A clandestine undertaking on behalf of Israel, the Jets and the Jews.

 
The Cowardly Oz

In today's New York Times, radical Israeli leftist Amos Oz writes that the peace process is failing because "the leaders on both sides are cowards. Both Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister, realize that there can be no progress before the extremists are contained and overruled. Yet each of these leaders wants the other to launch an internal civil war while he just sits and watches. Each of these leaders wants the internal battle to take place inside the other's family."

In fact, it is Oz who is a coward and a hypocrite. For on September 3, 1993, ten days before the signing of the disastrous Oslo accords, Oz wrote in The Jerusalem Post as follows:

"What if they take whatever we give them and demand even more, still exercising violence and terror? Within the proposed settlement, Israel will be in a position to close in on Palestine and undo the deal. If the worse comes to the worst, if it turns out that the peace is no peace, it will always be militarily easier for Israel to break the backbone of a tiny, demilitarized Palestinian entity than to go on and on breaking the backbones of eight-year-old stone-throwing Palestinians.

"Once peace comes, Israeli doves, more than other Israelis, must assume a clear-cut "hawkish" attitude concerning the duty of the future Palestinian regime to live by the letter and the spirit of its obligations. The plan now being negotiated, Gaza and Jericho first, is a sober and reasonable option. If the Palestinians want to hold onto Gaza and Jericho, eventually assuming power in other parts of the occupied territories, they will have to prove to us, to themselves and to the whole world, that they have abandoned violence and terror, that they are capable of suppressing their fanatics, that they are renouncing the destructive Palestinian Charter and withdrawing from what they used to call "the right of return." They will also have to show that they are willing to tolerate in their midst a minority of Israelis who may choose to live where there is no Israeli government."

Peace has not come, and the Palestinians control much more than Gaza and Jericho, but Israeli doves such as Oz refuse to take "a clear cut hawkish attitude concerning the duty of the Palestinian regime to live by the letter and the spirit of its obligations" or to demand that Palestinians show that they "have abandoned violence and terror, that they are capable of suppressing their fanatics." Nor have the Palestinians renounced what they still call the "right of return," or shown any willingness to allow Jews to live peacefully in areas controlled by the PA.

Yet Oz not only refuses to undertake what he called for in 1993, he has the audacity to attack his own government and his own prime minister in a hostile newspaper.
posted on 8/19/2003