As soon as the ink dried on the Oslo surrender, followed by the handshake between Rabin and Arafat, both sides began reassuring their constituents and appeasing their critics. While setting loose his thugs, Arafat also embarked almost immediately on terrorism within Israel's urban centers. Arafat urged his critics to remain patient, assuring them that Oslo was only a phase in the ultimate goal of destroying Israel.
Rabin, Peres, Beilin, Sarid and company also had to counter severe criticism from the right and a degree of skepticism from some precincts of the left. Israel's "peaceniks" devised a two pronged strategy-- use the word "peace" ad nauseam, even referring to the victims of terrorism as "casualties of peace," and promise the critics and doubters a golden economic era along with the respect of the United Nations and all its member nations.
While we are neither admirers nor supporters of Israel's defeated Prime Minister, we cannot join the vultures that swarm at his defeat.
The latter was a seductive promise. For decades, Israel sought not only commercial agreements, but also a sense of being equal among the nations of the world. And, for a brief period, Israel enjoyed a honeymoon with Europe, Africa, Asia, and most important, with America. Rabin's funeral was the apogee, as dozens of dignitaries from every corner of the world, including several Arab nations, eulogized the slain Prime Minister and the vision of "peace." The halcyon days did not last long. After Netanyahu acceded to virtually every Arab and Clintonian demand, after he went beyond the original dictates of the Oslo Accords, retreating from Hebron, after he turned a blind eye to the PLO's violations and to its incitements to hatred and war, after he turned his back on his constituency and gratified only his enemies, after he did all this, he was reviled by the left, by the Israeli media, by American Jews, and by a vicious chorus of international observers and legislators. While we are neither admirers nor supporters of Israel's defeated Prime Minister, we cannot join the vultures that swarm at his defeat.
Bibi, however flawed, however duplicitous, was never the real problem. Nor is he responsible for the sudden outbursts of anti-Semitism that find a voice in support of the entire PLO package--including the surrender of Jerusalem, and a return to the original partition plan which would leave Israel, as former Labor leader Yigal Allon once observed, in the shape of three sausage links (see map on page 7). The effrontery of the European Unions' unanimous support for treating Jerusalem as a "Corpus Separatum"--a separate body from Israel--is not Bibi's fault. Nor is the indecent and disrespectful treatment of Israel by the Clinton administration, including the Secretary of State and all her lapdogs, really Bibi's fault.
When Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and head of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, blasts Israel in a way reserved for scolding a truly wicked child, it is not Bibi's fault.
The reason for all this opprobrium directed at the Jewish State from every corner of the world is that Israel is in retreat and it is an historical and irrefutable fact that the world's anti-Semitic thugs cannot resist kicking Jews when they sense weakness. And, the more weakness there is, the harsher the kicks.
Many American supporters of Israel, among them even the cheerleaders for the Oslo Accords, are now experiencing a sense of foreboding and gloom. While many are heartened by the election results, they are upset and even mystified by Israel's return to the status of a pariah state.
The United Nations is again a hotbed of anti-Israel rhetoric. The European Union has unanimously supported the concept of an international status for Jerusalem, rejecting Israel's claim to its own capital. Most ominously, there is increasing European support for UN Resolution 181, which was originally devised to give Israel a tiny fraction of the 20% of Palestine which remained after the creation of the kingdom of Trans-Jordan. Although the Jews, in their zeal to have even a tiny portion of the historic homeland, accepted the partition plan, the Arabs attacked the fledgling Jewish State.
When Israel won its War of Independence, the larger armistice lines of 1949 became the borders of the state until 1967 when Israel liberated eastern Jerusalem, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Judea and Samaria. Resolution 181 became null and void, with the deftly worded Resolutions 242 and 338 becoming the basis for negotiations.
That was the situation until Arafat, postponing a PLO declaration of statehood in an effort to aid Labor, declared that Resolution 181 (the original UN partition plan) and Resolution 194 (calling for the return of all
(Continued on p.9)
Outpost - 8 - June 1999