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Peace Process

Peres now admits: 'My' Oslo was not the best


By Stan Goodenough
November 06, 2007

The peace agreement that the United States seeks to secure Israel's agreement to at Annapolis later this month will not be like the disastrous Oslo Accords, Israeli president Shimon Peres said Tuesday.

"Annapolis is a tremendous opportunity, it won't be an instantaneous solution to everything, but I have spoken to the Arab leaders and there is a spirit of trust and optimism there," Peres enthused, after being briefed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

"Our starting point for the negotiations is far better than anything we could have expected," he added. "This is different from Oslo."

Concerned observers believe that Peres' whole-hearted endorsing now of this new "peace" plan harbors a great deal of ill for the State of Israel.

Peres was the chief architect of the Oslo Agreement that was arrived at in 1993 out of a series of secret and illegal (under Israeli law) meetings between leftist Israeli officials and senior PLO terrorists.

"Oslo," as it is simply called by the Israelis, unleashed an avalanche of unprecedented terrorism that bathed Israel in Jewish blood.

More than 1,390 people were murdered and thousands more were maimed or otherwise wounded in acts of terrorism that came about as a direct result of new reality created by the Oslo Agreements.

Those agreements had other serious consequences:

They brought and established inside Israel a variety of armed forces totaling tens of thousands of members who to this day remain committed to Israel's annihilation.

They led to the surrender of large parcels of land that had been under Israel's control since 1967 and that had been part of Eretz Yisrael for thousands of years. In this way Oslo also awarded "validity" to the Palestinian Arab claims to Jewish land.

They drove deeper than ever the political and religious wedges dividing Israel's Jewish society, leading to the assassination of a prime minister and bringing the country to the verge of civil war.

They fueled the "Palestinian" nationalism of Israel's Arab citizens, giving them reason to believe that they would one day be the sovereign lords of this land.

They culminated two years ago in the mass eviction of Jews from their homes and communities in Gaza and northern Samaria, turning thousands of Israelis into refugees.

That "disengagement" established the precedent upon which the international community places its demand for the ethnic cleansing from Judea and Samaria of tens of thousands of Jews.

Peres has doggedly defended "his" Olso agreement, until today.

But now, speaking with renewed hope about the possible outcome at Annapolis, the veteran fantasizer said that unlike what happened in 1993, "today no one is twisting Israel's arm; no one is writing off its yearning for peace."

Back then, US President Bill Clinton twisted Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's arm, coercing him into taking arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat's hand on the West Lawn of the White House as the world applauded the advent of the new "era of peace."

As seen in the frequently replayed footage of that ceremony, Peres did not need his arm twisted, reaching out freely to grasp Arafat's hand in a way that earned him a rebuke from Rabin.

Still, contrary to Peres' most recent assessment, analysts and columnists have noted frequently in past months US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's repeated and increasingly determined pressuring of the Olmert government into making more "concessions for peace."

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