Since the onset of the Oslo peace process between Israel and the Palestinians (1993), an entire structure was erected which had no foundation; an entire set of axioms was woven which assumed that once addressed, negotiated, and agreed upon, the fundamental problems pitting the parties against each other would become soluble.

Foremost among these assumptions was the one which posited that the Palestinian issue was "the core of the Arab-Israeli dispute," as if it were impossible to resolve other problems without first addressing it or, conversely, as if resolving it would usher in solutions for all the rest. But if anything, the Palestinian issue has been the pretext and rationalization for Arab and Islamic hostility. Two decades into the peace accords between Israel and Egypt, visits of Egyptians to Israel are curtailed by Cairo, anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli campaigns prevail in the government-controlled media, and Israel, the Jews, and Zionism are treated with scorn and abuse, not unlike the pre-peace period.

Until the 1967 War, the very existence of the embattled Jewish state, within its dangerously impossible boundaries, attracted much of the Western world's sympathies. The Arabs were numerous, overwhelming, wealthy, and powerful, while the fledgling Jewish nation seemed small, resourceless, threatened, and besieged. But following Israel's stunning victory in that war, roles were inverted: Israel now appeared as the conqueror, while the hapless Arabs gladly took on the role of the defeated, the victims, the humiliated, who needed world sympathy to deliver them from the claws of Zionism.

Against that backdrop, the Palestinian national struggle attained its apogee; the PLO and Yasser Arafat became household names both in the chanceries of the world and in the living rooms of practically everyone. It was in those years that the myth was cultivated that the Palestinians were the "core of the conflict" and the rest of the Arab-Israeli dispute was made subservient and hostage to them. So much so, that through a long process of guilt cultivation within the Left in general, and the Israeli Left in particular, the Palestinian claim was accepted that Israel had been born in sin and that unless that wrong was redressed, the Arab-Israeli dispute would remain insoluble. The moral burden was shifted from the politicidal broadsides of the Arabs against the existence of Israel to the latter's obstinacy in denying the Palestinians what it had itself struggled to achieve: a place under the sun, recognized by the world community.

The steady erosion in Israel's stance in the world ultimately produced Israeli governments who were ready to go to Madrid, Washington, Oslo, Cairo, and Sharm el Sheikh to engineer a peace accord with the Palestinians, precisely after the latter had evinced their commonality of purpose with Saddam Hussein, whom they enthusiastically backed during the Gulf War. The reversal in Israel, and in consequence in the U.S., was so complete that the order of the day became a quick, complete and comprehensive settlement of the Palestinian issue. Exonerating the Palestinians themselves and other Arab countries from the search for a solution, Israel was soon left in solitude like a thorn in the desert, to produce the panacea. And the deeper Israel delved into this impasse, the higher the expectations were from her to deliver. Any snag, any friction, any misunderstanding, was then systematically laid at Israel's door, due to her "procrastination" and lack of "good faith."

Israel was left in solitude like a thorn in the desert, to produce the panacea.

Chief among those concerns that caused the negotiations to stall were Jerusalem and the unexpected Palestinian insistence on the right of return for their refugees. Contrary to Israel's foregone conclusion since 1967 that Jerusalem would remain "forever united under Israeli sovereignty," the Palestinians meant business when they stood by their resolution that their Palestinian state must be crowned by Jerusalem as its capital. Similarly, all the "understandings" under which the Palestinians were supposed to have internalized and digested the unfeasibility of the repatriation of their four million refugees to Israel proper proved to be deep and irreconcilable misunderstandings. With these two fundamental assumptions vanishing, the gaps between the parties grew truly unbridgeable.

Probably the most disappointing among the collapsed assumptions was the realization that the substantive change that Oslo was to introduce in the relations between Israel and the Palestinians, namely that differences were to be settled peacefully by way of negotiations, proved totally illusory. In fact, as an immediate result of the signing of the accords, the intensity of Palestinian violence against Israel dramatically increased. Distraught Israelis were told that they were asked to make "sacrifices for peace," an interesting innovation for an embattled people who had been urged to make sacrifices for survival during the preceding decades. It also soon appeared that the Palestinian Authority, which was to ensure the peace and rein in the terrorist groups under its aegis, was turning a blind eye to their anti-Israeli

August 2001               - 3 -               Outpost