This enabled the Palestinians to pursue, simultaneously, a two-pronged policy of negotiating with the Israelis while at the same time allowing a controlled level of violence to prod their interlocutors to submit to their demands. For a time, this behavior raised doubts about whether the Palestinian Authority exercised effective control over its citizenry. But it turned out that Arafat did move decisively, when Hamas posed a danger to his rule. Otherwise, he lauded Hamas martyrs and even participated in their funerals, as in the case of the "Engineer," Yihye Ayyash, who was eliminated by Israel. Moreover, Arafat himself never desisted from his incitement against Israel and from calling for a holy war (jihad) to liberate Jerusalem. His campaigns of incitement, which ran contrary to his commitments in Oslo, were reflected in the official Palestinian media and in the Palestinian Authority's school textbooks.

The Israeli government let Arafat off the hook,

A procession in Ramallah featured a donkey wearing a Jewish prayer shawl and a Star of David in the shape of a swastika.

And so the reciprocity that was embedded in the Oslo Accords, and that is inherent in any contract or treaty between parties, was gradually eroded, with the Palestinians overlooking their obligations and the Israelis overlooking their partners' oversight. Paradoxically, the Palestinians who were on the receiving end of the deal and should therefore have been interested in implementing the agreement to the letter, soon learned that the Israeli government was so eager to prove that the Oslo strategy was sound that it became more and more forgiving, until it unwittingly contributed to the collapse of the accords. Indeed, Israel had committed itself to evacuate territories gradually, in return for Palestinian pledges to eliminate terror and incitement, collect illegal weapons, cut the Palestinian Police to the agreed size, and extradite criminals who found refuge in its territory. This was not done, yet the demand that Israel should evacuate territory was constant. Netanyahu's innovation in the Wye Agreements of October 1998 was to link specifically Israeli withdrawals with Palestinian implementation of their obligations, summarized in the catchy phrase: "When they give, they will receive. If they do not give, they will not receive." But soon the Labor opposition began mocking that slogan and unilaterally accusing Netanyahu, not the Palestinians, of obstructing the peace. All the Palestinians had to do, then, was to demonize Netanyahu with the Israeli Left's support, and to wait him out until he was dethroned and replaced by Barak.

When that happened in May 1999, the Palestinians were elated and their expectations were raised. The new Prime Minister confidently re-launched the peace process, assuming that the Palestinians would accept with gratitude his far-reaching concessions which violated the taboos that previous Israeli governments had imposed. Instead, the entire Oslo process blew up in his face. And Barak finally realized that, regardless of who leads Israel in the negotiations, its maximal concessions for the sake of peace would remain far beneath the Palestinians' minimal demands. That realization, which started with Barak's sobering up in Camp David II (July 2000), came full bloom when the Palestinians decided in late September 2000 to back it up with large-scale acts of violence which finally buried all the assumptions upon which Oslo had been erected. The realization was that what is at stake is not a quantitative issue of assets and territory, which can be negotiated, but value-loaded matters which involve the very existence of the Jewish state. Moreover, as the Palestinian stance on these matters is endorsed by the Arab and Islamic worlds, and powerful doses of religious vocabulary and symbols are injected into this already difficult debate, the dispute becomes anything but soluble.

One day in January 2001, at the height of the al-Aqsa intifada, the Israeli press carried the picture of a procession in Ramallah, which paraded a donkey donning a Jewish prayer shawl and a Star of David in the shape of a swastika. The Israeli public was deeply shaken, regarding this act of profanation and abuse as a continuation of the torching of the Jewish synagogue in Jericho and Joseph's Tomb in Nablus during the initial stages of the current upheaval. In all those cases, what transpired was a Palestinian determination, born out of frustration and hatred, to take revenge on Jewish religious symbols, knowing full well the hurt and anguish this would cause among the Israeli public.

This phenomenon of poking the Jew in the eye in order to demean him has been repeatedly manifested in the desecration of Jewish sanctified objects, such as the Israeli national flag or parchments of the Torah or

Outpost               - 4 -               August 2001