Why the Oslo Peace Process Succeeded in Coopting Israeli Leaders

The practical and toughminded Yitzḥak Rabin, who was neither a starry-eyed idealist like Shimon Peres nor a hard leftist like the negotiators Yossi Beilin and Uri Savir, nonetheless, as Israel’s prime minister, went along with the Oslo peace process. Efraim Karsh tells the story of how Rabin came repeatedly to put aside his perceptive doubts about negotiations with Yasir Arafat:

Had it been up to Rabin, he would have avoided Oslo altogether in favor of an Israeli-Syrian agreement, and in its absence, a deal with the [local] West Bank and Gaza leadership [rather than the Tunis-based PLO]. As it was, not only did he not view the process in anything remotely reminiscent of the posthumous idealism misattributed to him, but the farther he walked down that path, the greater his disdain for his “peace” partner became—and the lesser his inclination for concessions. He repeatedly lamented that had he known in advance Yasir Arafat’s real intentions, he would have never signed the Oslo Accords, telling confidants and subordinates (including Henry Kissinger, the Tel Aviv mayor and his former comrade in arms, Shlomo Lahat, and then-head of military intelligence Moshe Yaalon) of his intention to revisit, if not abandon, the process after the 1996 elections. . . .

When, in late October and early November of 1993, three Israelis were murdered in terror attacks—one of them by Arafat’s Fatah group—Rabin stated that he did not consider the PLO leader responsible for preventing terror attacks by “dissenting” Palestinian groups. The following month, Rabin announced that the IDF would preempt terror attacks from the Gaza Strip and Jericho after the evacuation of these territories, only to back down in the face of Palestinian protest and to assert that “there will be no thwarting of terrorist actions.” A few months later, he took this concession a big step forward by telling the Knesset that terrorism was a natural outcome of the Oslo Accords. He similarly excused, as an understandable negotiating ploy, the PLO’s open pleading with the Arab states to sustain their economic boycott of Israel.

This is not to ignore Rabin’s occasional berating of Arafat, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) and PLO more generally, for failing to fight terrorism and/or meet other contractual obligations, notably the amendment of the Palestinian covenant. Yet these warnings made no perceptible impact on the Palestinian leadership, not least since they were not followed by any meaningful sanctions. . . . On October 20, 1994, a week after delivering his toughest reprimand of Arafat following the murder of twenty-one people in a suicide bombing on a Tel Aviv bus, Rabin stated that it would be a mistake to blame the PA for the rampaging terrorism. . . .

This approach probably makes the Oslo process the only case in diplomatic history where a party to a peace accord was a-priori amenable to its wholesale violation by its cosignatory.

Read more at Middle East Quarterly

More about: Israel & Zionism, Oslo Accords, Shimon Peres, Yasir Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, Yossi Beilin

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society