"The Oslo Syndrome," Part IV

This is a review/summary of the book, "The Oslo Syndrome: delusions of a
people under siege" by Kenneth Levin, Harvard psychologist and historian.
The final Part IV deals with the period of the Oslo Accords.

It is an obvious truism that Israeli military might represents no threat to
any of the surrounding Arab states as long as they do not take military
action against it. The reverse of course is not true. Israel was attacked
on several occasions by various combinations of Arab States, each time with
the clear intention of destroying the State (in the 1973 Yom Kippur War they
nearly succeeded).
But, within the body politic of Israel there was a large minority of people
who believed the reverse, who believed that Israel was a "colonialist,
imperialist" State, that was responsible for occupying Arab land. This
group, of various left wing organizations, cohered under the aegis of Peace
Now and sought to have Israel make concessions to the Arabs, in the
expectation that by doing so Arab hostility and hatred would disappear and
peace would miraculously break out (hence the name Peace Now!)
Such views were delusional in the extreme, yet in the period following the
Madrid Peace Conference of 1991, they became more and more accepted by
portions of the Israeli public. Israeli culture became dominated by the
"new" historians: Benny Morris, Tom Segev, Ilan Pappe, Amnon Rubinstein, Avi
Shlaim, etc. who stooped to selective referencing (often without Arab
sources) and downright fraud in their condemnation of Israel, and writers
such as: Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, Meir Shalev, Amos Elon and
others, who adopted a so-called "post-Zionist" rhetoric, in which all blame
for the continuing besiegement of Israel was self-directed. As stated by
Aharon Megged, "We have witnessed a phenomenon that has no parallel in
history: an emotional and moral identification of Israel's intelligentsia,
and its print and electronic media, with people committed to our
annihilation."
Although the Labor Party under Rabin won the Israeli election in 1992 on a
peace and security platform, he very quickly reverted (reminiscent of Sharon
ten years later) and under constant pressure from the Peace Movement adopted
essentially their approach. While the official Madrid Talks were
deadlocked, Rabin allowed secret talks to go ahead between Yossi Beilin,
Deputy to FM Shimon Peres, and a strong advocate of the Peace Movement, and
PLO representatives in Oslo. These talks led to the Oslo agreement that was
signed on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, where the famous
handshake took place between Rabin and Arafat.
Much has been written about the nature of these Accords and how they were
arrived at. Beilin ran these talks himself, with no professional input and
without direct involvement of Rabin or even Peres. Essentially he winged
it, and in the process gave away positions that had been long-established
Israeli and Labor Party policies (such as the distinction between "security"
and "religious" settlements and retention of the Jordan Valley). At no time
did he consider security or defense considerations in his discussions. His
naive attitude was that a signed "peace treaty" was in itself actual peace,
and that his agreements with the PLO were a fait accompli that could not be
rejected by the Israeli Government or Knesset. Later he confessed "I am
simply not prepared to live in a world where problems are unsolvable." His
further Stockholm draft agreement of 1995, in which Israel would have
withdrawn essentially to the pre-1967 borders, became moot with the
assassination of Rabin. Beilin is currently head of the extreme leftist
party Yahad (successor of Meretz).
What was the reality after the Oslo Accords were signed and implemented?
Everybody knows the sad story, the incitement (in Arabic) and terrorism
continued unabated. From September 1993 until July 1994, when Arafat
entered Gaza, 50 Israelis were killed. Between then and the signing of the
Oslo II Agreement in September 1995, a further 90 Israelis died. The Peace
Movement's sacrosanct belief that all that was required for peace was for
Israel to make sufficient concessions was shown to be bankrupt, yet the
Rabin/Peres Government still signed this further agreement. The Peace
Movement's conclusion was that terrorism continued because the pace of
Israeli withdrawals was too slow, and the Government's reaction was that
they would not allow the terrorists to prevent peace! So the killing went
on and in fact Arafat did not keep one commitment of the agreements he had
signed!
There followed an interlude from 1996-9 in which Benjamin Netanyahu was PM,
and he tried to introduce the concept of monitoring Palestinian compliance
and reciprocity in the Hebron Agreement, but by the time of the Wye
Memorandum of 1998 this had been dropped in the face of American
disinterest, European opposition, and domestic Israeli indifference. In
trying to do so he was labeled an "opponent of peace."
Ehud Barak as leader of the Labor Party became PM in 1999. In order to
overcome the effective stalemate in the so-called "peace process" (which
consisted of Israel withdrawing and Palestinian terrorists killing
Israelis), Barak tried for a "final status" agreement at Camp David in 1999,
but Arafat was not interested in signing any such agreement. After Arafat
rejected the Israeli concessions at Camp David, PM Barak under pressure from
Pres. Clinton offered Arafat everything that he could in the impromptu
follow-up Taba talks in 2000: a Palestinian State in Gaza plus 95% of the
West Bank, plus 5% of Israeli territory, complete Israeli evacuation,
removal of ALL settlements, Palestinian control over East Jerusalem and
sovereignty of the Temple Mount, and a token "return of refugees" - all
without any Government or Knesset approval. But, that was not enough for
Arafat, to him it was a clear sign of weakness, which he planned to exploit,
and he was not prepared to sign that the conflict was over. The Oslo period
came effectively to an end in 2000, when Arafat launched the intifada, and
Ariel Sharon was as a consequence subsequently elected Prime Minister. Now
five years later with over 1,000 dead and 6,000 injured we know what the
cost of the delusion of Oslo has wrought.
Never in history has a sovereign State virtually offered to commit national
suicide in order to placate an implacable enemy who had stated many times
his intention of destroying it. Only a State in which a large proportion of
the population has a peculiar kind of death-wish, derived from a
psychological self-hate induced by millennia of persecution, could indulge
in such self-delusion.
I leave you with this thought, the Gaza Disengagement Plan of PM Sharon was
sold as a rational unilateral policy - or was it another manifestation of
the Jewish tendency to self-reform in the face of besiegement in order to
ingratiate oneself with the enemy?

Summary: This is an excellent scholarly work, which is copiously footnoted.
It exposes a pattern of Israeli self-deception that derives from a
pathological syndrome of historical origin.