The Mistake of Oslo
22 January 2001

The encouragement of an enlightened and democratic regime in the Palestinian Authority is imperative.

The recent executions conducted before cheering mobs of suspected collaborators in the Palestinian Authority - who were denied fair trials - are reminiscent of the Stalinist show trials held in the Soviet Union's darkest periods, of which Russia is certainly not proud today.

The similarities run much deeper than that between the respective leaders of the two regimes. At root, they lie in the dictatorial nature of regimes which impose the rule of fear and brutal force in order to attain stability. Democratic leadership is based upon the measure of the people's satisfaction with their leadership; dictatorial leadership is based on the ability of the leader to rule over the people and prevent any change, which might threaten his leadership. History has proven that a precondition for dictatorial leadership is the ability of a tyrant to suppress all independent thought and mobilise the nation around a struggle against an external enemy.

When the Oslo agreement was initially composed, a question arose as to the possibility of conducting peace with the leader of a terrorist organisation. The goal was to assist Yasser Arafat in transforming from the leader of a terrorist group to the leader of a nation. The underlying conception was that if we grant Arafat the right economic and political conditions, along with international support, his need to provide for the welfare of his people would overcome his need to operate a terrorist organisation. With Israelis and Palestinians dealing with sewage problems and the establishment of factories, a true meeting of peoples would occur and the new Middle East would indeed become a reality.

A basic failure existed here from the start, in our lack of understanding of the ability of implementing such agreements. By definition, a regime built entirely on hatred towards the Zionist enemy is incapable to transforming overnight into a partner for peace.

It follows that the sole way to succeed in implementing the Oslo agreements is to create a process of bringing the two sides closer to each other. The only way to ensure that such a process is indeed taking place and developing is by insisting on the principle of reciprocity, which has instead been relegated to the margins. The most important component of reciprocity - the prevention of incitement and the teaching of hatred in schools - has been ignored nearly entirely.

Yossi Beilin has claimed that if we strengthen Arafat's position amongst his own people, he will cause the hatred to die away, and there is therefore no need to box him in a framework of monitoring the propaganda and school lessons of the Palestinian Authority. This assumption is fundamentally mistaken. Arafat is indeed strong, but his strength has not reined in hatred for the external enemy, Israel.

While the "Seeds of Peace " program sends a few dozen children from the Palestinian upper class to a well-publicised seminar in the United States, half a million Palestinian children are taught hatred of the Zionist enemy in their schools. None of Israel's governments have given the subjects of Palestinian propaganda, hate-filled school plans and spreading corruption the serious attention they deserve. On the contrary, we have granted them legitimacy, by transferring money intended for public spending in the Palestinian Authority directly into Arafat's private bank accounts and by ignoring the violations of human rights by the Palestinians - when the opposite would have been the best way of helping the security of Israel.

In a conversation I conducted with President Bill Clinton at Wye Plantation the President agreed with me that the basis for implementing the agreements lies in monitoring incitement and school lessons. Despite this, he also failed to turn the subject of dealing with the hatred against Israel into a necessary condition for continuing the peace process.

The fault lies not with Clinton, but with us. We are to blame for the failure of Oslo, because we by definition sustained a regime of darkness, and because we hoped that the central authority and power granted Arafat would crystallise around peace. We discovered, to the contrary, that our concessions in these matters only encouraged Arafat to continue to solidify a regime of fear and use hatred towards us in order to stabilise that same regime.

The solution today is not loud objections to the show trials and the public executions, but reformulating all the agreements around the concept of reciprocity. Monitoring of propaganda and incitement must be implemented, and we should not hesitate to use Arafat's dependence on the support and financing of the enlightened world in order to encourage the establishment of an enlightened and democratic regime in the Palestinian Authority. The political gains to both nations from such an approach is very clear. The result can be translated into a sustainable peace process, which today looks farther from reality than ever before. What Palestinian society will gain from this will be far greater than any founding of a textile factory in the Gaza Strip.

The above originally appeared in Hebrew in the Haaretz daily newspaper on 22 January 2001, and was translated into English by Ziv Hellman.