Op-ed: Those who praised Oslo Agreement and disengagement from Gaza still have plenty of human raw material left for their experiments in Judea and Samaria vicinity.
There is a story about a peace-seeking and perplexed poultry farmer who saw a major skirmish break out between the chickens in his henhouse. After failing to pleasantly establish peace between the rivals, he turned to a rabbi for help.
The rabbi began offering a series of tips in the spirit of the poultry farmer’s beliefs, but the implementation of this advice only aggravated the bloodbath among the chickens. Hopeless, the poultry farmer returned to the rabbi and asked if he has any other advice of the same kind. “I have a lot of advice, the question is whether you have any chickens left,” the rabbi responded.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be much more complicated than an appeasing poultry farmer and a haughty rabbi who seek to alleviate the aggressions of chickens, but it has quite a few things in common with them.
For example, people who take off their uniform and find it difficult not to adopt the crushing mantra of “where there is no peace, the people get out of control.” Retired major generals who refer to a prime minister who fails to bring us peace as nothing less than chickenshit (a coward afraid to take risks). Plenty of “peace victims,” who were seen by the supporters of peace during the bleeding Oslo years as sort of penance chickens for the supreme idea of reconciliation.
And there is also one weariless Shimon Peres, who will persist in his praise for peace, even when his own actions during Oslo and his advice are drowning in the sea.
“Those who have given up on peace – they are the delusional ones, and those who have surrendered and stopped seeking peace – they are the naive ones,” Peres stated two weeks ago at the rally marking the 19th anniversary of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s murder, just after he called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to finish what Rabin started in Oslo and bring us the inevitable peace.
Yes, the father and creator of the new Middle East, who was wrapped again and again around arch crook Yasser Arafat’s little finger, who promised that following our pullout from Gaza the Strip would turn into Singapore of the Levant, and who has been living for more than 20 years in an imaginary regional reality, has become a firm critic of those caught up in illusions and naivety.
Several days before the rally, Major-General (res.) Amnon Reshef, the former chairman of the Council for Peace and Security, began gathering former security officials to sign a petition which also calls on the prime minister to bring about that inevitable peace.
Reshef managed to find 105 colleagues to support the petition urging Netanyahu to pursue a peace agreement and stop his intimidations – while that same petition includes a slew of intimidations about what will happen if we fail to implement its demands.
“If you don’t take the road of achieving peace, we will find a different leader,” stated the petition’s signatories, turning themselves into a sort of “supreme council of sages” which crowns kings and appoints leaders to be its yes men, seek peace, and of course bring it over now. Otherwise, the sky will fall, they will renounce Netanyahu and likely stop seeing him as the donkey of the messiah leading them to a state of tranquility and peace on earth.
And so Peres, as well as the 106 petition signatories, most of whom have in the past praised the Oslo Agreement, the need to withdraw from the Golan Heights and the security benefits of the disengagement, are returning to the good old indicator of the camp, which distinguishes between the sons of light, who are seeking peace and reconciliation, and the sons of darkness, who are making their way up the paths of occupation and intimidation which are bringing us to the verge of destruction.
The tiny problem with this “realistic, non-delusional and non-naïve” demand for peace is that not a single one of its followers has a shred of response to the question why should Mahmoud Abbas accept the suggested historical compromise which he and Arafat already rejected in Camp David, in Taba and in Annapolis.
Abbas has been busy recently glorifying the terrorist who shot Yehudah Glick, failing to renounce the murderer of a three-month-old baby, continuing to sanctify the “shahidim” (martyrs) and seeing Jews’ visits to the Temple Mount as a desecration of the site.
None of them have a clue on how to guarantee that the Gaza model, in which the Palestinian Authority’s superior forces were defeated by Hamas’ resolve, would not be replicated in Judea and Samaria, with tunnels underneath and rockets from above becoming part of the daily life of all the residents of central Israel.
It is very important that these superior people continue offering this remarkable advice. Why there is still plenty of human raw material for this type of advice and experiments, this time in the Judea and Samaria vicinity.
