BESA BULLETIN,October 2003, No.16

Quote from Text:

“Peres: ‘We close our eyes. We don’t criticize because, for peace, we must produce a partnere.’ “

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The ongoing Palestinian war of terror is a direct and inevitable consequence of the 1993 Oslo accords – “the worst blunder in Israel’s history”. So concludes Prof. Efraim Karsh, head of the Mediterranean Studies Programme at King’s College London, in a just-published, special BESA Center (Hebrew) study to mark the tenth anniversary of the Oslo Accords, entitled “The Oslo War: A Tale of Self-Delusion”.

Karsh recounts in painful detail the follies of Oslo’s architects. “Just over a decade after destroying the PLO’s military infrastructure in Lebanon, the Rabin-Peres government asked the Palestinian organization, which was still formally committed to Israel’s destruction by virtue of its covenant, to establish a firm political and military presence right on its doorstep. And not only this, it was prepared to arm thousands of (hopefully reformed) terrorists who would be incorporated into newly established police and security forces charged with asserting the PLO’s authority throughout the territories”, Karsh writes.

In the words of prominent PLO leader Faisal Husseini, Israel was willingly introducing into its midst a “Trojan Horse” designed to promote the PLO’s strategic goal of “Palestine from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea” – that is, a Palestine in place of Israel.

Karsh writes that from the moment of Arafat’s arrival in Gaza in July 1994, the PLO chieftain set out to build up an extensive terrorist infrastructure in flagrant violation of the Oslo accords. He systematically failed to disarm the terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad as required by the Oslo accords, and tacitly approved the murder of hundreds of Israelis by these groups; created a far larger Palestinian army (the so-called police force) than was permitted by the accords; reconstructed the PLO’s old terrorist apparatus, mainly under the auspices of Tanzim, Fatah’s military arm; and frantically acquired prohibited weapons through the use of large sums of money donated to the Palestinian Authority by the international community for the benefit of the civilian Palestinian population.

Eventually, Arafat resorted to outright mass violence: first, in September 1996 to publicly discredit the newly-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and then in September 2000 with the launch of his war of terror — shortly after being offered by Netanyahu’s successor, Ehud Barak, the creation of an independent Palestinian state in 92 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

According to Karsh, what enabled Arafat to pursue his war preparations with impunity was a combination of international sympathy for his cause and Israeli self-delusion. “Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, the extent of the Israeli leap of faith in Oslo appears nothing short of mind-boggling. There were no ultimate goals set for the negotiating team, no road map to follow. There were no serious discussions over the direction of the entire process, not even awareness among the negotiators and their superiors of each other’s vision of peace”.

Karsh quotes Oslo godfather Shimon Peres who said: “I think what is really important for a peace process is the creation of a partner, more than a plan. Because plans don’t create partners but if you have a partner then you negotiate a plan”. But what if the partner would not act out the role ascribed to him? Peres: “We close our eyes. We don’t criticize because, for peace, we must produce a partner.”

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