Power Line - Wednesday September 7, 2016
by Scott Johnson
It is a remarkable fact that Israel has never held a public accounting for the utter disaster that was Oslo. Israel’s then Foreign Minister President Shimon Peres of course won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize (with Prime Minister Rabin and the terrorist butcher Yasser Arafat) for his involvement in the Oslo Accords that resulted in the return of Arafat from his Tunisian exile to rule over the Arabs on the West Bank and Gaza. I think this was a profound mistake deriving from idealism and cynicism, but you can be sure that Peres does not count it as such.
Indeed, as Israel’s president, Peres reaffirmed it in the supposed witticism I heard him utter in Jerusalem speaking at the 2012 Presidential Conference: “In order to make peace, you have to close your eyes. You cannot make love or peace with open eyes.” I am quite sure that this is a quote that will not bear comparison with: “At the summit true politics and strategy are one.”
The prominent Middle East historian Efraim Karsh is the incoming director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. In “The Oslo disaster,” Professor Karsh indicts the Oslo diplomatic process as “the starkest strategic blunder in Israel’s history” and as “one of the worst calamities ever to have afflicted Israelis and Palestinians.” His study is posted in PDF at the link and as a full-size Google document PDF here. Highly recommended.
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