Rather than challenging the Palestinians' wholesale expropriation of
justice and truth, the international community has encouraged their
self-perception as innocent victims of the Middle East conflict.
Every year on May 15, as Palestinians violently mark the nakba, or
tragedy, of 1948, much of the world's media dutifully replays the
Palestinian version of that event. Few journalists challenge
Palestinian spokesmen with the fact that Arab rejectionism was at
least partly responsible for their people's uprooting and occupation.
Indulging that sense of blameless victimization has only reinforced
the Palestinian inability to assume the role of equal partner in
negotiations and take responsibility for helping to end the conflict.
As Naim Ateek put it, the Palestinians' only obligation to
peacemaking is to show up and receive concessions. The Palestinian
leadership has felt no moral obligation to fulfill its stated
commitments under Oslo--such as curbing terrorism and ending
incitement or even the straightforward matter of revoking the
Palestinian Covenant that calls for the destruction of Israel. (To
this day it is uncertain whether the Palestinians have legally
revoked the Covenant, and their deliberately created ambiguity has
negated any positive impact its revocation may have had on the
Palestinian psyche.)

The apologetics offered by much of the international community--and
by part of the Israeli Left--for Arafat's violent rejection of
Barak's peace offer have reinforced the pathological tendencies of
Palestinian self-pity. Especially absurd has been the claim that
Barak's settlement-building was a sign of bad faith that undermined
Arafat's trust in the process. Nearly all the housing starts begun
under Barak were concentrated in areas intended to become settlement
blocs--whose permanence the Palestinians accepted during negotiations
at Camp David. According to Barak's chief negotiator with the
Palestinians, Gilad Sher, settlements--whose total built areas cover
a mere 1.5 percent of the West Bank--were not even among the five
major issues of disagreement during the Camp David negotiations.
Instead, the major issues were the Palestinian insistence that Israel
assume full moral blame for the flight of the refugees in 1948
(ignoring the Arab world's invasion of Israel that preceded the
refugee crisis), and the Palestinian refusal to acknowledge any
Jewish connection to the Temple Mount, Judaism's holiest site.

When confronted with the continued ideological intransigence of the
Palestinians, the Israeli left-wing retort was invariably a sarcastic
dismissal: "We don't expect them to become Zionists." Even as it
successfully compelled a reluctant Israeli publicto confront at least
some truths of the Palestinian narrative, the Left refused to demand
any reciprocity from its Palestinian partner. In so doing, the Left
ignored its own argument: that without accommodating the Other's
narrative, peace would be impossible.

The Israeli Left committed one more fatal tactical mistake: It
divorced itself emotionally from Judea and Samaria, even as the
Palestinians reinforced their emotional claim to pre-1967 Israel. The
moral basis for partition of Israel/Palestine is that two peoples,
profoundly rooted in the entirety of the land, must each sacrifice
part of its legitimate claim to accommodate the legitimate claim of
its rival. But by tacitly rejecting even a theoretical Israeli right
to Judea and Samaria, the Left created a moral imbalance: The
Palestinians were offering a traumatic concession by ceding parts of
historic Palestine, whereas Israel was merely restoring
occupied--that is, stolen--land. That imbalance reinforced the
Palestinians' refusal to compromise on the 1967 borders, even though
no independent Palestinian state had ever existed on any part of the
land.

The success of Oslo was predicated on the Palestinians' ability to
convince Israelis to trust them enough to empower them. But soon
after the White House signing, increasing numbers of Israelis began
to suspect they had been deliberately deceived. That process
accelerated with Arafat's 1995 speech in a Johannesburg mosque, in
which he compared Oslo to a ceasefire the Prophet Muhammad signed
with an Arabian tribe he later destroyed. By dismissing that speech
as mere rhetoric intended to appease domestic opposition, the Israeli
Left made a fatal miscalculation of its devastating effect on the
Israeli public. Then came the wave of suicide bombings in early 1996,
which further eroded Oslo's credibility among even centrist Israelis
and provided a link between Arafat's incitement and intensified
terrorism.

The inevitable result was a revolt by the Israeli majority that had
initially welcomed the Oslo Accords and that had been willing to make
far-reaching concessions for genuine peace. The first revolt occurred
in 1996, with the election of Benyamin Netanyahu. Apologists for the
Palestinians insist that Israel under Netanyahu helped destroy the
Oslo process by resuming massive settlement-building, largely frozen
under Rabin, thereby eroding Palestinian trust in Israeli intentions.
That argument ignores the fact that the election of Netanyahu was a
self-inflicted Palestinian wound--a direct result of Arafat's refusal
to fulfill his most minimal obligations under the Oslo accords. The
erratic voting pattern of the Israeli public throughout the Oslo
process--repeatedly veering between Left and Right, from Yitzhak
Rabin to Benyamin Netanyahu to Ehud Barak to Ariel Sharon--reflected
both the growing skepticism of Israelis and their reluctance to
repudiate the hopes raised by Oslo. Only with the landslide election
of Sharon, who had warned for decades against empowering the PLO, did
the Israeli people deliver its definitive judgment on the Oslo
process, as one of the gravest mistakes in the history of Israel.

Unchanged Palestinian Goals

By refusing to "partition" justice and insisting that historical
right belongs exclusively to them, the Palestinians have preempted
the need, in their minds, to revise their long-term goal of undoing
the "injustice" of Israel's existence. Indeed, when Palestinian
leaders speak of a "just and lasting peace", it is now clear that
they mean, in the long term, peace without a Jewish state. Mainstream
Palestinian leaders no longer invoke the old crude slogan of throwing
the Jews into the sea. Instead, the scenario has become more complex,
a gradual eroding of Israel that includes undermining its will to
fight and to believe in itself; loss of territorial intactness; a
compromising of its sovereignty via international commissions,
observers and "peacekeepers"; increased radicalization of Arab
Israelis leading to demands for "autonomy" and even the secession of
those parts of the Galilee and the Negevwhere Arabs could soon form a
majority.

Indeed, the key element in the "stages" plan is the massive
return--both through Israeli consent and illegal infiltration--of
embittered and inassimilable Palestinian refugees to pre-1967 Israel.
By refusing to concede the "right of return", the Palestinian
leadership belies its claim that it has recognized Israel in its
pre-1967 borders. For Palestinians, the great crime of Zionism was
artificially transforming the Jews into a majority in any part of
Israel/Palestine--through Jewish immigration ("colonization") and
Arab expulsion and flight. In a stunning speech to Arab diplomats in
Stockholm in 1996, Arafat laid out his vision of undoing the Jewish
majority even within pre-1967 Israel. By overwhelming the land with
refugees and expropriating water and other resources as well as
turning a blind eye to ongoing Palestinian terrorism, Arafat would
ensure that a large part of the Israeli middle class would emigrate
in despair to the West. The remaining Jews would be so disoriented
and demoralized by the departure of Israel's most talented citizens
that the state would eventually collapse from within.

That this was no mad fantasy on Arafat's part but an accurate
reflection of mainstream Palestinian strategy was confirmed by the
late Faisal Husseini, long considered by the Israeli peace camp to be
among the most pragmatic Palestinian leaders. In an interview with
the Egyptian newspaper Al-Arabi, Husseini made the remarkable
admission that the Oslo process was a "Trojan horse." He explained:
"When we are asking all the Palestinian forces and factions to look
at the Oslo Agreement and at other agreements as 'temporary'
procedures, or phased goals, this means that we are ambushing the
Israelis and cheating them." The goal, he concluded, was "the
liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea"--that is, from the
Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Though it appears that
Al-Arabi's claim that its interview with Husseini was the "last"
before his death in June is false, the veracity of its substance
should not be doubted; Husseini made similar statements in a meeting
with Lebanese lawyers in Beirut last March.

In a private conversation I held about two years ago in Gaza with the
head of one of the dozen or so Palestinian security services
established by Arafat, I was offered a benign vision of that dream of
Israel's demise: "This land is too small to sustain two states",
explained the commander. "When the refugees return, there won't be
enough resources and we will be forced to create one state--a
beautiful country that will show the world how Muslims and Jews can
coexist, just like in the days of Muslim Spain." That historical
model, of course, is based on a Muslim sovereign majority and a
dependent Jewish minority.

It is hardly coincidence, too, that the model most invoked by Arafat
for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is South
Africa. Israeli left-wingers misinterpreted that constant reference
to South Africa as proof that the PLO leadership had embraced
peaceful reconciliation. In fact, what most appeals to Palestinian
leaders in the South African precedent is the transition from
minority to majority rule. Though the Jews constitute a slim majority
in the whole of Israel/Palestine and an overwhelming majority within
the pre-1967 borders, Palestinian leaders believe that this is a
temporary aberration. When the refugees begin returning (and Jews
begin leaving), the "natural" majority will reemerge, and the Jewish
minority, like the white South African minority, will then be
compelled to negotiate the terms of its own surrender. This is why
Nabil Sha'ath, the pa Minister of Planning and International
Cooperation, told a Washington audience on June 21 that the January
2001 Taba negotiations "witnessed significant progress." Of what did
that progress consist? "A conceptual breakthrough on the issue of
refugees and the right of return", said Sha'ath, who described
Israeli negotiators as acknowledging that "Israel was responsible for
the initiation of the refugee problem" and as agreeing that "the
Palestinians had a right to return to both Israel and Palestine."

Essay Types: Essay