Arafat recompensed Israel’s unilateral concessions by unleashing a wave of terror, including bus bombings and roadside shootings, resulting in more than 1,500 Israeli deaths

Doug Feith had a premonition that the Oslo Accords were doomed a dozen years before its time.

Feith is no prophet, but in 1981, as a Middle East advisor to President Reagan, he met his Israeli counterpart, Yossi Beilin, who was then an aide to Knesset opposition leader Shimon Peres.

Peres, an initial backer of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, was having second thoughts. Peres expressed his change of heart in an essay, ghostwritten by Beilin, and published in the Spring 1980 edition of Foreign Affairs. If Israel desired to retain both its Jewish majority and democratic character, it would be suicidal to keep Judea and Samaria with its large Muslim Arab population, Peres wrote. Having said that, Peres suggested Israel could only withdraw in exchange for reliable Arab pledges of peace.

Feith referenced this article when he met Beilin, and asked: What if the Arabs don’t offer peace? Would Israel still hold Judea and Samaria, thereby committing the national suicide described in the article?

“Beilin laughed out loud,” Feith recalled, saying Beilin told him: “It’s amazing how most people don’t note that inconsistency. I favor unilateral withdrawal.”

Twelve years later, Israeli voters had swept Labor back into power. Shimon Peres was foreign minister. As deputy foreign minister, Yossi Beilin secretly negotiated the Oslo Accords, known formally as the Declaration of Principles (DOP), signed 25 years ago this week, on September 13, 1993.

“The DOP was an exchange of land for nothing,” Feith said last week at a conference marking 25 years of Oslo, hosted by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA) at Bar-Ilan University. “Israeli officials knew Oslo lacked mutuality, but apparently felt they had to mislead the public about the withdrawals by telling them it would lead to peace.”

Oslo brought no peace. Instead, it empowered Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat to reconstitute the PLO as the Palestinian Authority from a base in Ramallah, ten miles north of Jerusalem. Arafat recompensed Israel’s unilateral concessions by unleashing a wave of terror, including bus bombings and roadside shootings, resulting in more than 1,500 Israeli deaths.

Under the veneer of land for peace, Oslo subjected Israel to endless international pressure to agree to further withdrawals, as well as formation of a Palestinian state — which would truly be suicidal.

Successive Israeli governments obliged. Prime Minister Ehud Barak pulled Israeli troops out of a security zone in southern Lebanon in 2000. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered an IDF withdrawal and the expulsion of more than 8,000 Jews from Gaza in 2005. These withdrawals distanced the prospects for peace by allowing Hamas and Hezbollah proximity to Israel’s borders.

And to this day, despite security cooperation between Israel and the PA, Israeli security forces monitor terrorist activity day and night in Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem where more than 700,000 Jews have made their homes since 1967.

Arafat Plays Dumb, Israel Wises Up

As the death toll from terrorist attacks mounted shortly after Oslo was signed, Israel’s Prime Minister Rabin scrambled to close some of Oslo’s glaring loopholes.

He tabbed Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yom Tov Samia to head a second negotiating team to turn Oslo into a detailed security agreement. Samia told the BESA conference that while the joint-security patrols are “the only thing that still works” from the original agreement, Samia also learned fast that Arafat was not a peace partner.

On one occasion in 1994, when Arafat returned to Ramallah from Jordan, IDF intelligence were tipped off that three PLO terrorists forbidden from entering Israel were embedded in Arafat’s convoy.

This posed a dilemma. After Oslo, Arafat enjoyed VIP status. Security forces needed special permission to inspect his convoy. Samia’s supervisor, IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, directed Samia to call Rabin directly. Samia said Rabin told him: “Do what you need to, and you have my backing.”

Samia tricked Arafat into stepping out of his car, on the guise that Israel wanted to extend a diplomatic greeting at the IDF checkpoint. Once he was out of the car, security forces inspected Arafat’s convoy, discovering the trio inside the trunks of the cars.

Samia recalls that Arafat feigned ignorance: “Couldn’t someone have told me there were people inside?”

The terrorists were turned back at border, but Samia says, eventually they were smuggled in through other means.

He insisted that Rabin would have buried Oslo had he himself not been assassinated in 1995. “Had Rabin remained alive one more year, he would have revoked the Oslo agreement,” Samia contended. “Only Rabin would have had the courage to say ‘I made a mistake and I take the responsibility.’ ”

Trumping the PA

Not everyone believes Oslo is dead. Yair Hirschfeld, who, along with Beilin and Ron Pundak, negotiated the accords, defended the deal at the BESA conference, saying, “Israel cannot win by might and cannons alone.”

Hirschfeld said danger lurks in a new form of Israeli unilateralism, whereby Israel would extend sovereignty to or annex Judea and Samaria. “My far-reaching argument is if the settlers are interested in true sovereignty, it can only be reached through cooperation with the Palestinians and bipartisan agreements with the US and Europe. Unilateral annexation will only bring on more terror and internal schisms.”

Hirschfeld looks askance at President Trump as he cuts the legs out from under Oslo, and he warned against putting too much faith in Trump. “There will be a day after Trump, and we don’t know how extreme the Democrats will become.”

On the other hand, Doug Feith views the actions of the Trump administration as validation of key elements of a change in US policy that Feith was instrumental in fighting for, as expressed by President George W. Bush’s Rose Garden speech of June 24, 2002. Bush called on the Palestinians to elect new leaders not compromised by terror and build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty. “If the Palestinian people actively pursue these goals, America and the world will actively support their efforts,” Bush said.

Feith applauds Trump administration officials for challenging the conventional wisdom on the Arab-Israeli conflict, by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, supporting the Taylor Force Act, condemning Hamas without equivocation, cutting aid to UNRWA (whose main purpose, he said, “is not to aid refugees but to perpetuate the Arab-Israeli conflict”), and fostering broader Israeli-Arab relations throughout the Middle East.

“It may take many years to produce the needed changes,” Feith said, “but if they occur, the Palestinians will be better off, and Israel might finally have a partner willing to make peace with it.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 727)