Thirty Years of the Oslo Accords

In 1967, following the Six-Day War and the defeat of the Arab armies, the honor of the Arabs was severely wounded. It became unseemly to present the Israeli-Arab conflict solely as a clash between the big Arab world and little Israel, for the Arab armies had suffered a crushing defeat. It was much more profitable to present the case as an “aggression” of “big” Israel against the “heroic little Palestinian people.” Such a commodity is easily bought and sold in the international political market of “progressive thinking.” To strengthen the impression of this vocabulary of war and peace, another fruitful idea was put forward: the Palestinian Arab people were attributed the characteristics of the Jewish people — small, dispersed, living in diaspora, persecuted, deprived of their homeland, suffering genocide. There was an inversion of roles. A “Palestinian people” was born, previously unthinkable even in the Arab milieu until the early 1960s. The people being born, receiving a Jewish guise, carried an anti-Jewish charge. The Arab world Goliath found itself beaten in the Six-Day War by Israel’s David. However, the Arab world managed to outweigh the signs: Israel was declared Goliath, and the Arab world produced its own David — the Palestinians.

The 20^th century is the age of acceleration. The breeding and destruction of peoples in it has surpassed all that was known of breeding and destruction in the past. Previously, nations disappeared over the course of centuries. In the twentieth century, one-third of the Jewish people were wiped out in three years of death camps. Nations used to be created over centuries. In  a fifty-year period, the Arab people became twenty-two nations. The 21^st century has begun, which promises prospects for an increase in the number of Arab nations, for the Arabic language is very rich: it has a thousand names for a camel. The Arab nation is spread over a territory of thirteen million square kilometers. This is larger than the area of Europe. It is less than it was in the seventh and eighth centuries, when it assigned names to foreign lands for future Arab nations: Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Palestine. Possessor of thirteen million square kilometers and twenty-one states, an earth and oil millionaire, the Arab world has managed to indoctrinate “progressive humanity” that one of the greatest misfortunes of modern times is the absence of a twenty-second, Palestinian state for the Arabs.  The torches of Arab oil have ignited the conflict between Arabs and Israelis to enormous proportions. The territories, which are 0.17% of the area of the Arab world, are at the core of the conflict and are a factor in the disorder of world peace. The “Palestinian problem” has been globalized and has become an international asset, like protecting nature and the environment, like fighting the warming of the globe. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has grown to monstrous, disproportionate proportions. Israel is at the center of the problems that make up the world’s malaise. It seems that on a planet where millions of people die of starvation and epidemics, where genocide claims millions of lives, there are no matters more important than the quarrel between Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs.  

Although Israel is a democratic country with freedom of speech, the press, religion, respect for human life, and surrounded by a group of tyrannical regimes that claim to want to destroy it, it serves as a permanent source of discord and disharmony on Earth. Although Israel’s oppressive neighboring countries infringe on Arab rights far more than Israel, it is the Jewish state that is stigmatized for its persecution of Arabs. Although homosexuals are imprisoned in Muslim countries, people suspected of belonging to terrorist organizations and their relatives are tortured, women who cheat on their husbands are beheaded in some places, opponents of the regime are killed without trial, the unwanted are imprisoned and executed on trumped-up charges, and in some places there is apartheid against non-Muslims, it is Israel that is accused of violating the rights of Muslims. The Jewish state is “central” to the list of sources of global malaise.    

The U.S. government accepts the Oslo Accords, under which the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict is the creation of a “Palestinian state.” What is Palestine? It was the Roman name for Judea, which rebelled against Rome in the 2^nd century and was invented to erase from historical memory the existence of a rebellious Jewish state. Whether or not there ever was an Atlantis, there is no doubt that there never was a country called Palestine. “The “Occupied Palestinian Territories,” which for a long time were South Syrian, Syrian, and even earlier Turkish, is a structure built not on love of homeland but on hatred of the people who claim the same territory.

There are thousands of nationalities living on Earth, but not all of them get a state on a tray from the UN. The people of Tibet have no state of their own, nor do the Kurds, Copts, Basques, and many other peoples who are culturally, linguistically, or religiously different from the peoples who are masters of their territory. The Palestinian Arabs are in this sense a “chosen” people. A majority of the UN members have elected them as a “state” people. The Arabs of Palestine, who are neither religiously nor linguistically different from their brethren in Arab countries, have earned the privilege of being recognized as state-owners. They have never had a state in the area and did not accept the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish parts proposed to them by the British Peel Royal Commission in 1937, which would have given them a Palestinian state. They seek a state, although they gave it up in 1948 by waging war with all the then existing Arab countries against the newly formed Jewish state. They want a state on territories that were in the hands of Jordan and Egypt for nineteen years and which the Palestinian Arabs did not demand for themselves from these Arab countries or from the UN at that time. For nineteen years (1948-1967) the “Palestinian problem” was not solved by the Egyptians, the Jordanians, and the Palestinian Arabs themselves as a Palestinian problem, or rather it was not solved at all, because there was no demand for a Palestinian state.

The Oslo Peace Declaration was a failed attempt to sell an air of imaginary change. It ended with the acquisition of an airless space in which there can be no peace, but only a pseudo-peace introduced by foreign dreamers gathered in the cold Norwegian capital. The dream of Oslo, made of fabulous ice cubes, melted in the desert like a mirage. The Oslo Accords looked good on documents signed by people dressed in elegant suits with nice ties. Warmed up in the Levant, the “Oslo Accords” broke away from the pretty papers and simply evaporated. Carefully prepared roadmaps for a peace settlement never found negotiating tables and bogged down in the Middle East off-road. French playwright Eugène Ionesco argued that the Six-Day War was about Arab aggression against Jews: “French Jewish intellectuals, poisoned by leftism, argue in letters to newspapers that the very presence of Jews in the country of Israel is aggression against the Arabs.” The thirty-year stalemate of the Oslo Accords proved that hope for peace between Israelis and Arabs is as baseless as waiting for Godot in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play of the same name. 

Image: White House