Oslo Is Dead, and Arafat Killed It

The Oslo process is over. Its key premise--that Yasser Arafat had abandoned terrorism as his main political weapon--has been exposed, at least for the clear majority of the Israeli public, as a lie. Israelis may argue about the extent of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s responsibility for the breakdown of relations with the Palestinians; they may even argue about the need to continue dealing, despite everything, with the Palestinian leader. But trust in the “new” Arafat has been shattered, and the Oslo process won’t recover from that fatal disillusionment.

Netanyahu’s denunciation of Arafat after the Cafe Apropos bombing is not what persuaded Israelis that the Palestinian leader has decided to play the terrorist card. Netanyahu’s credibility is low even among his erstwhile supporters on the right. What convinced the Israeli public was confirmation of Netanyahu’s charges by the army chief of staff and the heads of army intelligence and the Shin Bet security service. Israel may well be unique in having a military establishment that is largely left-wing (and which has also been intimately involved in the Oslo process). That fact not only helps immunize Israeli society against militarism but also assures the army’s credibility in assessing Palestinian intentions.

For the last four years, the Israeli political debate has centered on the sincerity of Arafat’s conversion from terrorist to peacemaker. Arafat didn’t make it easy for the optimists, who struggled to explain to growing numbers of Israeli skeptics why he hadn’t destroyed the terrorist infrastructure of the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas, why he eulogized their suicide bombers as holy martyrs, why he appeared in a military uniform, like a Cuban or North Korean dictator, at the ceremony awarding him a Nobel Peace Prize.

Then came the four suicide bombings last spring, barely two months before the Israeli elections. Labor Prime Minister and Oslo architect Shimon Peres finally delivered an ultimatum to Arafat: Control Hamas terror or the process is over. Miraculously, terrorism stopped, which only convinced many Israelis that Arafat could have prevented the terror all along. The election became a referendum on Arafat; the result, of course, was the rise of Netanyahu, the chief debunker of Arafat the peacemaker. Still, many Israelis continued to perceive Arafat the way our satirical TV revues have portrayed him: as a harmless, even likable rascal.

The bombing of the cafe in Tel Aviv last Friday decisively ended the debate on the good Arafat. Whether or not Arafat gave Hamas a “green light,” as Netanyahu charges, the facts that are known are damning enough. Arafat released more than 100 Hamas terrorists, including leaders of its so-called “military” wing, and days before the bombing, the Palestinian security services essentially suspended cooperation with Israel. Most Israelis now acknowledge what only Netanyahu supporters knew: that Arafat has never stopped regarding terrorism as one of his legitimate options.

Yes, there are some Israelis who blame Netanyahu for provoking Palestinian “desperation” by beginning to build in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Homa. But few here are prepared to understand people who blow up pregnant women--just as few Israelis refused to understand the lunatic act of Dr. Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down 29 Muslim worshipers in Hebron in March 1994, even though Goldstein was clearly “desperate” and believed that the Oslo process was leading the Jewish state to another Holocaust.

Despite Palestinian claims, Netanyahu didn’t violate the Oslo accords by going ahead with construction in Har Homa. Nowhere in the accords is building in East Jerusalem forbidden. Labor leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres built extensively in East Jerusalem all through the Oslo process. Indeed, Har Homa was first earmarked for construction by the Labor government.

Netanyahu was elected with a delicate mandate: Continue the Oslo process, but fight terrorist blackmail. In fact, he has proceeded with Oslo, withdrawing from most of Hebron, Judaism’s second holiest city, and maintaining a freeze on almost all West Bank settlement building. (Almost no Israelis, left or right, consider East Jerusalem neighborhoods as “settlements.”) In the process, he has alienated his most loyal right-wing supporters, some of whom have actively begun seeking an alternative leader for the next elections.

Yet now Netanyahu has no choice but to implement the other half of his mandate, and refuse to deal with the Palestinian leader until he stops using terrorism as a pressure tactic. Those well-meaning outsiders who are urging both sides to rebuild trust should know that, as far as Israelis are concerned, Yasser Arafat remains what he always was: a child-murderer.