If Israel is ever destroyed, Yossi Beilin will hold more than his fair share of responsibility for this, second probably only to Shimon Peres himself.

Yossi Beilin was in many ways the mother hen to the Oslo debacle. He had risen in the Labor Party's machine after completing a "doctorate" in political science at Tel Aviv University. (I am one of those very few who have actually seen his "dissertation," a copy of which is floating around the library at Haifa University. It is a shallow, longwinded story about the potential of the ideologically pure "young guard" in the Labor Party to do really nice things if they take over the party, and it reveals all of the shallow silliness of Beilin, "the Labor Party intellectual." It is a disgrace that Tel Aviv University awarded a doctorate to its author.)

Beilin's latest gambit is to "negotiate" publicly on behalf of himself with the PLO and to crayon yet another grand document for total settlement of all outstanding Arab-Israeli issues through surrender to the PLO.

Beilin had organized the illegal and secret "negotiations" with the PLO in Oslo back when any contact with it was illegal in Israel. He was accompanied by two other mediocre Israeli "academics." Beilin accelerated the "talks" after Rabin got elected on a platform of no deals whatsoever with the PLO. Beilin's view was that Israel's "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was the source of all the country's problems, and that it must be ended at all costs, no matter how the PLO behaved, and no matter how many Jews were killed along the way to achieve this greater good. In a bastardization of a line by Ben-Gurion, Beilin insisted that Israel must fight terror as if there is no "Peace Process" and pursue the "Peace Process" as if there is no terror. In fact, Israel pursued both the "Peace Process" and the war against terror as if there were no terror, all thanks to Beilin.

When the buses started exploding, thanks to the West Bank and Gaza having been turned into bomb factories as part of Beilin's grand plan, it was suggested by your humble curmudgeon that a new graveyard be erected for the victims, to be named Beilingrad. After the Oslo Accords produced their inevitable bloodshed, Beilin led the effort for yet another new all-encompassing grand "Accord" to resolve all Middle East issues of conflict through capitulation to the PLO. He led the campaign to turn all of East Jerusalem, including the Old City and the Western Wall, over to the PLO and to reconstruct the Berlin Wall in Jerusalem. Beilin unblushingly insisted that the most effective way to retain Jerusalem as Israel's capital was to turn it into the capital of "Palestine." When the Oslo "Accords" produced hundreds of murdered Israeli civilians, Beilin coined the expression "sacrifices for peace."

As a result of his political role, Beilin became the darling of the European left and a man despised even within his own Labor Party. As the Labor Party shrank and approached single-digit percentages of the Israeli electorate in its vote-draw, Beilin was dumped by his own party. In last year's Labor Party primaries, he was consigned to political invisibility, this by the same party that had lurched as far leftwards as it had ever dared, under Amram Mitzna. (Mitzna, by the way, is backing the new Beilin "Understandings.")

But even the Labor Party of Mitzna saw Beilin as an embarrassment and blocked him in the primaries from getting a seat in the Knesset. Within days, Beilin announced that he was resigning from the Labor Party and was recruiting himself to rescue the Meretz Party and the 4% of Israeli voters who support it, by joining it to erect a new "Social Democratic" party.

Beilin's latest gambit is to "negotiate" publicly on behalf of himself with the PLO and to crayon yet another grand document for total settlement of all outstanding Arab-Israeli issues through surrender to the PLO. Beilin does not represent Israel, does not represent the opposition Labor Party and does not even represent Meretz, whose leaders are embarrassed by the new "peace initiative." Even Ehud Barak, who came close to offering Arafat at Camp David what Beilin now suggests and who turned Israel's northern border over to the Hizbollah, has denounced Beilin for harmful kibbitzing. Nevertheless, Beilin has been meeting in Geneva with a PLO representative and they have produced the "Geneva Understandings," the newest Beilin answer to the Munich capitulations.

Now, in fact, "Jewish-Arab Peace Dialogues" have been polluting the planet for many years. These are those meetings between Palestinian fascists and Jewish leftists that inevitably end up endorsing all of the Arab positions regarding the Middle East war as a balanced compromise and consequence of the open dialogue. These are dialogues of the deaf and extraordinarily dumb. They are meetings of the mind between Arabs seeking Israel's destruction and Jews seeking Israel's destruction.

Nevertheless, the Beilin "Understandings" became the buzz all over town. Israel's "post-Zionist" daily Ha'aretz touted them day after day in banner front page headlines, serving as little more than a printed infommercial for them. Ha'aretz ran as a "news story" on

November 2003               - 7 -               Outpost