We have fallen into the Oslo trap. It was a honey trap, sweet and hope-inspiring. How pleasant it was to be enmeshed in its web for a few years, with all the conferences and meetings. But Oslo didn’t advance peace, it only moved it farther away, beyond the horizon, consolidating the occupation and perpetuating the settlements.
This is of course the wisdom of hindsight and no, it’s not because of Rabin’s assassination. History will not judge the Israeli instigators of Oslo favorably. They cannot be forgiven for missing an opportunity, no less fateful than the missed chances before the Yom Kippur War.
One scene in particular is etched in my mind from those heady days, and how gay they were. One day, when we left the Gaza Strip through the Erez border station, we turned around and waved goodbye to the Strip: Goodbye Gaza, we won’t see you again, not under an occupation. Yasser Arafat was already stationed in Gaza, catching a cold in his Spartan office under the Tadiran air conditioner left behind by the Israelis, and hopes soared.
A tour for journalists, held a few months later in honor of the inauguration of a vacation village in the northern Gaza Strip, attended by Israeli celebrities, only heightened the sense of delight. A delegation to Europe, consisting of members of the Knesset and a Palestinian legislative council, including Marwan Barghouti, only intensified the illusion.
We thought the occupation was about to end, that a Palestinian state was around the corner, and that we could vacation at a Club Med in Beit Lahiya; we thought Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres wanted peace. Only a handful of sourpuss leftist radicals thought we should not be taking that road. They were right and we were wrong. We again have to apologize to the radical left, which saw it all before anyone else did.
The minutes of the cabinet meeting that ratified the accords 30 years ago, first published last week, tell the whole story. The querulous tone, the pessimism, the contempt, the almost physical revulsion at the Palestinians and their leader; the sense that Israel was “giving” more than it was “getting,” the lack of any willingness to forge a belated justice, no taking of responsibility for the crimes of 1948, not even for those of 1967; the total disregard for international law, the compulsive attention to security, only that of Israelis, obviously, the reference to Palestinian “terror” exclusively, not to Israel’s actions, and the underlying fear of the settlers and their henchmen, who at that time were mere infants in comparison to the monsters they are now: All of these were not apparent in any of the words spoken by the Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Rabin and Peres. That’s not how peace is made. That’s how you set a trap in order to gain more time.
The pinnacle was the sigh of relief emitted by Peres at that session. The Palestinians had agreed that Jewish settlements could remain in place. The father of the settlement enterprise boasted that he had even managed to foil the demand to turn them into a free trade zone. This is the crux of the problem with Oslo.
The most fateful issue wasn’t discussed. The greatest crime was ignored. The Palestinians made the mistake of their lives, with the Israelis acting in their customary rapacious and scheming ways. “What we were worried about was that they would raise the issue of the settlements,” confessed Peres. “The issue of the settlements” as if this were the buzzing of a pesky fly that needs to be removed from the room. But the fly disappeared on its own. How fortunate. After all, if they had started pestering us with that “issue,” we would have had to at least freeze settlement construction, the minimal step of any government striving to make peace.
That was the litmus test for ascertaining true intentions: If Rabin and Peres did not propose to freeze the construction of settlements, they did not intend for one minute to enable the establishment of a Palestinian state. It’s that simple.
No, Rabin and Peres were not seeking justice or peace. They were seeking quiet, which enabled the tripling of the number of settlers and ensured the perpetuation of the occupation. For that, there is no forgiveness. Haaretz editor Aluf Benn misses Rabin. I find it hard to join him, despite my great admiration for the man and the pining for those days, which were indeed better. But there was no true striving for peace and justice there.
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