Israel Matzav: Our 20-year nightmare

Friday, September 13, 2013

Our 20-year nightmare

On the Gregorian calendar, it happened twenty years ago today on the White House lawn. I was in New York at the time, representing a client of my boss who was a high-ranking member of the Labor party in meetings with underwriters. (The client turned out to be a fraud - his only sale was to his own company and the company never went public). The client was exuberant. Now, there was going to be 'peace,' he told me. I had been in Israel two years, and even then I knew that he was out of his mind. After all, I had been in yeshiva here from 1978-80, had buried one friend who was a terror victim, and knew of many others. We had the PLO down and out. Now, we had let them up to live another day.

Caroline Glick marks today as the 20th anniversary of our national nightmare.

Diplomatically, Israel has paid an immeasurable price for the abject stupidity of our leaders' willful blindness to the rank phoniness of the PLO's commitment to peaceful coexistence with Israel. The glaring obviousness of the danger of accepting the false historical narrative of our sworn enemies on our ability to defend ourselves internationally was so overwhelming that no one even bothered to mention it in the years before the so-called Oslo accord was concluded.

But today, after twenty years of self-induced diplomatic failure has rendered Israeli leaders and representatives incapable of defending the country, it is necessary to explain it.

The PLO falsely claims that the cause for instability and violence in the Middle East is the absence of a Palestinian state in the lands Israel took control over from Jordan and Egypt in the 1967 Six Day War.

Before the inauguration of the so-called peace process, Israel easily defended itself against this libel. After all, the PLO was established in 1964 - three years before Israel took control over Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Its declared purpose was and remains the destruction of Israel, not the establishment of a Palestinian state on some of the territory Israel controls.

The absence of regional peace has nothing at all to do with Israel. It stems from the virulent Jew hatred that is endemic throughout the Islamic world. Due to this hatred Israel's neighbors seek its destruction. The centrality of their irrational, obsessive desire to seek the eradication of the Jewish people and the Jewish state is the reason there has been no true peace between Israel and its neighbors - including its Palestinian neighbors. And because their hatred is irrational and all-encompassing, there is nothing Israel can do to appease them.

Israel was able to defend itself from the PLO's lies to great effect before it accepted this terrorist organization as a legitimate actor and so accepted the legitimacy of its duplicitous narrative. But since it did, it has been unable to explain its actions, or increasingly, its right to exist at all. Because if the absence of a Palestinian state in Israel's heartland, and its capital city is what stands behind all the bad behavior of the Arab world, then everything that Israel does that impinges even marginally on the establishment of such of state is immoral, destabilizing and dangerous.

This is why even Israel's most skilled diplomats - to the extent they still operate in Israel's PLO-besotted Foreign Ministry -- cannot defend us. This is why a generation of Israeli leaders have zero to show for their efforts to defend this country. They are trapped in a policy discourse that is founded on anti-Israel lies.

Then there is our alliance with the United States. To legitimize the single most destructive action ever undertaken by an Israeli government, the Rabin-Peres government approached the Clinton administration and asked it to sponsor this objectively insane policy, strenuously opposed by half the country.

Bill Clinton was happy to oblige them. But once the Americans were on board, and placed US prestige behind a policy which, based as it was on lies, had no chance of success, Israel could not walk away.

Once the Americans supported a policy that half of the public - and now two-thirds of the public - opposed, Washington necessarily found itself siding with an ever shrinking minority of Israelis against the majority of the public. Consequently for the past twenty years, US decision makers have backed policies that have become progressively more anti-Israel.

From a domestic perspective, the phony peace process has taken an enormous toll on Israeli society and democracy. To defend such a move so strenuously and reasonably opposed by such a large portion of the public it was necessary to marginalize the public. And so we were subjected to a systematic effort to purge and discredit dissident voices from the senior and later junior ranks of the IDF, from the Foreign Ministry, (although Peres had done much of the work pruning responsible voices out of the ministry in the previous decade), and from the Justice Ministry.

Responsible opponents in the public square were castigated as extremists and enemies of peace, little different from terrorists. A new vocabulary to hide reality - like calling terror victims, victims of peace - was invented.

Four times over the past twenty years - in 1994, 1995, 2000 and 2005 - the peace processors brought Israeli society to the brink of collapse. Lawful demonstrators and political activists - including minor children - were criminalized, and often jailed and put on trial for their civil disobedience. The corruption of Israel's legal system, which applies laws unequally to various members of the public, depending on their political views was a direct outcome of Israel's decision twenty years ago to embrace the PLO.