Remembering Oslo
Remembering Oslo
By Jack Kinsella
A poll commissioned on the tenth anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination found only 50% of Israelis polled believed Rabin was right on Oslo.
To the Jerusalem Post, a 50% approval rating means the ‘prevailing’ view among Israelis looks upon the Oslo experiment with favor. The Post, (Israel’s most liberal newspaper) has championed the Oslo Accords since the day Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands in the Rose Garden and began the systematic dismantling of Israel.
Yitzhak Rabin’s legacy is somewhat similar to the John F. Kennedy model.
JFK was a womanizer, a disastrous president under whose watch the CIA attempted an illegal invasion of Cuba (the ‘Bay of Pigs’) before abandoning the expatriate Cuban invasion force to Castro’s tender mercies.
It was during the Kennedy administration that America first sent troops into Vietnam, and in October, 1962, reacting to US pressure against its client state off the coast of Florida, Moscow began setting up nuclear weapons in Cuba.
The resulting Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest the world ever came to nuclear annihilation.
I am certainly not faulting Kennedy for standing firm and backing Khruschev down, but it was the Kennedy foreign policy that gave Moscow the excuse in the first place.
In addition, the 1960 race that brought the Kennedys to the White House was one of the closest in history. Had Kennedy not won Chicago, he would have lost Illinois and Nixon would have come to office eight years earlier.
Fortunately for Kennedy, Chicago came through, garnering more votes for the Democratic ticket than Chicago had living voters. And fortunately for America, Nixon chose to concede rather than challenge the election like Al Gore did in 2000.
(The difference being, had their been a Chicago recount, either it would have been declared invalid and Nixon would have won. Kennedy got as many votes from dead voters as he did from living ones. Nixon knew this, but put the country ahead of his presidential ambitions. That is a matter of historical record.)
Given Kennedy’s abysmal foreign policy record, the growing series of behind-the-scenes scandals, the charges of nepotism, cronyism and growing concern about his health and addiction to painkillers, had he survived to stand for election in 1964, he almost certainly would have lost.
The reason for his ill-fated trip to Dallas in the first place was to try and salvage traditionally-Democratic Texas from his Republican opponent.
In 1964’s election demographic, Texas would have been the swing state for Kennedy. If he didn’t win Texas, he wouldn’t win re-election. On the morning of November 22nd, 1963, John F Kennedy’s presidency was in serious trouble. By that evening, he was well on his way to being beatified as America’s first sainted martyr.
All sins were forgiven, and to this day, John F Kennedy is remembered as one of America’s great presidents, based largely on two memorable speeches and the shock of his assassination.
In a sense, Yitzhak Rabin received the same sympathetic historical revisionist treatment that Kennedy did, and for the same reason. Had he lived to see Arafat’s Phased Plan for the Destruction of Israel as it played out (after Rabin had been warned of it by Benjamin Netanyahu in early 1993), Israeli history would not be quite so kind to his memory.
Well before the signing of the Oslo Agreement, political rival Benjamin Netanyahu ticked off each element of the agreement, signed in Cairo on June 9, 1974 and never subsequently repealed;
1. Through the “armed struggle” (i.e., terrorism), to establish an “independent combatant national authority” over any territory that is “liberated” from Israeli rule. (Article 2)
2. To continue the struggle against Israel, using the territory of the national authority as a base of operations. (Article 4)
3. To provoke an all-out war in which Israel’s Arab neighbors destroy it entirely (“liberate all Palestinian territory”). (Article 8)
Speaking just after the announcement of the Israel-PLO accord, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat announced that the historic agreement “will be a basis for an independent Palestinian state in accordance with the Palestine National Council resolution issued in 1974…. The PNC resolution issued in 1974 calls for the establishment of a national authority on any part of Palestinian soil from which Israel withdraws or which is liberated.” (Radio Monte Carlo, 1 September 1993)
Ariel Sharon has called Oslo “a horrible plan with only disadvantages. It was based on the false notion that there was a partner on the Palestinian side. There is no philosophy more different.”
Despite Rabin’s mystical status, as Israelis watched Arafat’s Phased Plan unfold precisely as predicted. Israeli doves like Rabin and Peres were replaced with hawks like Netanyahu and Sharon.
Israeli Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin said during one of the Rabin memorials that he objected to the “intertwining of the assassination’s memory with what has become known as the Rabin legacy, in what Rivlin terms “a package deal.”
Rivlin’s comments reflect a recognition of the ‘Kennedy Effect’ saying, “it is not because of the Rabin legacy that we have come together today, but rather because of the murder, because of the unrelenting shock, because of the shame that the murderer has brought on us all…and because we are not sure we can withstand another murder.”
Assessment
The Oslo Accords, far from being a diplomatic triumph overseen by the deft administration of Yitzhak Rabin, was really the diplomatic disaster on a proportionate scale that made the Bay of Pigs seem like a US diplomatic triumph by comparison.
Far from being the statesman who ‘brought peace to Israel’, more Israelis were killed by terrorists in the first four years of Oslo than in the preceding fifteen, including the 1989-1993 intifada that pressured Israel into seeking peace with the PLO.
And as it stands now, more Israelis have been killed by terrorists since making ‘peace’ in 1993 than were killed during the entire period from the establishment of the State of Israel to Oslo.
Interestingly, Yasser Arafat didn’t sign the Oslo Agreement — his deputy, (now PA Chairman) Mahmoud Abbas signed on his behalf. That is interesting because it betrayed Arafat’s intentions from the beginning.
Arafat often referred to the Oslo Agreement as ‘the peace of the brave’ — a reference to the Hudaybiyah treaty signed between Mohammed’s forces and the Quriash tribe that at that time occupied Mecca.
Mohammed never intended to keep the Hudaybiyah treaty, either, so he had his deputy sign instead. Mohammed broke the treaty and during the Battle of Badr, slaughtered the entire tribe and took the city for himself.
Arafat’s vision of peace with Israel, as he stated on many occasions, was based on Mohammed’s Treaty of Hudaybiyah. Like Mohammed, Arafat was free to make whatever promises were necessary to accomplish the goal of slaughtering the Jews and taking the land for himself.
It can be understood why fifty percent of Israelis still support the Oslo Experiment — the vast majority of Americans think Kennedy was among our greatest presidents, too. But few Israelis now believe peace will ever be possible with the Palestinians.
Of all the signs of the times pointing to this generation as the generation that will witness the return of Christ, the failed Oslo Agreement is the most astonishingly precise.
Twenty-five hundred-plus years ago, the prophet Daniel was given a vision of the future of the Jewish people, encapsulated into a time frame of 70 ‘weeks’ of years, 490 in all.
The first 483 years of Daniel’s vision were concluded with the Crucifixion of the Messiah. Then the clock stopped to allow for the ‘times of the Gentiles’ — or the Church Age.
At the conclusion of the ‘times of the Gentiles’, the countdown for the last seven years of Daniel’s vision will restart with a false peace treaty based on the principle of ‘dividing the land for gain’ (Daniel 11:39) — which could just as easily be expressed as ‘land for peace’.
Daniel identifies the peace broker in this land for peace deal as a coming prince of ‘the people’ who destroyed ‘the city and sanctuary’ (Jerusalem and the Temple) which was accomplished by the Roman Empire in AD 70.
That prince of the Roman Empire, Daniel writes, will ‘confirm the covenant with many for one week’ before breaking the deal ‘in the midst of the week’ and unleashing a wave of unprecedented persecution against the Jews of Israel. Speaking of that coming persecution, Jesus advised those Jews living at that time to ‘flee’. (Matthew 24:6)
Of the covenant, Daniel specifically says the coming prince will CONFIRM it, not negotiate it. One cannot ‘confirm’ that which does not yet exist. (Call your doctor and try confirming an appointment you never made.)
Also, Daniel is specific regarding the terms of the covenant. It will be based on a land for peace formula and it will be of seven years’ duration.
The failed Oslo Agreement was broken into three phases, with the third and final stage, the negotiation for the final status of Jerusalem, scheduled to be completed on September 13, 2000, exactly seven years after its initial signing in Washington.
Every subsequent effort at reviving the ‘peace process’ has followed the Oslo formula of ‘dividing the land for gain’ except that now Israel has virtually no more land to negotiate away and the Palestinians are continuing to move forward with the next step in the Phased Plan.
America, the principle broker since Oslo, is losing credibility with the Arab side, which views it as hopelessly pro-Israel. In an effort to balance its image, Washington is losing credibility with the Israeli side, who have begun to see Washington as increasingly unreliable champion.
That leaves only one entity with sufficient credibility with both sides to step in and pick up the pieces. The Europeans, who have been trying to insinuate themselves into the process for a decade.
EU chief Javier Solana told reporters from Israel last year, “Europe will be part of the process whether Israel likes it or not.”
The prophet Daniel said exactly the same thing — only two thousand five hundred years earlier.
This Letter was written by Jack Kinsella on November 14, 2005.