The Camp David debacle 20 years later: Still holding onto the Oslo delusion

The disastrous peace summit that led to a Palestinian terror war remains an object lesson in hubris and an unwillingness to accept the truth about an insoluble conflict.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
23 July '20..

It’s one anniversary that no one is celebrating. Twenty years ago this month, President Bill Clinton welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to a peace summit at Camp David. Looking back on it now, even Clinton administration veterans understand that it was an act of monumental folly. As former State Department Middle East peace processor Aaron David Miller wrote, the effort was doomed even before it began.

The problem is that even those who have, in retrospect, acknowledged that they were mistaken still cling to the delusion that smarter diplomacy and different American, Israeli and Palestinian leaders might still produce a different outcome. Even those who are striving to be self-critical about being, as Miller noted, “lost in the woods” at Camp David in July 2000, are only gradually coming to grips with the fact that some problems have no solution. Even worse, some of those who followed them, like White House senior adviser and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was in charge of President Donald Trump’s Mideast peace efforts, seem to have failed to learn all of the appropriate lessons from the Camp David fiasco, even as he strove to do better than his predecessors.

Unlike the backdrop to the signing of the Oslo Accords seven years earlier, the circumstances that led the events of July 2000 are no longer much discussed. The famous photo op on the White House Lawn in September 1993 is still celebrated by some as a historic triumph, despite the catastrophic consequences of that agreement. But the ignominious conclusion to the 2000 summit has largely been thrown down the Orwellian memory hold by the foreign-policy establishment and the mainstream media.

They don’t want to draw appropriate conclusions from these events because the conclave exploded the entire concept behind the Oslo process from which it sprang as based on a myth.

(Continue to Full Column)

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Judea and Samaria: The Historical and Legal Milestones that Make the Case - by Amb. Alan Baker

Israel’s claims to sovereignty regarding the West Bank areas of Judea and Samaria did not originate with Israel’s attaining control of the area following the 1967 Six-Day War. Israel’s rights are based on the indigenous and historical claims of the Jewish people in the area as a whole, virtually from time immemorial.

Amb. Alan Baker..
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs..
13 July '20..
Link: https://jcpa.org/sovereignty-in-the-west-bank-areas-of-judea-and-samaria-historical-and-legal-milestones-that-make-the-case/

The subject of the rights of the Jewish People and the State of Israel under international law, in the West Bank areas of Judea and Samaria, involves a complex and extensive web of historical, legal, military, and political issues.

The Jewish People Have Historical Claims in Judea and Samaria

Israel’s claims to sovereignty regarding the West Bank areas of Judea and Samaria did not originate with Israel’s attaining control of the area following the 1967 Six-Day War.

Israel’s rights are based on the indigenous and historical claims of the Jewish people in the area as a whole, virtually from time immemorial.

Israel’s international legal rights were acknowledged in 1917 by the Balfour Declaration’s promise to the Jews to reestablish their historical national home in Palestine. These rights are based on clear historical, archeological, and Biblical evidence.

The Balfour Declaration was subsequently recognized internationally and encapsulated into international law through a series of international instruments commencing with the 1920 San Remo Declaration by the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers, followed by the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.

The continued validity of these foundational legal rights was also assured under Article 80 of the United Nations Charter.

The 27-year Oslo blood libel is over - by Caroline Glick

And closely, more immediately, as I sat there listening, I felt 27 years of worry and frustration washing away. The 27-year Oslo nightmare was over. The blood libel that blamed Israel for the Palestinians’ war against it was rejected by the greatest nation in the world, finally.

Caroline Glick..
Carolineglick.com..
31 January '20..
Link: http://carolineglick.com/the-oslo-blood-libel-is-over/

From 1994 through 1996, as a captain in the IDF, I served as a member of Israel’s negotiating team with the PLO. Those years were the heyday of the so-called peace process. As the coordinator of negotiations on civil affairs for the Coordinator of Government Activities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, I participated in all of the negotiating sessions with the Palestinians that led to a half a dozen or so of agreements, including the Interim or Oslo B agreement from September 28, 1995, which transferred civil and military authorities in Judea and Samaria to the PLO.

Throughout the period of my work, I never found any reason to believe the peace process I was a part of would lead to peace. The same Palestinian leaders who joked with us in fancy meeting rooms in Cairo and Taba breached every commitment they made to Israel the minute the sessions ended.

Beginning with the PLO’s failure to amend its covenant that called for Israel’s destruction in nearly every paragraph; through their refusal to abide by the limits they had accepted on the number of weapons and security forces they were permitted to field in the areas under their security control; their continuous breaches of zoning and building laws and regulations; to their constant Nazi-like anti-Semitic propaganda and incitement and solicitation of terrorism against Israel – it was self-evident they were negotiating in bad faith. They didn’t want peace with Israel. They were using the peace process to literally take Israel apart piece by piece.

Israel’s leaders shrugged it off. Instead of protesting and cutting off contact until Yasser Arafat and his henchmen ended their perfidious behavior, Israel’s leaders ignored what was happening before their faces. And in a way, they had no option of doing anything else.

When Israel embarked on the Oslo peace process it accepted Oslo’s foundational assumption that Israel is to blame for the Palestinian war against it. From the first Oslo agreement, signed on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, through all its derivative deals, Israel was required to carry out “confidence-building measures,” to prove its good faith and peaceful intentions to Arafat and his deputies.

Time after time, Israel was required to release terrorists from prison as a precondition for negotiations with the PLO. The goal of those negotiations in turn was to force Israel to release more terrorists from prison, and give more land, more money, more international legitimacy and still more terrorists to the PLO.

On Tuesday, this state of affairs ended.

On Sunday morning, just before he flew to Washington, US Ambassador David Friedman briefed me on the details of President Donald Trump’s peace plan at his home in Herzliya.

Friedman told me that Trump was going to announce that the United States will support an Israeli decision to apply its laws to the Jordan Valley and the Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria.

I asked what the boundaries of the settlements would be.

He said that they have a map, it isn’t precise, so it can be flexibly interpreted but it was developed in consultation with Israeli government experts.

Suspicious, I went granular. Khan al-Ahmar is an illegal, strategically located Beduin encampment built on the access road to Kfar Adumim, a community north of Jerusalem. Israel’s Supreme Court ordered its removal, but bowing to pressure from Germany and allegedly, the International Criminal Court, the government has failed to execute the court order.

I asked if Khan al-Ahmar is part of Kfar Adumim on the American map. Friedman answered in the affirmative.

What about the area called E1, which connects the city of Maaleh Adumim to Jerusalem?

Yes, it’s inside the map, he said.

How about the illegal building right outside the northern entrance to my community, Efrat, south of Jerusalem in Gush Etzion. The massive illegal building there threatens to turn Efrat’s highway access road into a gauntlet. Is that area going to be under Israeli jurisdiction?

He nodded.

How about the isolated communities – Yitzhar, Itamar, Har Bracha? Are they Israel?

Yes, yes, yes, he said. Our map foresees Israel applying its sovereignty to about half of Area C, he explained.

What about the other half? Without control of the surrounding areas, the communities in Judea and Samaria will be under constant threat. Their development will be stifled by limitations on the development of critical infrastructure.

For now, Friedman replied, everything in the rest of Area C will be governed as it has been up until now. Israel will have overriding civilian powers and sole security authority. In fact, in our plan, he explained, Israel will have permanent overriding security authority over all of Judea and Samaria, even after a peace agreement is concluded.

Friedman then turned to the nature of the agreement the Trump administration seeks to conclude.

The Palestinians have four years, he explained, to agree to the President’s plan. To reach a deal they have to agree to recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. They have to accept Israeli control over the airspace and the electromagnetic spectrum. They have agree to a demilitarized state and accept that there will be no Palestinian immigration to Israel from abroad. They have to agree to Israeli sovereignty over the border with Jordan. They have to disarm Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza and demilitarize Gaza.

If they do that, we will recognize them as a state and they will receive the rest of Area C.

What if they don’t agree to those terms? I asked.

If they don’t agree, he replied, then at the end of four years, Israel will no longer be bound by the terms of the deal and will be free to apply its law to all areas it requires.

You’re telling me that in four years we’ll be able to apply Israeli law on the rest of the territory? I asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.

Yes, that’s right.

Why the Surprise That to European Leaders, Jewish Flesh Is Cheap? - by Guy Millière

The Oslo Accords were based on the illusion that the PLO could totally change and suddenly become a "partner for peace"... It soon became clear that the Palestinian Authority was still the PLO: terrorist attacks quickly multiplied. The money received by the Palestinian Authority was used to continue incitement to murder and payments to incentivize it.

Guy Millière..
Gatestone Institute..
30 August '19..

August 7th. Israel. When Dvir Sorek, an 18-year-old student returned from Jerusalem to his school after having bought some books for his rabbis as an end-of-year gift, he was stabbed to death by two Arab terrorists.

As his funeral took place, while his father was delivering the eulogy, the inhabitants of the Arab village of Silwad, two miles North, to celebrate the murder, were setting off fireworks.

Sorek was apparently a peaceful teenager who had never hurt anyone. Among the books he brought was one by an Israeli left-wing writer, David Grossman, supporting the need to create a Palestinian state.

Sorek's "fault" was to be a Jew.

His name extends the long list of Jews killed or wounded by Arab terrorists. Some murders are even more cruel. The man who raped and murdered Ori Ansbacher in February in Jerusalem said, "I wanted to kill a Jew and be a martyr." In 2011, five members of the Fogel family, including three young children, were slaughtered. In 2014, two murderers with axes, knives and a gun entered a synagogue in Jerusalem during morning prayers and massacred five worshipers and a policeman who tried to stop the attackers. On December 13, 2018, at a bus stop near Ofra, two young Jews were shot dead by terrorists. Four days before that, another gun attack injured seven Jews. A wounded young woman survived, but despite the efforts of doctors, the baby she was carrying died. Last week, in a terrorist bombing on a hiking trail near Dolev, north of Jerusalem, a teenage Jewish girl was murdered. Her father and brother were seriously wounded.

After each murder, celebrations like those in Silwad take place. Candies and sweets are passed out in the street. If the murderers are shot by the Israeli soldiers or the police, they are proclaimed martyrs, and are celebrated. Their portraits are displayed in Palestinian towns. Whether the terrorist murders are killed or whether they are arrested, tried and imprisoned in Israel, they or their families are awarded a generous monthly stipend from the Palestinian Authority -- an amount higher than the average Palestinian wage. Sometimes, the mothers of the murderers say how proud they are of the act their sons committed.

The depravity built-in to murdering civilians, the celebrations that follow, the prestige granted to racist murderers, the alluring payments granted as a reward, and the pride of the mothers all stem from an incitement to hate Jews that is injected into the minds of the Palestinian Arabs by the people and institutions that lead them.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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OH MY! Palestinians threaten to void agreements with Israel? No big deal - by Ken Cohen

For Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas to formally withdrawing from signed pacts would change nothing in the Middle East, except perhaps to add a note of realism.

Ken Cohen..
FLAME/JNS.org..
31 July '19..

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas threatened last week that his government would withdraw from all treaties and agreements signed with the State of Israel. This would include the 1993 Oslo Accords and all subsequent agreements regarding day-to-day security in Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”). This is the emptiest of the P.A.’s numerous threats; they have never honored their pacts with Israel.

They even failed to revise their basic constitutional document, the Palestinian National Covenant. They accepted a treaty obligation years ago in Oslo to repeal sections of this viciously anti-Semitic, terror-supporting document which calls for the total destruction of Israel.

Abbas has made pact-nullification pledges many times before and always failed to keep his word, largely because the P.A. desperately depends on Israel’s support to stay in power.

Nonetheless, some in the global diplomatic community reacted with horror at this prospect. (Of course, this segment invariably blamed the “outrageous behavior” of U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the tragic turn of events.)

Another part of the diplomatic corps shrugged it off as more bluster from the P.A. leadership.

Finally, many wondered how the P.A.’s real-world actions would change in any way after its withdrawal from the agreements it has signed, whose provisions it has never honored or observed anyway.

The P.A. has seemed, since Oslo, to view all agreements with Israel as fundamentally optional, except when Israel’s obligations are in question.

(Continue to Full Column)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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A Palestinian state, just a Qassam rocket away, just like Gaza - by Dror Eydar

The Palestinians have never sought an independent state. All they ever wanted was for the Jews not to have one. Meanwhile, we speak up on behalf of our enemies and assign them ideals they have never held.

Dror Eydar..
Israel Hayom..
08 March '19..
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/2019/03/08/the-dinosaurs-and-the-palestinian-state/



1

You still hear serious people talking out loud about the two-state solution as a reasonable – even inevitable – possibility to the conflict between us and the Arabs of the region: dividing the good land and establishing an Arab state on the hills of Judea and Samaria, which could wind up connecting to the Hamas state in the Gaza Strip to the west and the state of Jordan to the east.

Exactly 100 years have passed since the division of the land was first suggested in the 1919 Faisal–Weizmann Agreement, after World War I. Eighteen years later, in 1937, the Peel Commission (convened to investigate the bloody events of 1936) proposed dividing the land, and a decade later, on Nov. 29, 1947, the U.N. voted in favor of the partition plan. The Arabs refused, and their response was war.

The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded before the "occupation" of the 1967 Six-Day War. Its goal was to "liberate all the land from the Zionists." Our country was then quite small in size, and still the organization's terrorists wanted it. The goal hasn't changed; it has sometimes been disguised to delude naïve, liberal, self-righteous Jews in the West.

The Oslo Accords came into being after the PLO was on the mat after backing Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein during the First Persian Gulf War. The Palestinians supported any murderous dictator who served their purposes. In Oslo, the government under then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin put the dying organization on artificial life support and brought tens of thousands of terrorists whom we had armed into western Israel to force the division of the country and fulfill their dream of peace. If the Jews don't acknowledge their right to their own land and revive their sworn enemies from the ashes, we can expect nothing more from Europe or the U.S. That is how the organization of terrorists became the official, respectable representative of the supposed forthcoming Palestinian state.

2

It didn't happen. The Palestinian Arabs never asked for an independent state alongside ours; mainly, they wanted the Jews not to have a state. The Jews, for their part, insist on speaking on behalf of their enemies and attaching all sorts of nice ideas to them which they never held. Article 20 of the PLO charter decrees that the Jews are only a religion, not a nation, and therefore have no rights to a country of their own, and must return to the nations from which they arrived and live as Russian, Polish, Iraqi, or Iranian citizens. That article has never been changed. This is a fundamental Arab position; even Arab MKs do not recognize the Jewish people's right to national determination in their own land.

In the past decade, the basic condition laid down for negotiations with the Palestinians – recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people – is not designed to win their recognition of us. We don't need it. It functions as a litmus test for how honest their intentions are. If there is no recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, then even after the land is divided, the Arabs will continue to talk about Israel in terms of colonialism and an apartheid state because they would be able to point to the Law of Return, for example, as a "racist law" that gives Jews preference in obtaining citizenship when they make aliyah.

No, National Geographic, the Oslo Accords are not about "returning" land to Palestinians - by Elder of Ziyon

...Too many people think it is axiomatic that a people called the Palestinians have been indigenous to the region and deserve to control "their" land. However, the Palestinian Arab people are an invention of the 20th century.

Elder of Ziyon..
27 November '18..

Update: CAMERA’s Israel office yesterday prompted correction of a National Geographic article on the preservation of biblical archeological texts which contained an ahistorical reference to disputed West Bank land.

Words matter, and when lies get embedded into everyday descriptions of the Middle East as fact it is enormously difficult to set the record straight.

National Geographic has a nice article (not yet online) about the race to find and preserve Biblical archaeological texts, many of which can be found in Israel and areas controlled by Israel. But one parenthetical statement makes one wonder who does fact checking for the esteemed magazine.

"In 1993, after signing the Oslo Accords - which provided a framework for returning disputed territories to Palestinian control - the Israeli government launched Operation Scroll, an urgent survey of all the archaeological sites the country potentially stood to lose."

It is nice that the author didn't lazily say "occupied territories" instead of "disputed territories," but it is quite untrue that Oslo was about "returning disputed territories to Palestinian control."

Because they were never under control of anyone known as Palestinians, nor were they ever under control of any independent political entity since the Romans defeated the Jews in 70 CE.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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How the Israeli political system became captive to the whims of the Palestinian leadership - by Prof Efraim Karsh

In the 25 years since the signing of the Oslo accord in September 1993, just one of the 10 reigning Israeli governments completed its entire tenure.

Prof. Efraim Karsh..
Opinion/JPost..
18 November '18..
Link: https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Libermans-resignation-and-the-naive-search-for-peace-572226

It is a historical irony that last week’s resignation of defense minister Liberman came on the heels of the 23rd anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, for it can clearly be seen as the latest casualty of the slain prime minister’s “peace legacy.” Not merely because the move was triggered by the latest conflagration along the Gaza Strip, transformed by the Oslo “peace process” into an ineradicable terrorist entity that murdered and maimed thousands of Israelis and made the lives of countless others a living hell, but because the process has destabilized the Israeli political system and made it captive to the whims of the Palestinian leadership.

In the 25 years since the signing of the Oslo accord in September 1993, just one of the 10 reigning Israeli governments completed its entire tenure, with one term ended by the unprecedented assassination of the incumbent prime minister. Meanwhile, parliament’s average lifespan dropped from 3.6 years to three years and an unprecedented number of parties were formed, torn apart and disbanded.

The historical truth: It wasn't the murder that destroyed the chance for peace; it was our "partners" in Ramallah - by Uri Heitner

The waves of terror that trailed these concessions in Judea and Samaria, and again following the disengagement from the Gaza Strip, are evidence that the conflict doesn't stem from "occupation." Therefore, no withdrawal will lead to peace. The conflict is rooted in the Palestinians' refusal to accept the presence of Jews in this land and Israel's right to exist. Peace isn't on the docket today and wasn't on the docket when Rabin was alive, either.

Uri Heitner..
Israel Hayom..
07 November '18..
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/rabins-murder-didnt-kill-peace/

"The Rabin murder is the most successful political murder in history," asserted Meretz leader MK Tamar Zandberg. The murderer, Yigal Amir, is sitting in his prison cell, is basking in pleasure. He can see the myth being built around him: He's the person who stopped the wheels of history in their tracks; he won, his path won. If there are any other Amirs out there, they too are hearing and internalizing the message. If he succeeded, they ponder, we too can succeed. An irresponsible comment of this sort loads their warped minds with ammunition. Even if there were a kernel of truth in the claim of Amir's victory, caution should be practiced when engaging in this dangerous discourse – all the more so when the claim is baseless.

According to the myth Zandberg is diligently cultivating, had it not been for his murder, Yitzhak Rabin would have assuredly won the elections and completed the Oslo process; culminating in a final peace contract between Israel and the Palestinians to end the conflict.

Utter nonsense. On the eve of the murder, the Likud under Benjamin Netanyahu was beating Rabin in the polls. In the wake of the murder, the polls drastically turned and Shimon Peres emerged with a 40% lead over Netanyahu. Those who pushed public opinion and Israeli voters to the right, toward Netanyahu, were the Palestinians, following a chain of deadly terrorist bombings in the winter of 1996. Had it not been for the murder, Netanyahu would have had the momentum and the result would have been similar to Ariel Sharon's landslide victory after the Camp David summit between Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak and the campaign of terror in its wake.

And even if Rabin would have won the elections, he wouldn't have reached a final-status agreement. In contrast to his image as a diplomatic dove, which the Left insists on marketing, Rabin was hawkish in his views. On the eve of the murder he laid out his diplomatic legacy in a Knesset speech, in which he presented the red lines for a final-status deal: We won't return to the pre-1967 borders. … A united Jerusalem, including Maaleh Adumim and Givat Ze'ev as the capital of Israel, under Israeli rule. … Israel's security border will be in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest sense of the geographical term. … Gush Etzion, Efrat and Beitar will be under Israeli rule. … Israeli settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza will remain under Israeli rule without any change in their status.

What was Rabin’s legacy? - by Caroline Glick

...Rabin’s actual vision tells us something important about how the Left’s draconian restrictions on freedom of speech have harmed Israel. By shunting aside what Rabin actually stood for, and reinventing him as a leftist ideologue, the Left has cheapened and distorted the true significance of what he stood for while preventing Israel from correcting his mistakes and building on his successes.

Caroline Glick..
CarolineGlick.com..
26 October '18..
Link: http://carolineglick.com/what-was-rabins-legacy/

This week we received a few reminders that in certain significant ways, the discourse in Israel and hence the policymaking is very much stuck in the 1990s.

The first reminder came on Sunday when Jordan’s King Abdullah abruptly announced that he is rescinding two annexes of the peace deal that then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signed with his father the late King Hussein in 1994. Not only did he give Israel no prior warning of his plan to abrogate the annexes, but Abdullah made the announcement on the 23rd anniversary of Rabin’s assassination.

The annexes in question involved Israel leasing from Jordan two border areas, one in the South and one in the North. Rabin ceded sovereignty claims over the areas in 1994 in exchange for a 25-year lease, which was supposed to be extended automatically next year.

There isn’t much Israel can do about Abdullah’s hostile move. The agreement clearly permits Jordan not to renew the lease for another 25 years if it gives Israel one-year’s notice.

And particularly with Iran threatening the Hashemites – with its forces and proxies perched on Jordan’s borders with Iraq and Syria – Israel doesn’t want to take action that will threaten Abdullah’s monarchy. So despite the material harm his move will cause hundreds of Israeli farmers who have tilled the soil there since the 1920s, Israel will likely do little in the way of retaliation.

The second reminder came Wednesday with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s renewed threat to abrogate the Oslo accords he and his predecessor Yasser Arafat concluded with Israel in the framework of the peace process they embarked upon in 1993. It’s not at all clear why Israel should care if Abbas abrogates the deals. Since they were signed, the Palestinians have only upheld the sections that serve their interests. They cooperate with Israel against Hamas because they are threatened by Hamas. They don’t condemn terrorism and indeed they engage in terrorism, because they support terrorism against Israel. The Palestinians never stopped, and indeed, they constantly escalate their incitement against Israel because they think that doing so advances their interests. And so on and so forth.

Why it is still open season on ‘obstacles to peace’ - by Jonathan S. Tobin

If you think “settlers” have it coming, then like a new HBO film, you’re missing the point about why Oslo failed.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
17 September '18..

One more Jewish life was just added to the list of those killed during the century-old conflict between Jews and Arabs. On Sunday, a Palestinian terrorist fatally stabbed to death Ari Fuld, a 45-year-old American immigrant to Israel and a married father of four, in addition to an articulate advocate for the Jewish state. But for some people, the only relevant fact about him is that he was a resident of Efrat, a Jerusalem suburb that lies over the so-called green line in the West Bank.

Efrat is part of the Etzion bloc that was originally settled by Jews before 1948. But in the eyes of the world, that still makes it a settlement and Fuld a “settler.”

Like the hundreds of thousands of other Jews who live in the West Bank and Jerusalem, Fuld was reviled as an obstacle to peace. That’s why the reaction to attacks on those who fall into this category is so often one of heartless indifference—if not gloating about people who had it coming—on social media and elsewhere. Not only Palestinians who consider all violence against Jews justified acts of “resistance” hold this attitude. Across the world and even among many Jews, “settler” is an epithet more than a description. Since the Oslo Accords were signed 25 years ago, settlements and settlers have become the all-purpose scapegoat for the lack of peace and undeserving of sympathy even when slain by terrorists.

While most Israelis have embraced a hard-headed realism about diplomacy forced upon them by 25 years of tragedy, myths about the Israeli right and about settlers killing prospects for peace continue to get an airing in the media and popular culture. The latest example of this trend is a new documentary being shown on HBO called “Oslo Diaries” that helps explain the antipathy for settlers.

(Continue to Full Column)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Marking the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords - by Michael Freund

If Oslo taught us anything, it is that appeasement and territorial concessions are a recipe for ruin. All the rest is commentary.

Michael Freund..
Pundicity/JPost..
13 September '18..
Link: http://www.michaelfreund.org/21619/oslo-accords-lessons

Over the course of the past 70 years, Israel has committed its fair share of grave miscalculations, many of which continue to haunt the country and harm our national security. From the failure to annex Judea, Samaria and Gaza in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, to the refusal to believe that Egypt would dare attack in 1973, and on to the inconclusive 2006 Second Lebanon War, the Jewish state's indecision has often proven to be costly in both blood and tears.

And yet, as we mark the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords with the PLO this week, it is clear that even these blunders pale in comparison with the capricious capitulation that took place on the White House Lawn on September 13, 1993.

Simply put, Oslo was the worst strategic disaster in Israel's history and we have yet to fully extricate ourselves from the damage it continues to wreak.

The tragedy began when, with reckless disregard for logic, morality or even common sense, then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and foreign minister Shimon Peres tossed a lifeline to PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and magnanimously agreed to give him control over parts of the Land of Israel in exchange for an empty promise of peace.

Overnight, the reviled revolutionary, whose resumé included ordering plane hijackings, school massacres and the slaughter of civilians, was granted international legitimacy.

Arafat was subsequently allowed to set up shop in Gaza and Jericho, and later in all the major cities of Judea and Samaria, which he quickly used as a platform from which to murder more Israelis than ever before.

How It Happened: The Oslo Disaster Revisited - by Prof. Efraim Karsh

In the decades attending Rabin’s assassination on November 4, 1995, an extensive “peace legacy” associated with his name has been created, transforming him from “Mr. Security,” as he had been widely known prior to Oslo, into an indefatigable “peacenik,” who would leave no stone unturned in the tireless quest for reconciliation. Had it not been for his assassination, ran a common argument, the peace process would have made substantial progress if not been brought to fruition. Reality, of course, was quite different.

Prof. Efraim Karsh..
The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies..
Mideast Security and Policy Studies No. 154..
13 September '18..
Link: https://besacenter.org/mideast-security-and-policy-studies/oslo-disaster-revisited/

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Precisely two decades after the failure by the Golda Meir government to identify a willing Arab peace partner triggered the devastating 1973 Yom Kippur war, another Labor government wrought a far worse catastrophe by substituting an unreconstructed terror organization committed to Israel’s destruction for a willing peace partner. Instead of ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the “Oslo peace process” between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) created an ineradicable terror entity on Israel’s doorstep that has murdered some 1,600 Israelis, rained thousands of rockets and missiles on the country’s population centers, and toiled tirelessly to delegitimize the right of the Jewish state to exist.

This blunder is all the more mindboggling given that neither Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin nor Foreign Minister Shimon Peres desired the advent of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Peres subscribed to Labor’s old formula of a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation, while Rabin envisaged “an entity short of a state that will independently
run the lives of the Palestinians under its control” (as he told the Knesset a month before his assassination) within narrower boundaries than the pre-June 1967 lines and with Jerusalem excluded from its territory.

Not only did Rabin not view the Oslo process in anything remotely reminiscent of the posthumous idealism misattributed to him, but he would have preferred to avoid it altogether in favor of an Israeli-Syrian agreement, and in its absence, a deal with the West Bank and Gaza leadership. Rabin found himself skidding down a slippery slope into a process he deemed “a national disaster,” brokered by a colleague he deeply distrusted, and inextricably binding him to a partner he profoundly loathed. He repeatedly lamented that had he known Arafat’s real intentions in advance he would never have signed the Oslo accords, yet he failed to take the necessary measures to stop the slide into the abyss.

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Oslo - Avarice, Hubris, and Secular Messianism - by Dr. Aaron Lerner

In many respects, Palestinian impatience saved us. A few years without terror would have easily facilitated the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state that by now could have served as a strategic bridgehead in a multi-front conflict to destroy us.

Dr. Aaron Lerner..
IMRA Weekly Commentary..
08 September '18..
Link: http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=73354

As we mark 25 years to Oslo it is useful to recall three key drivers behind what became known as the Oslo Process: Avarice, Hubris and Secular Messianism.

Avarice:

First and foremost the establishment of a Palestinian autonomy was an opportunity to make money. Besides the assignment of monopolies (for example gasoline supplies) there was development money as well as other economic activity.

Ministers and MKs in Prime Minister Rabin's ruling coalition, as well as MKs considering crossing the floor, saw themselves either receiving "consideration" for helping others get a piece of the action or as silent partners.

There were also security officials who took a key role in negotiations with the Palestinians who split their time with their Palestinian colleagues between hammering out security details and discussing joint ventures in anticipation of their retirements.

The "peace business" also became a source of easy money for academics and others engaged in promoting support the Oslo Process.

All of this served to taint their judgment.

Hubris:

The Oslo Process was driven by the working assumption that regardless of the lines drawn or the conditions set, the IDF could always come up with "appropriate security arrangements".

There was a darker side to this hubris. One frequently heard from "realistic" Oslo Process supporters that they expected Oslo to fail, but that the failure would be so profound that it would lead to a conflict during which Israel would have the moral justification, and the means, to kick the the Arabs out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Oslo Accords: 25 years of illusions, paid for in blood and crushed hopes. - by Jonathan S. Tobin

Most Israelis understand they were duped. Why does the foreign-policy establishment still resist learning from history?

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
05 September '18..

When the Trump administration announced that it was ending its funding of the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) last week, the protests from the foreign-policy establishment were loud and anguished. As a New York Times op-ed that masqueraded as a news story sought to explain, UNRWA “matters” because the experts say it does.

UNRWA has perpetuated the refugee problem it was established to solve and has become one of the chief obstacles to peace. It has served to keep the 1948 refugees and their descendants in place as a weapon to use against Israel and to give hope to those who wish to destroy it. But uttering these painfully obvious facts and drawing the proper conclusions from them is just something the “experts” about the Middle East don’t do. They don’t because doing so would be to admit that they’ve been wrong about the conflict for a very long time. Coming to grips with this means admitting what amounts to foreign-policy malpractice.

That’s an important point to remember this week as we commemorate a more recent but no less consequential act of folly: the 1993 Oslo Accords. The Oslo process was supposed to serve as a mechanism to end the conflict, and it was celebrated as the answer to the prayers of generations of Israelis who had known nothing but war since the day their state was born.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Israel 25 Years after the Oslo Accords: Why Did Yitzhak Rabin Fall for Them? by Efraim Karsh

...It was thus Beilin who shrewdly steered his two superiors towards a path they had not planned to take despite his keen awareness of the untrustworthiness of the “peace” partner. As he put it on one occasion: "I never had any illusions regarding Arafat. I never considered him an important world leader. I think he has committed numerous follies. He could have achieved a lot for his people many years ago, and his personal record includes almost every possible mistake … But since I have only Arafat, despite all the stupidities he utters, I must negotiate with him." This approach probably makes the Oslo process the only case in diplomatic history where a party to a peace accord was a priori amenable to its wholesale violation by its cosignatory.

Efraim Karsh..
Middle East Quarterly..
Fall 2018 Volume 25: Number 4..
01 September '18..

Precisely two decades after the failure by the Golda Meir government to identify a willing Arab peace partner triggered the devastating 1973 Yom Kippur war, another Labor government wrought a far worse catastrophe by substituting an unreconstructed terror organization committed to Israel’s destruction for a willing peace partner. Instead of ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the “Oslo peace process” between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) created an ineradicable terror entity on Israel’s doorstep that has murdered some 1,600 Israelis, rained thousands of rockets and missiles on the country’s population centers, and toiled tirelessly to delegitimize the right of the Jewish state to exist.

How did this come to pass? Why did two of Israel’s foremost security and foreign policy veterans—Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres—lead Israel into what a prominent PLO official candidly described as a Trojan horse designed to promote the organization’s strategic goal: “Palestine from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea”—that is, a Palestine in place of the state of Israel.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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The Continuing Fail: The Israeli Labor Party and Its Palestinian “Partner” - by Prof. Shmuel Sandler

The low standings of the Zionist Camp list in public opinion polls floated a new demand for change at the top. As a result, the Labor party, the Zionist Camp’s senior partner, is again challenging its newly elected chairman, Avi Gabai. Despite replacing its leaders with each election campaign, Labor has never made a comeback to govern Israel. Because it is identified with Ramallah’s demands in any future settlement, Labor has suffered electoral punishment. An analysis of Labor’s performance over the past two decades reveals that its leadership has not yet internalized that instead of replacing its frontrunner, it should replace its alleged partner for a durable peace in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Prof. Shmuel Sandler..
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 891..
11 July '18..
Link: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/israel-labor-party-palestinians/

The low standings of the Zionist Camp list, formed before the last elections in 2014 by Labor, headed by Yitzhak Herzog, and the Movement party, headed by former foreign minister Tzipi Livni, floated a new demand for change at the top. The Labor party is thus once again challenging its newly elected chairman, Avi Gabai. But if Labor leaders want their party to become a real contender for the office of Prime Minister and an alternative to Likud rule, they should replace their partner for a durable solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict rather than replace their own leaders.

What made the situation more acute was the election of Herzog, the former leader of Labor, as Chairman of the Jewish Agency. His decision to run for that position reflected his realization that the chances of his party winning the next elections are very slim. His victory means he has to leave the Knesset, where he served as head of the opposition. Gabai cannot serve in that position as he is not a Member of the Knesset. He is thus forced to select a new MK to serve as head of the opposition.

The two contenders are Livni and Shelly Yechimovich, who supported Gabai during the last Labor primaries. Whomever Gabai chooses, the real issue in Labor politics is the threat to his leadership at the forthcoming elections.

Labor has replaced eight chairpersons in the past twenty years. What the leadership of Labor refuses to recognize is that its main problem is not who leads the party but its identification with the failed Oslo process, which installed the PLO leadership in Ramallah and Gaza (before its loss to Hamas in 2007). A short analysis of the 40 years since Labor’s defeat in 1977 after having ruled Israel since its inception – a turning point in in Israel’s political history – shows that the problem is not one of leadership but of political identity.

The Now Accused Iranian Spy Who Created Two Terror States in Israel - by Daniel Greenfield

...There is no counting the lives that Segev’s actions cost. Countless children lost their fathers and mothers. And parents lost their sons and daughters. Even long before the former doctor had allegedly gone to work for the Iranians, entire hospitals could have been filled with the casualties of his vote.

Daniel Greenfield..
Sultan Knish..
03 July '18..

When the Oslo deal that would create two Islamic terror states inside Israel came up for a vote in the Knesset, the legislator whose vote helped it pass is the same man now accused of spying for Iran.

The strange story of Gonen Segev, doctor, Minister of Energy, drug smuggler, Nigerian exile and now accused Iranian spy, is also that of the dirty politics behind the peace process. It wasn’t idealism that made the deal with the PLO. It was dirty backroom deals with dangerously unprincipled politicians.

Segev's cousin had testified in court that he was "a pathological liar who makes excuses and evades responsibilities for his actions." But the same is true of the Israeli left which brought Segev on board.

The alleged Iranian spy began his political career on the right. But 3 years after he became one of the youngest members of Israel’s legislature, he aligned with the left and helped pass an agreement with the PLO that is the second biggest threat to Israel’s existence after Iran’s nuclear weapons.

It’s only fitting that Gonen Segev, whose political life hit its terrible peak with the PLO deal, should climax his post-political criminal career by standing accused of spying for Israel’s worst enemy.

And the former politician and defrocked doctor has the same excuse for the latter crime as for the former one. He wanted to be a hero. But Gonen Segev doesn’t have a history of being a hero.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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The Last Remnant of Oslo Crumbles, the Palestinian Authority Loses Its Authority - by Seth Mandel

...The Jerusalem moves have been an unmitigated humiliation for the PA. They undid the damage to the U.S.–Israel relationship inflicted by Obama. Worse for the PA, Trump called the Palestinian bluff. Contrary to the fears of Western observers, and the ill-disguised morbid hopes of some in the media, the region did not go up in flames. The “terrorist’s veto” did. And the coordination that such a move required between the United States and its Arab allies made crystal clear just how isolated the Palestinian Authority has become—how vulnerable it is to the politics of the Arab world, and how impervious to Palestinian politics the Arab world has become. It took four decades, but the dog is once again wagging the tail.

Seth Mandel..
Commentary Magazine..
16 April '18..

Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton stood in the Map Room of the White House on September 13, 1993, making awkward conversation. Two days earlier, Clinton had Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization removed from the State Department’s list of terrorist groups. The Map Room meeting came after the Palestinian leader’s famous handshake outside the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, which inaugurated the “Oslo era.” The accords created the Palestinian Authority to serve as a sort of caretaker government tasked with making peace with Israel and building the institutions of a state, led by Arafat. Just like that, one of the most consequential terrorists of his generation became the equivalent of a head of state—before the state even existed.

The whirlwind changes left Clinton unprepared for the meeting. Perhaps that accounts for the momentous mistake he made that day. “Rabin can’t make further concessions until he can prove to his people that the agreement he just made with you can work,” he told Arafat. “So the more quickly we can move on your track, the more quickly we’ll be able to move on the Syrian track.” Clinton thus tipped his hand: The U.S. saw an Israeli–Syrian peace deal as the real goal, and the president needed Arafat to make it happen. “Now that Arafat had used that deal to open up a relationship with Washington, he did not want to let Clinton shift his attention back to Syria,” reports Clinton foreign-policy hand Martin Indyk in his memoir. “And the more he managed to involve us in the details of his agreement with the Israelis, the less we would be able to do that. In his good-hearted innocence, Clinton had revealed his preferences. Arafat would not forget them.”

Indeed he would not. No foreign official would be invited to the Clinton White House more than Arafat. The Israeli–Palestinian peace process would not be a mere sideshow to the wider Arab–Israeli conflict. It would be a tapeworm inside U.S. foreign policy, diverting and consuming resources. Arafat had made the Palestinian Authority the center of the world.

Twenty-five years of violence, corruption, and incompetence later, the PA lies in ruins, with the Palestinian national project right behind it. Arafat controlled the PLO for a half-century before assuming control of the new PA. Thus his death in 2004 was the first moment of serious potential change in the character of Palestinian institutions. Mahmoud Abbas, far less enamored of violence than the blood-soaked Arafat, was his successor. Rather than reform Palestinian institutions, Abbas has presided over their terminal decline. As Abbas’s own health fades and as the world again turns its attention to Gaza, the part of the Palestinian territories not controlled by him, it’s worth wondering if there is a future at all for the Palestinian Authority.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Harvard’s "Progressive Jewish Alliance" students evidently flunked ‘Israeli History 101’ - by Stephen M. Flatow

Anyone who is familiar with even the most cursory facts about the Middle East knows that the Jewish state’s occupation of the Palestinians ended 23 years ago.

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
04 April '18..

Radical Jewish students at Harvard University are planning to hold a late “Liberation Seder” to “protest the continuing occupation by Israel.”

On Thursday, April 5—six days after all other Jews around the world held their Passover Seders—the Progressive Jewish Alliance will hold its event to protest “our community’s support for the occupation” and to ask “Are you for endless occupation, or for freedom and dignity for all?”

I have a question for these students: Have you ever taken a course in the history of modern Israel?

Either the answer is “no,” or they took it and flunked. Because anyone who is familiar with even the most cursory facts about the Mideast knows that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians ended 23 years ago.

Here’s a very brief history lesson for the Harvard students.

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Stephen M. Flatow, a vice president of the Religious Zionists of America, is an attorney in New Jersey. He is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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