The planned terror war of the Second Intifada

...None of these facts prevented then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres from making a formal announcement before the media congratulating Arafat on the decision -- when no such decision had ever actually been made. It was not Arafat who deceived us. We deceived ourselves, and we continue to do so.

Dror Eydar..
Israel Hayom..
30 August '13..

On several occasions, I heard Yossi Beilin, my colleague at Israel Hayom, repeat the claim that the Second Intifada had broken out because of "the provocative visit by [then-Opposition Leader] Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount." This assertion is characteristic of the deep Israeli Left, which directs most of the blame for the failure of the Oslo Accords at Israel and holds Ehud Barak responsible for the failure of the talks at Camp David -- a failure that led to the outbreak of the terror war that began in September 2000.

But we know that Arafat had planned that war years before. Just like what happened before the Yom Kippur War, in the case of the Oslo Accords, their architects led the peace process while ignoring the obvious signs. Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon writes in his book "The Longer Shorter Way" that when he became head of the Military Intelligence Directorate in 1995, he looked into the rhetoric Arafat used internally, with the Palestinians, to see whether he was preparing the next generation for reconciliation or for war.

What Ya'alon discovered then still applies. Unlike Assad senior, who prepared his officers and the Syrian people for a possible treaty, Arafat continued to use jihadist rhetoric in the speeches he gave in Arabic (while in English he spoke of "the peace of the brave," which is open to interpretation). To this day, the Palestinian school system denies the existence of any link between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, referring to all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River as Palestine.

Arafat had a symbiotic relationship with the planners of the suicide attacks. The advocates of the Oslo Accords used to say that Arafat had no control over the terrorism and that his people were deceiving him. On January 24, 1996, during a meeting between Peres and Arafat, the name of the most wanted terrorist at the time, Mohammed Deif, came up in conversation: The Israelis asked that he be arrested. Playing innocent, Arafat asked Mohammed Dahlan in Arabic: "Mohammed who?" That was a significant moment for Ya'alon since the Israelis were aware that Arafat and Deif knew each other. Arafat's deception was laid bare for all to see.

Several months later, the Palestinian National Council assembled to revise the sections in the Palestinian National Covenant that denied Israel's right to exist. At the end of the convention, intelligence researchers realized that Arafat had pulled a fast one: While the English version stated that the change would be made right away, the Arabic version could be interpreted as stating that the change would take place at some undefined point in the future. The members of the PNC who opposed the change were told that the binding version was the Arabic one. It was also agreed that the change would be made by a committee of legal experts that would meet within six months. It goes without saying that no such committee ever met.

None of these facts prevented then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres from making a formal announcement before the media congratulating Arafat on the decision -- when no such decision had ever actually been made. It was not Arafat who deceived us. We deceived ourselves, and we continue to do so.

(Video) Dear John, Bill, and Catherine. Oslo Accords, been there, done that.

LOTL..
18 June '13..
H/T Greg Lauren/IsraelUnseen.com..

As the ongoing stream of visitors once again proffer ill-advised and unbidden advice, perhaps it's time to take a short look back at their and their predecessors prior contributions.

The twenty years from the signing of the Oslo Accords, 1993-2013, brought the State of Israel and it's people 1,537 murdered and tens of thousands injured and crippled. Thus the Oslo Accords became known instead as the Oslo War, which from the year 2000 and onward itself accounts for 1,235 of the above total. The first video below presents a montage of these terrible years in a way that no words can convey. The background track is "The Ballad of Oslo's Children" from our friends at LatmaTV, and is presented and translated in the 2nd video below.


Yaron Lahav



LatmaTV

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.

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IMRA - [With context]Transcripts of Shin Bet interrogations of Marwan Barghouti

Dr. Aaron Lerner..
IMRA..
20 April '12..




[Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA:

Here is the context of this documentation of the deliberate and calculated use of terror by the very Palestinian actors who were the "dream team" that Israelis, Americans and other proponents of Oslo endorsed, promoted and vouched for time and again:

The context:
"...the PLO renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence"Letter From Yasser Arafat To Prime Minister Rabin: September 9, 1993

That's right.

Arafat forfeited the "right" to use violence on behalf of the Palestinians.

PM Rabin insisted on this as a prerequisite for Oslo.

That such a basic truth was so quickly forgotten serves as a warning against future "land for piece of paper" deals.

The same people who so terribly erred in their judgment of Arafat, Barghuoti, etc. continue to make policy recommendations that flow from their continued profoundly flawed take on reality. ]

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Israel suffers from short-term memory loss

David Wilder
Guest Blog/JPost
15 September '10

Rosh HaShana Eve. I was downstairs at Beit Hadassah, where I had moved with my family from Kiryat Arba two years earlier. A friend of mine was examining emergency medical equipment in special lockers. We were killing time waiting for the selichot services, special penitential prayers recited prior to the New Year, to begin.

I must have been around 11:30, when suddenly shots rang out. In Hebron, nothing can be considered strange or unexpected, but the sound of live ammunition being shot was not an everyday affair. The gunfire was not sporadic or single shots. It was massive.

As we ran upstairs, the emergency security squad took up positions around the building and in the street. The source of the shooting was from the hills to the north of the building, Harat a'Shech. Clearly the bullets were aimed at us.

I ran up to my home and found my wife and kids crouched in a corner. Almost all the windows in my apartment face the hills from which the shooting was initiated. They didn't know where to hide. Finally they went downstairs to an 'underground apartment' where one of my daughters and her husband were then living.

Officers and soldiers, taken by surprise, started making the rounds throughout the building. Upon reaching my apartment, and following a quick look around inside, they asked my permission to set up a temporary base in one of the rooms, clearly overlooking the hills. I agreed, and they remained there for over three weeks.

That was the beginning of what is popularly known as the Second Intifada. I call it the Oslo War.

(Read full post)

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Ten Years Since the Start of the Oslo War

West Bank Mama
27 August '10

During a time when some Americans are actually debating the idea of allowing a mosque to be built near Ground Zero, it is important to see Islamic terror for what it really is. Unfortunately here in Israel we do not need to “imagine” it – many of our citizens have lost loved ones or have survived attacks themselves. One particularly intense period of Arab terror in Israel was during the years 2000 to 2005, during the Oslo War.



In September 2000, on Rosh Hashana, the Second Intifada (what we call the Oslo War) started. Arabs started riots all over Israel, supposedly in response to Arik Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, although evidence shows that this was planned months previously. I remember that after the holiday was over the IDF recommended that those living in Judea and Samaria should refrain from leaving their homes for a day or two. We missed our nephews’ bris in Jerusalem because of it.

This event ushered in a period of Arab terror in Israel that has left an indelible mark on many people’s personal lives, and a scar on the Israeli psyche.

(Read full post)

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The Good Old Days Before Peace

Khaled Abu Toameh
Hudson New York
26 January '10

Many Jews and Arabs living in this part of the world really miss the good old days before the Middle East peace process began -- before Yasser Arafat and the PLO were brought to the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the signing of the Oslo Accords.

It is time to cry out loudly that this peace process has been nothing but a disaster for both peoples. Has anyone ever noticed that more Jews and Arabs have died since the signing of the Oslo Accords than during the period between 1967 and 1993?

This peace process, correctly dubbed by some as a “war process,” has failed; it is time to try something else.

Real peace between Palestinians and Jews cannot be achieved, at least not in the foreseeable future. The gap between the two sides remains as wide as ever and the two sides do not trust one another at all. Instead of talking about conflict resolution, we should go for conflict management , with good-will gestures from both parties.

(Read full article)
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The Only Feasible Basis for Arab-Israeli Peace

Daniel Mandel

FrontPageMagazine.com

24 September 09

One of the responses I sometimes receive after publishing articles and delivering speeches pouring cold water on the prospects of current diplomatic efforts to achieve an Arab-Israeli peace is: ‘What should Israel/the West be doing instead?’

As it happens, there is an alternative, but it will convince no one unless the prohibitive costs of the present policy of diplomatic engagement with and funding of the Palestinian Authority (PA) are understood – which, largely, they are not. For even among those not deluded about peace prospects, there are some who believe that diplomatic shadow-boxing brings benefits.

Accordingly, what are these alleged benefits?

· Politicians buy time claiming to be working for peace, even if it never arrives. Yet deception via dissemination of spurious good news simply lulls the public to sleep. That might suit incumbents, who often manage to leave office before the consequences of their temporizing boomerang on their countrymen: Britain’s Stanley Baldwin, retiring in 1937, two years before the consequences of his appeasement policy and lack of rearmament helped to produce a long and bitter World War Two; or Bill Clinton’s inertia in dealing with Al Qaeda, leading to 9/11 early on his successor’s watch, come to mind.

· Negotiations defuse tensions and prevent full-scale hostilities. The absence of hostilities is often meaningless if aggressors patiently utilize truces to prepare for war. Just consider Yasser Arafat’s resort to war in 2000, after seven years of diplomatic “progress”; or Hizballah using the illusory calm of 2000-06 to dig in and plot further aggressions from southern Lebanon, leading to a costly, inconclusive war for Israel.

· Negotiations benefit Israel by warding off even stronger pressures. The Oslo negotiations tell otherwise: where Palestinians prove unwilling, the only remaining room for maneuver lies in pressuring Israel, which Bill Clinton duly did. He even threatened Israel with negative UN votes if Israel didn’t deliver concessions. Under both Clinton and Bush, the State Department refused declaring Palestinian violations by promoting terrorism and incitement to hatred. Chief U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross told me personally that “we … became so preoccupied with this process that the process took on a life of its own …Every time there was a [Palestinian] behavior, or an incident or an event that was inconsistent with the process … the impulse was to rationalize it, finesse it, find a way around it and not allow it to break the process.”

Is anything different today?

Fatah, which controls the PA, can hold a conference reasserting its refusal to accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state while glorifying terrorists and rejecting an end of claims in any future peace agreement with Israel and yet the Obama Administration acts as though the key to the problem is to stop Jews moving into eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank. This is how shadow-boxing and process takes on a life of its own.

(Full Article)

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Wishing For Peace (1993)

I did this cartoon at the end of December in 1993 and snail-mailed it out to subscribing newspapers. Thirteen years ago this month. I dated the signature as 1994 because that's when it would be printed.

This is another one of those cartoons that I could run today without any changes

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.
(Full Article)
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