Rabin’s lamentable legacy
DVIR ABRAMOVICH
TODAY (Thursday) marks the 15th anniversary of the Rabin assassination. Many will reflect on his legacy, especially his signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. Even the most starry-eyed optimists now admit the accords were an unmitigated disaster and were doomed from the start.
Making a deal with a terrorist like Yasser Arafat meant he was given a free hand to continue his campaign of indiscriminate murder to achieve his goal of a Palestine over all of Israel.
Oslo was based on the pie-in-the-sky belief that if Israel offered more unilateral concessions, the Palestinian Authority (PA) would make peace. It’s hard to understand Rabin’s misplaced confidence in Arafat.
In fact, Rabin saved Arafat from oblivion. After supporting Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait, he had few backers. Then the Oslo Accords brought him and his henchmen from exile in Tunis to a hero’s welcome in Gaza. They furnished him with control of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as billons of dollars in aid. And did I mention a Nobel Peace Prize? In return, Arafat created an armed camp in the territories and protected Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Following Oslo, Israel was treated to a full-scale suicide bombing campaign that killed more than a thousand of its citizens. During the Oslo years, every pronouncement of hate, incitement and glorification of violence by Arafat was ignored. Only after Oslo did terror escalate.
For Arafat, Oslo was always a tactic, never a goal. A golden opportunity to continue the next stage in his perpetual war against Israel, he now had territory closer to Israeli cities than ever before. Oslo was a modern day Trojan horse.
Editor of Al-Quds Al Arabi newspaper, Abd Al-Bari Atwan, recalls Arafat telling him, just before he returned to Gaza in 1993, that “The day will come when you will see thousands of Jews feeling Palestine … The Oslo Accords will bring this about.”
When Palestinian commentator Yunis Udeh told Arafat that Oslo meant the end of the Palestinian cause, Arafat replied, “I am hammering the first nail in the Zionist coffin.” When asked how, Arafat said, “I will go to Gaza, I will go to Palestine.”
Following Oslo, Fatah enshrined a rule of terror that violated Palestinians’ basic human rights, and crushed any opposition through kidnapping and summary execution.
Arafat did everything possible to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
So Ehud Barak’s flawed logic led him in 2000 to offer Arafat 100 per cent of Gaza, 95 per cent of the West Bank and sections of East Jerusalem for a future Palestinian capital. Arafat walked out on that deal and unleashed a savage war that claimed the lives of 1000 Israelis.
Arafat figured that the Israeli public would yield to this kind of blackmail and pressure its leaders to make additional concessions.
Earlier that year, Barak withdrew Israeli troops from South Lebanon’s security zone. That gesture became a nightmare as Hezbollah built up a massive arsenal of rockets. The Second Lebanon War followed six years later.
Ariel Sharon did not learn the lesson of Oslo or South Lebanon. His disengagement plan repeated the failed experiment of turning land over to terrorists. It enabled Hamas to take over Gaza and create an Islamist, Iranian-allied terror camp that has launched more than 10,000 rockets into Israel. When the Palestinians elected Hamas, they voted for war over statehood and peaceful ¬≠coexistence. Three seasoned army generals — three huge mistakes.
Not learning the lesson of the past, Ehud Olmert, beholden to the land for peace formula, offered Mahmoud Abbas in 2008 an independent Palestinian state. Abbas was not interested, and still insists on the right of return, which would see millions of Palestinians come into Israel.
Two months ago, when Hamas killed four Israeli civilians near Hebron, thousands celebrated on the streets of Gaza, carrying flag-waving children on their shoulders.
And earlier this year, the PA named a public square and a children’s summer camp to honour a terrorist who murdered 37 Israelis. In September this year, Um Yousuf Abu Hamid was presented by the PA’s Minister for Prisoner’s Affairs with the Shield of Resoluteness. She was praised since “the Palestinian mother is a central partner in the struggle, by virtue of what she has given and continues to give. It is she who gave birth to the fighters, and she deserves that we bow to her in salute and in honour.” Abu Hamid’s four sons are in Israeli jails serving 18 life sentences for carrying out terrorist attacks.
The Fatah charter still supports “armed military struggle” against Israel, and Abbas still oversees ¬≠incitement.
Seventeen years after Oslo, most Israelis, as opposed to Tzipi Livni, are not in the mood for additional risk-taking. They know that the West Bank, as a terrorist haven, will threaten Israel’s survival. They can imagine what would happen the moment Israeli forces leave.
It’s time to face up to the truth that rejectionism has been a hallmark of successive Palestinian leaders.
As such, it’s up to Palestinian society to democratise and institute law and order; it must dismantle and arrest the terrorist gangs, dislodge Hamas, renounce violence, recognise Israel’s right to exist and agree to a de-militarised state. Only then will it give peace a chance.
Dvir Abramovich, the Jan Randa lecturer in Jewish studies, is the director of the Centre for Jewish History and Culture at the University of Melbourne. His column appears monthly.
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