UPDATE 9:58 am: Impending terrorist rocket sirens for Kisufim.
UPDATE 8:00 am: Southern Israel has fallen into the same pathetic routine. The terrorists are firing rockets and mortars at us (Sderot, Sha’ar Hanegev, and Nir in the last 12 hours); we scurry to our bomb shelters; the IAF blows up buildings in Gaza about eight hours later. The IDF does nothing. Absolutely pathetic.
TODAY’S BLOG
The hope embodied in this handshake quickly faded into Israeli despair.
In a historical sense, there are few things sadder or more predictable than old men rewriting history for their own benefit–to make their reprehensible actions commendable and thereby ensure their positive place in that same history.
This week has seen yet another Yitzhak Rabin lovefest, capped yesterday by an annual anniversary memorial service and a presidential address. In both venues, Rabin has been described as a visionary of peace, a man who had he lived would have created a new Middle East anchored on Israelis living in peaceful friendship with our Palestinian neighbors.
On Monday night at the Rabin Memorial in Tel Aviv, many of Rabin’s cabinet ministers including including Ephraim Sneh, Yossi Sarid, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Uzi Baram and Avraham Shohat endlessly extolled Rabin.
Baram spoke for them all when he said: “As the years pass we find ourselves in a gloomy reality. The political situation is dismal, and the spirit of Israel’s democracy is also withering away – that same spirit which during Rabin’s era and the years that followed was a source of pride for all of us.” To which Ben Eliezer fatuously added: “Back then we had hope. Unfortunately, in the situation today, we are heading towards despair and also towards prayer.”
Meanwhile at the President’s House in Jerusalem, Shimon Peres gushed about his and Rabin’s “shared vision” which has “held true and resulted in far-reaching consequenses”, concluding with the remarkable “many of those who initially rejected Oslo arrived at your conclusion later.”
Your humble servant reads all of these statements and wonders what delusional reality the speakers inhabit. Whereas we can all agree that before his second term as Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin led a life meritoriously dedicated to fighting for the existence of Israel, any objective reading of what took place afterwards reveals that Rabin grossly misunderstood the Palestinians and his so-called “partner for peace” Yasser Arafat, and that Rabin grossly imperiled the state of Israel by taking it down the road of the Oslo Accords.
Rabin did not bring Israel hope; he brought it despair.
Prior to Oslo, there had been two suicide attacks against Israelis: one in 1989 in which 16 Israelis were killed; the second in April of 1993 in which 1 Israeli was murdered. Between the time that the Oslo Accords were signed on September 13, 1993 and the time that Rabin was tragically assassinated on November 4, 1995, the situation in Israel became much worse with 8 suicide attacks resulting in the deaths of over 65 Israelis and the wounding of hundreds more–a figure that does not even include car bombs and exploding donkey carts. This murderous trend continued for the next decade–as Arafat rejected offer after offer of peace.
Rabin did not bring Israel hope; he brought it despair.
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All of his territorial and security concessions to the Palestinians–without one single concession in return–led inexorably to the second intifada which saw another thousand Israelis murdered. By establishing the principle of turning over land to the Palestinians in return for nothing more than a “promise” of peace, Rabin–along with Shimon Peres and all of his cabinet– put Israel on a slippery slope towards destruction.
The irony is that what those younger men could not see twenty years ago, they still cannot see today when the truth of their incredible miscalculations are plain for all to see–miscalculations that have already eroded their place in history.
We finish this blog with two quotations from Yasser Arafat–which anyone can read and could have listened to 18 years ago if only they had not been so wrapped up in their false vision of peaceful coexistence.
Almost eight months to the day after the Oslo Accords were signed, here’s what Yasser Arafat said in a speech in a Johannesburg mosque (a speech that is remarkably similar to the speeches that Mahmoud Abbas and Ismail Haniyeh made last month when the murderers in the Shalit deal were released):
“In the name of Allah…believe me, there is a lot to be done. The Jihad will continue…Our main battle is Jerusalem. Jerusalem. . . I can’t do it alone…No, you have to come and fight and to start the Jihad to liberate Jerusalem…No, it’s not the Jews’ capital.. It is our capital. It is your capital.
This agreement, the Oslo Agreement, I am not considering it more than the agreement which had been signed between our prophet Muhammad and Koreish, and you remember that the Caliph Omar had refused this agreement and considered it a despicable truce …But the same way Mohammed had accepted it, we are now accepting this peace effort.”
From my heart, and I am telling you frankly from brother to brother, we are in need of you. We are in need of you as Moslems, as warriors of Jihad. Again I have to say…onward to victory, onward to Jerusalem!”
Yasser Arafat again–this time on the one year anniversary of the Oslo Accords in November 1994:
“Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do this in stages. We take any and every territory we can of Palestine and establish a sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel.”
“In order to obtain the goal of returning to Palestine, all of us sometimes have to grit our teeth (about the “peace process”) but it is forbidden that this harm the continued struggle against the Zionist enemy…The speedy retreat of Israel from the occupied areas is only the first stage in the establishment of a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem. Only a state like that can then continue the struggle to remove the enemy from all Palestinian lands.
Rabin did not bring Israel hope; he brought it despair.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.