(Continued from p.11)
to better relations. India's need for new anti-terror strategies and advanced weapons, and Israel's need for markets and technology, may increase cooperation between both governments. India's relations with Israel will be tempered and influenced by the outcome of America's ongoing anti-terror campaign and the international response to Islamic terror. Among the evils inherent in the Oslo process is the stubborn delusion that a "peace process" is inevitable. Despite the obvious failure of the Road Map, even Israel's friends -- people like Clifford May, Hillel Halkin, well-meaning legislators and diplomats -- simply make a political u-turn and go back to the Rogers' plan -- territorial concessions by Israel in exchange for rhetoric from its enemies. There is a paralyzing inability to consider other alternatives.
There are notable exceptions. David Frum, in National Review Online on September 12, 2003, states:
"The world community keeps pretending that this Palestinian war of aggression does not exist. What is occurring in the Mideast, we are urged to believe, is not a war but a 'peace process' interrupted by bomb attacks carried out by fringe groups. Arafat and the Palestinian Authority (or so we are again urged to believe) are merely bystanders.
"Has it occurred to anyone that the reason that the Middle East is so unstable -- the reason that the Arabs keep warring and warring and warring again on Israel -- is that we have taught them to think of war as a one-way option? If they win, they keep their winnings -- if they lose, the West will restore their losses?
"The Palestinians gambled everything on this war. They lost their gamble. Now it is time for them to be cashed out. Israel should invade the West Bank and Gaza, extinguish all Palestinian political authority, round up and detain as many Palestinian leaders as it can catch, put them on trial for war crimes, and reassert its pre-1993 status as the occupying power in all of the West Bank and Gaza."
In another sober view, Jeff Jacoby writes in the Boston Globe on September 14:
"Oslo quickly became a cult, worshipped with a fervor that brooked no doubts and disdained all skeptics. There was never peace but there was a 'peace process,' and the more the evidence of its failure mounted, the more fervently it was venerated.
"Oslo was not a good idea that went sour. It was fatally flawed from the start. The fundamental premise of Oslo -- that the Palestinians were ready to live in peace with Israel -- was always a lie. To Arafat and the PLO, peace was merely a tactic, one step forward in the 'liberation of Palestine'."
These two columnists are to be congratulated and encouraged for forward thinking and rejecting a return to failed policies of the past.
Americans For a Safe Israel
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Outpost - 12 - October 2003