Another Tack: Unhappy Birthday, Bitter 16

Sarah Honig
JPost
10 September 09

"Tra-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la happy birthday sweet 16," Neil Sedaka crooned his way to pop-culture immortality in those antediluvian days of 1961. Sixteen years are indeed a milestone. Any girl born this week in 1993 is, to borrow from yesteryear's hit-song lyrics, "not a baby anymore." She might well have "turned into the prettiest girl" and into "just a teenage dream."

But not all birthdays are sweet at 16. Some stick painfully in the craw. Sometimes what grew up before our very eyes is nothing less than a teenage nightmare, certainly nothing to rejoice about.

Such is the pitiless pseudo-peace conceived clandestinely in Oslo, imposed undemocratically on hapless Israelis and launched festively on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993.

Worst of all, this misshapen 16-year-old grotesque has changed our circumstances forever. The cataclysmic chain reaction it set off rages still. Thus far nobody has possessed the pluck to snuff the monstrosity. Even those who once pronounced it dead, like Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, now make nice and vow to nurture it.

NEARLY NINE years ago, when campaigning for seeming superhawk Ariel Sharon, Netanyahu declared that "Oslo is dead. The Palestinians quashed the deal they themselves signed." On that occasion he set three conditions for restarting talks: "an absolute cease-fire, a fundamental revamp of the message broadcast by the Palestinian leadership to its people, and testing these conditions over a prolonged period - not just two or three weeks."

He stressed that "no real coexistence can emerge from a situation in which Palestinians speak war and Israelis speak peace. Only after thorough and unambiguous overhauls of Palestinian intentions and behavior can we return to a clean negotiating table."

In actual fact, however, rather than being unceremoniously disposed of and buried, the Oslo ghoul mushroomed hideously from atrocity to atrocity. After two intifadas, nearly 2,000 Israeli dead, the attendant betrayal and folly of disengagement, the Hamas takeover of Gaza (which resulted from disengagement) and an ever-burgeoning series of egregious Israeli concessions (all of which the Palestinians disdainfully rebuffed), it can be confidently concluded that our geopolitical situation has never been this bad.

We mechanically move, as if mesmerized, from debilitating delusion to devastating weakness. Given everything that transpired, it's hard to recall how much better things were in the summer of 1993, before the Oslo newborn was underhandedly unleashed on unsuspecting us.

The first intifada had been quelled. The PLO was down and out, crumbling and deprecated even in the Arab milieu. Yasser Arafat and 50,000 of his henchmen hadn't yet been imported here to set up their corrupt latifundia. The Palestinian state was a chimera. "Family reunions" hadn't yet added 150,000 Arabs to Israel's population.
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