been targeting settlements and soldiers in the territories, but towns and cities all over Israel, allows for no other conclusion. The incessant suicide bombings, running at one a day before this month's Israeli offensive in the West Bank, are indeed the product of Palestinian despair. But not, as some Arab and European governments and many journalists would have us believe, the despair of a stateless people blocked from independence by a heartless, massively armed Israel.

The despair, rather, of a manipulated people whose leader chose not to foster a climate of conciliation but one that delegitimised Israel. A leader who rejected a peace deal that would have given the Palestinians statehood on almost all the territory they sought, with massive international financial compensation for refugees the Arab nations had deliberately chosen not to rehouse for half a century. And a leader, worst of all, who failed to tell his people the truth about the deal that he had rejected, and set about persuading them that Israelis would never compromise and had to be defeated by violence.

It is an astounding testament to Israelis' desire for peace that even now, after the month of March saw 126 of its people killed in acts of terrorism stoked by Mr Arafat, a majority are telling pollsters that they support the Saudi peace initiative which envisages "normal ties" between Arab states and Israel after a complete Israeli withdrawal from territory it captured in the 1967 war. Israel is desperate to end the occupation. It just needs a Palestinian partner, unlike Mr Arafat, who doesn't seek to end Israel.

Slick Palestinian spokesmen assert daily, from the platforms granted to them by the deferential news channels, that Mr Sharon's aggression is the cause of the current Middle East malaise, trusting interviewers and viewers alike to overlook the fact that the intifada was hatched on Mr Barak's watch. They blame Mr Sharon for the curfews and the blockades and the incursions, trusting interviewers and viewers to forget that there were no curfews or blockades or incursions before the intifada was ignited.

Had Mr Arafat, armed by Israel with what must be the highest proportion of security personnel of any regime in the world, chosen to frustrate terrorism rather than fund it, Israel would have had no need and certainly no desire to re-enter areas, such as the Jenin refugee camp, which it happily relinquished in late 1995.

Yet in a world turned upside down, again, it now finds itself charged with the "massacre" of terrorists from Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Mr Arafat's own Fatah faction who had dispatched 23 suicide bombers from the camp into Israel. Terrorists who had publicly bragged that they would fight to the last bullet, and who publicly delighted in ambushing 13 Israeli reservists, fathers and husbands called to the battle against the extremists that the cowardly Mr Arafat refused to fight, heads of families who will never return.

Thousands of civilians in the Jenin camp have, appallingly, lost their homes because Israel was left with no choice but to confront the bombers where they thought they were immune, where Mr Arafat had allowed them to flourish. In a world turned upside down, Israel is now pressured by the international community to "act with restraint" when the bombers blow up its civilians in restaurants and buses and wedding halls, and branded the aggressor when, betrayed by Mr Arafat, it attempts to thwart the bombers itself.

The sooner fair-minded people recognise the true picture, and morality returns to the handling of the Middle East, the sooner the long, hard haul back to the negotiating table can begin again in earnest.

David Horovitz is editor of Jerusalem Report and The Irish Times correspondent in Israel