25 YEARS AFTER OSLO

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THE U.S. PRESSURES PALESTINIANS TO GIVE UP A LOST WAR

JP- by Ziva Dahl  6-9-2018 - https://tinyurl.com/y74ffzks   

September 13, 2018 marks the 25th anniversary of the first of two Oslo Accords, which the late Charles Krauthammer referred to as “one of the great miscalculations in diplomatic history.”

Prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat signed the initial 1993 accord on the White House lawn. A second accord followed in 1995. In exchange for Arafat’s signed pledge to renounce terrorism and other violence, remove the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Covenant statement denying Israel’s right to exist, and to work toward a two-state settlement, Israel would withdraw from areas with dense Palestinian population and allow a Palestinian Authority to govern 95% of its population. 

Oslo represented an act of appeasement by the Jewish state. Sick of war and hungry for peace, Israeli leaders deluded themselves into believing that PLO chairman Arafat had accepted Israel’s existence.

Israel fell for a grand deception. The Palestinians never changed their covenant, continued their terrorist activities, established a kleptocracy and, at Camp David in 2000, rejected a magnanimous Israeli two-state peace plan – an act that President Clinton called a “colossal mistake.” Arafat began a war of terror that killed more than 1,100 Israelis (78% civilians) and wounded 8,000. In 2008, Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, refused an offer that was even more generous.

More than a decade after Oslo, Israelis gradually concluded that you can’t make peace with an enemy determined to replace you with a 22nd Arab state. They realized that Oslo was part of the PLO’s “phased plan” to establish political control over territory Israel gave them and use that base to continue the “armed struggle” until it had “liberated” all of Israel from the Jews. 

Oslo exacted a painful price, effectively allowing the PLO to transform Judea, Samaria and Gaza into terrorist hotbeds.  The PLO achieved international credibility. They created a propaganda machine to defame and delegitimize Israel, added “occupied Palestine” to the world’s lexicon and won the support of the Left. The PLO radicalized the Palestinians and Israel’s Arab minority, openly glorifying brutality and terrorism with religious zeal.

Palestinian culture views Israeli compromises, peace offers and “painful concessions” as signs of weakness and vulnerability. Oslo made a bad situation worse, strengthening the Palestinians’ resolve to vanquish the Jewish state.

President Trump’s predecessors rewarded the Palestinians for bad behavior and inadvertently fueled their will to fight on. Trump has warned the Palestinians that the US will no longer acquiesce to Palestinian intransigence and that violence will cost them dearly. He is methodically discarding Palestinian demands that pose unique obstacles to peace – the right of return and status of Jerusalem – which Oslo never addressed.

Former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren observed, “Each time they refused to negotiate in the past, the Palestinians were rewarded... But now the US will punish them.”

Trump’s administration rejects the Palestinian claim to the right of return to Israel of the five million descendants of the original Palestinian refugees, withholding its $400 million funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), with the goal of shuttering that anti-Israel organization that supports Palestinian irredentism and terrorism.

The Saudis are also applying pressure on the Palestinians. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman suggested that the Palestinians accept Trump’s “proposals” or “shut up.”

It’s highly unlikely that President Trump will unveil a peace deal during his September 25 UN speech. Most likely, he’ll discuss overarching principles within the context of US Middle East policy.

Trump is playing hardball. So far he hasn’t fallen into the Oslo trap. He’s attempting to demoralize the Palestinians to destroy their will to fight a lost war. This will take much more time and effort, continued pressure by the US and Israel, and new Palestinian leadership.

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IT IS NOT THE ECONOMY, STUPID

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No cliché has dominated the discourse on the Gaza situation more than the perception of Palestinian violence as a corollary of the Strip’s dire economic condition. No sooner had Hamas and Israel been locked in yet another armed confrontation over the past weeks than the media, foreign policy experts and politicians throughout the world urged the immediate rehabilitation of Gaza as panacea to its endemic propensity for violence. Even senior members of the Israel Defense Forces opined that a “nonmilitary process” of humanitarian aid could produce a major change in the Gaza situation.

It is not Gaza’s economic malaise that has precipitated Palestinian violence; rather, it is the endemic violence that has caused the Strip’s humanitarian crisis.

Yasser Arafat, was an engineer, and his fellow arch terrorist George Habash – the pioneer of aircraft hijacking – a physician. Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was a schoolteacher, while his erstwhile successor, Sayyid Qutb, whose zealous brand of Islam fired generations of terrorists, including the group behind the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, was a literary critic and essayist.

Nor has Hamas been an exception to this rule. Not only has its leadership been highly educated, but it has gone to great lengths to educate its followers, notably through the takeover of the Islamic University in Gaza and its transformation into a hothouse for indoctrinating generations of militants and terrorists. 

Hamas founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, studied at the al-Azhar University in Cairo, probably the Islamic world’s most prestigious institution of higher religious learning, while his successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, was a physician, as is Hamas cofounder Mahmoud Zahar. The group’s current leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and Muhammad Def, head of Hamas’s military wing, are graduates of the Islamic University of Gaza, while Khaled Mashaal studied physics in Kuwait, where he resided until 1990. Hardly the products of deprivation and despair.

This propensity for violence among the educated and moneyed classes of Palestinian society was starkly reflected in the identity of the 156 men and eight women who detonated themselves in Israel’s towns and cities during the first five years of the “al-Aqsa Intifada,” murdering 525 people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. A mere 9% of the perpetrators had basic education, while 22% were university graduates and 34% were high school graduates. 

Likewise, a comprehensive study of Hamas and Islamic Jihad suicide terrorists from the late 1980s to 2003 found that only 13% came from a poor background, compared with 32% of the Palestinian population in general. More than half of suicide bombers had entered further education, compared with just 15% of the general population.

By contrast, successive public opinion polls among the Palestinian residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the 1990s revealed far stronger support for the nascent peace process with Israel, and opposition to terrorism, among the poorer and less educated parts of society – representing the vast majority of the population.

In short, it is not socioeconomic despair but the total rejection of Israel’s right to exist, inculcated by the PLO and Hamas in their hapless West Bank and Gaza subjects over the past 25 years, which underlies the relentless anti-Israel violence emanating from these territories and its attendant economic stagnation and decline.

At the time of the September 1993 signing of the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles, conditions in the territories were far better than in most Arab states – despite the steep economic decline caused by the intifada of 1987-93. But within six months of Arafat’s arrival in Gaza (in July 1994), the standard of living in the Strip fell by 25%, and more than half of the area’s residents claimed to have been happier under Israel. Even so, at the time Arafat launched his war of terrorism in September 2000, Palestinian income per capita was nearly double Syria’s, more than four times Yemen’s, and 10% higher than Jordan’s – one of the better-off Arab states. Only the oilrich Gulf states and Lebanon were more affluent.

By the time of Arafat’s death, in November 2004, his terrorism war had slashed this income to a fraction of its earlier levels, with real GDP per capita some 35% below the pre-September 2000 level, unemployment more than doubling, and numerous Palestinians reduced to poverty and despondency.

This means that so long as Gaza continues to be governed by Hamas’s rule of the jungle, no Palestinian civil society, let alone a viable state, can develop. Just as the creation of free and democratic societies in Germany and Japan after World War II necessitated a comprehensive sociopolitical and educational transformation, so, too, it is only when the local population sweeps its oppressive rulers from power, eradicates the endemic violence from political and social life, and teaches the virtues of coexistence with Israel that Gaza can look forward to a better future.

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1967 and the myth of Palestinian victimization

Video of the week: A PALESTINIAN MYTH - The so called NAKBA - http://tinyurl.com/lnahe55

In the weeks of tension before the Six Day War, Israel’s struggle for survival was seen around the world as a contest between good and evil. The threats to “push the Jews into the sea,” were widely reported, as were the military preparations and sudden departure of UN peacekeepers. Israel was still the plucky David of 1948, ominously threatened by the Arab Goliath. Although the PLO – the Palestine Liberation Organization – was created in 1964, the Palestinians received little attention. In this environment, Israel’s success was widely applauded, particularly in the West.

But gradually, the images began to change as the Arabs used their oil power and threats of terrorism to gain allies and market anti-Israel campaigns in Europe. In France, the elite’s support for Israel waned before 1967, based on a cold calculation of economic interests, and in Britain, a mix of Arabist romanticism and antisemitism gained influence.

In North America, avant garde intellectuals switched support to the newly minted Palestinian cause.

Under Yasser Arafat, PLO airplane hijackings and mass terrorism such as the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre put the “plight of the Palestinians” high on the priority list, and the Arab oil embargo that accompanied the 1973 Yom Kippur War reinforced this process. Support for Israel became a liability, but rather than admitting that this was due to weakness and fear, political officials and diplomats blamed the post-1967 “occupation.”

 

Israel suddenly became the dominant power, and was automatically pronounced guilty (without much of a trial) for the failure to end the conflict. In 1980, Europe officially promoted Palestinian independence as a magic solution to the conflict, and condemned “Israeli settlements” as the “primary obstacle to the peace process,” while terrorism and incitement were hidden under the diplomatic, journalistic and academic carpets.

This language and the policies behind it have not changed in 37 years.

But for Palestinian leaders, settlements and the absence of a Palestinian state next to Israel were not the main issues; Arafat told anyone who would listen that “the goal of our struggle is the end of Israel, and there can be no compromise or mediations. We don’t want peace, we want victory. Peace for us means Israel’s destruction and nothing else.” (Cited in The Washington Post, March 29, 1970.) In the United Nations, which was still taken seriously at that time, the Arabs were joined by the Soviet Union, which combined Cold War competition with crude antisemitism.

Bodies such as the UN Commission on Human Rights (now a council) were turned into platforms for Israel-bashing – in part for its own sake, and also to turn attention away from the dictatorships. As one official noted, it was much easier to “support a condemnation of Israel for reprisals against Arab sabotage” than to deal with real abuses.

UNRWA, created in 1948 ostensibly to help war refugees, remains a permanent source of propaganda and hate, and in 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution. The Division for Palestinian Rights was created and funded to orchestrate a traveling road show known as the Committee for the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, to promote the mythology in Jakarta, Beijing, Brussels and elsewhere.

Into this propaganda mix powerful human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, began promoting the myths of Palestinian victimization and Israeli “violations of international law.” Mass producing condemnations of Israeli “occupation” while erasing the images of Palestinian terrorism and its victims, they rewrote the history of the conflict as well as the reality on the ground. A generation of journalists, political officials, and other “elite opinion makers” were indoctrinated into accepting this narrative without question. In this environment, the transition to boycott campaigns and other forms of demonization was simple.

Among Israelis, the gap between our understanding of history and the way it was portrayed elsewhere was largely ignored, allowing the damage to fester and grow. When politicians finally recognized the implications of the “narrative war,” many of the responses, including the recent legislation to ban leading foreign boycott activists, were heavy-handed and counterproductive.

As the 50-year anniversary of the 1967 war approaches, the myths of Palestinian victimization and Israeli guilt will resonate widely in the UN, college campuses and media platforms.

The challenge is to expose these slogans, and restore at least some connection to reality. But whether this will actually happen depends on how we package our messaging.

The days of David vs. Goliath and the image of Israel as a country threatened with imminent destruction are long gone.

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