Ruth King

When Prime Minister Rabin gave his hand to Arafat in the infamous handshake on the White House lawn in 1993, Americans for a Safe Israel was alone among organizations to denounce the entire event. The only public figure that joined us (writing in Commentary) was Norman Podhoretz. To be sure there were expressions of skepticism -- including calls for PLO "compliance." But many organizations which ostensibly supported Israel’s territorial and historical rights refused to lend their names to a Zionist Conference assembled by AFSI to remind participants of those rights and to denounce Oslo. The late Emil Fackenheim came from Israel as did the courageous “refusenick” Ida Nudel and Yoram Hazony, then director of the Shalem Center.

A decade later those who rose to applaud Arafat on the White House lawn tripped over themselves to criticize him. Those who hailed Oslo as a “new beginning” now saw it as a failed process. Moreover, the terrible events of September 11, 2001 seemed to focus many minds on the international Islamist assault on the West. The Arab war against Israel was understood to be a part of the great Jihad. This was especially so when stunned Americans saw the exultation and celebration throughout the Arab world -- especially marked in the Palestinian Arab street -- when our skyscrapers and the Pentagon were attacked.

For a very brief period Israel paused in its hitherto demoralizing pattern of concessions to terror. To be sure, the UN and the Europeans paid their customary tribute to Islam with unrelenting hectoring of Israel. Even Tony Blair, staunch in his support of American initiatives, took time out from the Afghanistan War to reiterate his belief that nothing could be solved without a reconciliation of the Israel/Arab problem……on Arab terms, naturally.

However, in America and Israel, there were louder and more articulate criticisms of the entire Oslo process. Arafat was isolated in his Ramallah compound even as suicide bombing and rockets continued on an almost daily basis. Anti-Semitism escalated throughout Europe, frightening local and other Jews dispersed throughout the world in America, South America, as well as those residing in Israel. The imperative for a strong Israel loomed larger than at any time since the 1960s, particularly as anti-Semitism surged throughout Europe, frightening not only Jews in the countries affected but Jews in the rest of the world. Christian Zionists were apprehensive and energized in their support.

And then? Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the most vocal and unrelenting critic of Oslo, declared the “disengagement” from Gaza, ineluctably to be followed by more retreats, more abandonment of Judea and Samaria, more flooding the streets with jailed terrorists, more appeasement and more surrender. He can get away with it because, as an outraged Sarah Honig wrote in The Jerusalem Post, Israelis have "distanced themselves from their own cause, aren't emotionally involved with Jewish and Zionist interests, don't love, don't hate, don't deeply care."

Meanwhile, in the United States, the heat was turned up as Arafat was replaced by a terrorist without the stubble and head scarf. The media gushed with descriptions of a grandfatherly Abu Mazen. I would not know since my grandfathers never attained his age. They were victims of the Holocaust which Abu Mazen denied ever happened. And now all those who finally said, albeit a decade too late, that Oslo was a tragic error, had to mentally retool and find a new policy.

And what they did they come up with? Why, Oslo again. Another highly photographed handshake of an Israeli Prime Minister with a terrorist, and more strategic surrender in exchange for a Hudna (truce). They can learn about Moslem "truces" from Hugh Fitzgerald, or Robert Spencer or Andrew Bostom or Ibn Warraq or Bat Ye’or. Or, after listening to Abbas declare that war is over, they might turn to Muir's Life of Mahomet, p. 173: “His reason for the toleration of his Meccan opponents was present weakness only. Patience for awhile was inculcated by God on Mahomet but the future breathed of revenge and victory.”