Kenneth Levin

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF OSLO

Editor’s note: As Israel blindly prepares to re-enact the failed Oslo peace process, Kenneth Levin’s new book, of which we offer here brief excerpts, is especially important.)

The determination to hold fast to a particular comprehension of reality no matter what the strength of countervailing evidence, to be impatient with all invoking of such evidence and brook no debate, is virtually a textbook definition of “delusional.” It is not surprising then that many observers responded with a sense of something being psychologically amiss in the avid and unshakable embrace of Oslo by its Israeli and Jewish-American enthusiasts (the latter typically no more open to countervailing evidence or tolerant of challenge than their Israeli counterparts). Thus, I found myself in September, 1993, and increasingly in the months and years that followed, being asked again and again by acquaintances, both Jewish and non-Jewish, variations on questions of the sort: Why are the Israelis doing these insane things? Why are Jews so self-destructive? So suicidal?

Such questions, and the events that prompted them, brought to mind the extensive literature dating back to the first decades of the twentieth century attempting to address what was perceived as a distinctively Jewish self-denying and self-destructive pathology. The literature related this pathology to the particular travails of Diaspora Jewish life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But those difficulties were, at least superficially, very different from the circumstances confronted by a free people in a sovereign Jewish state.

Yet the reactions of Diaspora Jews to the corrosive indictments and assaults they suffered in that earlier period are relevant to the delusions many Israelis have embraced in the face of chronic besiegement. Immigrants to the pre-state Jewish community in Eretz Israel and then to the state brought with them predilections learned in the Diaspora. While they may have foreseen in the prospect of being citizens of a Jewish state a release from the persecutions of life in exile, some also promoted in their new society self-deluding concepts of proper, accommodating Jewish behavior born of the Jewish predicament in Europe. They did so not only as parents but as teachers, journalists, and writers. And many Israelis, confronted with the chronic Arab assault, have reacted in ways reflecting those responses introduced into Israeli culture by Diaspora immigrants.

Clues to the psychology of those who embraced Oslo can be found in the rationales with which they sought to defend their position. Those arguments were very often either delusionally self-deprecating or delusionally grandiose.

Illustrative of the former was the burgeoning of a largely bogus revisionist history of Israel, the so-called New History, beginning particularly in the late nineteen eighties. This rewriting of the history of the state implicitly or explicitly placed the onus on Israel for perpetuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict over the previous half-century: It was Israeli militancy and Israeli occupation of the territories in the face of Arab openness to compromise that initiated and sustained the conflict. Therefore, Israel’s ceding of the territories would end the conflict and bring about a new era of genuine peace.

Many Israelis were drawn in by the new historians’ claims that, despite the Palestinian Arabs’ rejection of the UN partition plan in 1947 and despite the subsequent invasion of Israel by five Arab armies, Israel was actually the villain in the story. They took to heart assertions that the Arab terror of the 1950s really was not so onerous and Israeli counteractions were too heavy-handed. But even someone unable to analyze the new historians’ specific claims and discern the lies in them should have been able to see the overarching lie in their authors’ assessments of the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict. There was abundant evidence of Arab intent available to any Israeli, evidence in the form of anti-Jewish rhetoric and policy reflecting an Arab perception that the only just outcome would be Israel’s dissolution. It still, therefore, required a major exercise in self-deception to perceive Arab intentions as “moderate,” as having always been “moderate,” and as consistent with genuine peace were only Israel to change its ways and be forthcoming enough in its concessions.

At the same time, delusional grandiosity was also apparent, as in arguments that Arab quiescence could be won by Israel’s proffering benefits to Arab partners in economic, environmental, medical, and other endeavors. According to this thinking, the lure of economic gains would drive the Arabs to enter into peace agreements and would assure Arab adherence to those agreements – if only Israel were sufficiently forthcoming. Such arguments ignore, of course, the relative inconsequentiality of the economic strength of Israel, however impressive for a country of six million, and the relative insignificance of opportunities potentially provided by cooperation with Israel, in the context of the vast Arab world of over a quarter billion souls.
They ignore the obvious consideration that hostility to Israel may have a utility in the domestic and inter-Arab politics of Arab governments that far outweighs in those governments’ calculations the benefits any rapprochement with Israel might provide. They ignore the fact that the fundamentalist threat to so-called moderate regimes is another reason for those regimes to keep Israel at arm’s length. They ignore the example of Egypt, which has reneged on virtually all of the numerous accords touching on economic cooperation that were part of the 1978 Camp David treaty.

Both the self-deprecating and the grandiose distortions of reality have a common source: A wish to believe Israel to be in control of profoundly stressful circumstances over which it, unfortunately, has no real control.

CLINGING TO OSLO

What, in fact, followed on the initial Oslo accords was essentially what the doubters anticipated.The end of terrorist acts against Israel was particularly touted by Rabin and his colleagues as one of the major benefits that would accrue to Israel as a result of the Oslo process. Arafat and his allies had foresworn in the 1993 accord their own engagement in terror and were now committed to acting against others responsible for attacks on Israel, particularly the Islamic fundamentalist groups. Moreover, Rabin emphasized that negotiations could not proceed in an atmosphere of violence, and a cessation of violence would be a test of the Oslo process and a condition for its continuation. An end to incitement to violence was similarly characterized as a key test of the Palestinian Authority’s compliance with its obligations under the accords and so of the viability of the Oslo process.

But anti-Israel rhetoric and incitement by Arafat and his associates did not end. Indeed, on the evening of September 13, 1993, just hours after his signing of the Declaration of Principles and his handshake with Rabin on the White House lawn, Arafat, in a broadcast on Jordanian state television, assured his followers and the Arab world generally that the events of the day, rather than representing a shift in policy, were simply steps in the first stage of his 1974 Plan of Phases for Israel’s destruction. In the ensuing months, allusions to the plan were a staple of Arafat’s speeches to Arab audiences.

Arafat also at times stated his agenda even more explicitly, referring to areas within Israel that the Palestinians would ultimately possess. In a speech in 1995, he declared, “Be blessed, O Gaza, and celebrate, for your sons are returning after a long celebration. O Lod, O Haifa, O Jerusalem, you are returning, you are returning.” In a speech broadcast in November, 1995, Arafat assured his audience, “The struggle will continue until all of Palestine is liberated.”

The Israeli government’s response to this and other incitement by Arafat and his associates was muted. Most often, the incitement was entirely ignored. Israeli media, both government-controlled and independent likewise tended to ignore it. This was no doubt in part because the incitement was embarrassing and called into question government policy and the new-found faith in Arafat. But in addition to this, there seemed to be an assumption among many in government circles, and among those in the media sympathetic to government policies, that the incitement did not really matter, that the assurances of peaceful intent that Arafat and his lieutenants were conveying to Israeli officials were more important than the incendiary messages they were giving to their own people.

Many construed the Palestinians’ receptiveness to incitement as a consequence of their not yet experiencing the full benefits of peace, and they saw the solution to Palestinian hostility in more rapid implementation of Israeli concessions. Indeed, if the step-wise nature of the Oslo process and of Israeli withdrawals was presented to the Israeli public by the government as a mechanism for testing Arafat’s, and the Palestinians’, intentions and trustworthiness, some in the government, particularly those Laborites around Yossi Beilin and ministers drawn from the Meretz Party, appear to have seen no need for testing. They unequivocally trusted both Arafat and the Palestinians to give Israel full peace for full withdrawal, would have preferred to institute territorial concessions much more rapidly, and saw utility in gradual withdrawal only as a device for acclimating the Israeli public to the new realities the government was creating.

In addition to the persistence of incitement, acts of terror likewise continued apace. If Arafat offered any condemnation at all, it was lukewarm and couched in statements that such attacks were against Palestinian interests. Even these pinched declarations were typically pried from him only after bombings that killed large numbers of Israelis and only when international attention was turned to Arafat’s response. Moreover, such statements invariably avoided condemning Hamas and Islamic Jihad-–the perpetrators of the bombings—by name. On the contrary, Arafat at times praised the terror groups, their leaders and their operatives.

Not surprisingly, Arafat did nothing to disarm Hamas and Islamic Jihad or dismantle their infrastructures. While he did occasionally arrest members of these organizations and murderers of Israelis, detainees were often soon released or given furloughs. This pattern quickly became known as “revolving door” imprisonment, and some such “prisoners” were even recruited into the Palestinian police.

In the fifteen months between Arafat’s arrival in Gaza and the signing of the next accord, Oslo II, the initial Israeli government stance, that terror and the peace process were incompatible and that continuation of the former would mean termination of the latter, was effectively abandoned. Indeed, the government even cast Arafat and his Palestinian Authority as an ally against the terrorism despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. For example, in August 1995, addressing the issue of recent terrorism, Rabin declared: “This is a war against the enemies of Israel and the enemies of peace. It is a war which we are waging today, to some extent, together with the Palestinian Authority, whose enemies they are also.”

The primary target of the terrorists, the government argued, was the peace process itself; it was not Jews or Israelis per se they sought to kill, but the “peace.” So the proper Israeli response would be to accelerate the process and the pace of concessions and thereby frustrate the terrorists. For some in the government, this line of argument, and the protection of Arafat, were no doubt motivated by a desire to cast its Oslo gamble in a positive light despite the terror and Arafat’s recalcitrance. But many in the coalition sincerely believed this rhetoric.

Of course, as was entirely obvious to numerous observers, this Israeli response essentially rewarded the Palestinians for terror. The more terror, the more the government urged a speeding up of the “peace process,” whose most tangible elements were Israeli withdrawals and other concessions. Not surprisingly, the terror did not diminish and Arafat continued on his course of tolerance toward and tacit, and at times explicit, cooperation with the terrorism’s perpetrators.

ARAFAT MOVES TOWARD OPEN WARFARE

After the outbreak of violence in September 2000, and the unraveling of the Oslo Accords, various senior officials in military intelligence and other Israeli intelligence services argued that they had informed the government of Arafat’s noncompliance with Oslo’s security provisions and of his continued commitment to a belligerent agenda but that government leaders chose to ignore the warnings. But the reality appears to have been more complicated. While the various branches of Israeli intelligence were providing the government with evidence of Palestinian malfeasance and commitment to terror and ultimate confrontation, the leaders of the intelligence community were submitting contorted and hedged interpretations of the evidence that sought to reconcile it with the possibility of Arafat still being a genuine “peace” partner. It may well be that this reflected in part the intelligence leadership’s simply providing the political echelon with what it knew the latter wanted to hear – a not uncommon phenomenon even though a dereliction of duty. But it seems that also at work here was an embrace by the intelligence community of the Oslo zeitgeist that blinded it to the full import of its own data.

The Israeli government’s ignoring or downplaying of Arafat’s repeated calls for Holy War and his other exercises in incitement, and the government’s continually responding to terror not as a violation of Oslo commitments but as a reason to hasten forward into additional “agreements,” were accompanied by other government failures as well. There were additional examples of the Rabin administration refusing to allow Palestinian flouting of the first Oslo accords to halt or even slow more than briefly the parade of more concessions and more “peace” ceremonies.

Arafat quickly established armed forces substantially exceeding those allowed under the Gaza-Jericho accord, and his agents lost no time in organizing smuggling operations to bring into the territories weapons banned by the agreement. All this occurred with the full knowledge of Israel but with no impact on Israel’s eagerness to pursue accommodation. The Palestinian’s failure to extradite murderers of Israelis again caused barely a ripple.

Despite Oslo commitments protecting Palestinians who had cooperated with Israeli intelligence prior to the agreements, Arafat’s forces immediately embarked on a series of “collaborator” murders that killed dozens. This too elicited hardly a murmur of protest from the Rabin administration. In addition, the Oslo accords included arrangements for cooperation between PA and Israeli security services, and Israel repeatedly passed on to the PA information about terrorist activities; but this very often led not to any significant moves by the PA against the terrorists but rather to the PA using the information to track down possible Palestinian sources of the Israeli intelligence and to attack them, once more with little Israeli reaction. But it should hardly be surprising that Israel was virtually silent about the murder of so-called Palestinian collaborators when it was so supine in its responses to the murder of Israelis.

While not all the steps taken by Arafat to impose his dictatorial control entailed violations of Oslo, some did; and insofar as the Israeli government acquiesced to those violations, its stance represented not simply passivity in the face of Arafat’s course but virtual collusion in it.

Arafat’s assumption of control in the territories has been best described by Daniel Polisar, who at the time headed Peace Watch, the only Israeli group accredited by the PA to be an observer of its 1996 elections. Polisar documents “the rise of a regime characterized by a massive police force whose specialty was intimidation of political opponents; an executive branch in which Arafat alone made all major decisions and in which the civil service was reduced to a corrupt patronage machine; the institutionalized absence of the rule of law, and a judiciary that lacked any independence; and the intimidation of the media and human rights organizations, to the point that it became virtually impossible to transmit any message other than one personally approved by Arafat.”

Arafat and his PA associates diverted a large percentage of the PA budget, much of it consisting of foreign contributions, to personal accounts and private use. A comptroller’s report on PA finances for 1996 stated that $325 million out of a budget of $800 million had disappeared, either to “waste” or embezzlement by PA officials. In a protocol ancillary to the Oslo accords, Israel had agreed to reimburse the PA for taxes collected on imported goods destined for areas under Palestinian governance. Arafat insisted that the taxes be placed in accounts personally controlled by him, and Israel agreed to this. The transfers, until interrupted upon Arafat’s launching of his terror war in September 2000, amounted to about $2.5 billion.

The Palestinians had developed, under Israeli administration, the freest press in the Arab world: Arafat established PA-controlled newspapers to overwhelm the independent papers, and he ultimately intimidated and crushed the latter. A number of human rights groups had flourished in the territories during Israel’s control. Either out of “nationalist” sentiment or because of Arafat’s pressure, all retreated from high-profile human rights monitoring. The few individuals who refused to bend and chose to criticize PA practices were threatened, arrested, and accused of being Zionist agents. Not only was the Israeli government silent, but the Israeli Left in general was mute.

The major targets of the government’s animus were those Jews who saw the self-delusion and terrible dangers in the Oslo path and voiced their opposition to it. All challengers were now attacked as “enemies of peace,” often as the Jewish equivalent of those Arab “enemies of peace” who were perpetrating the terrorist attacks against Israel. It was perhaps not surprising that the government and its supporters were not prepared to respond seriously to the critiques of Oslo put forward by its opponents, that it limited its reaction almost exclusively to smears and name-calling. But its doing so was another mark of its eagerness to put aside all measured consideration in its embrace of the faith that sufficient concessions would inexorably yield a durable peace.

At the same time, the government sought to conceal from the public anti-Israel incitement by Palestinian officials and clerics and in Palestinian media and schools as well as evidence of Arafat’s tolerance of and cooperation with Islamic fundamentalist and other groups perpetrating anti-Israel terrorism. In effect, government leaders saw themselves not as the public’s servants but as paternal guiding figures, as philosopher kings, who could legitimately withhold information from a too benighted and emotional public in the interest of cultivating accommodation with Arafat and his associates and achieving “peace.”

Both state and independent media followed the government in this as well. Indeed, so little was [Palestinian behavior] covered in the Israeli media that citizens’ groups emerged to do the job: to monitor, for example, official Palestinian media, statements by Arafat and other Palestinian leaders, Palestinian school texts, and sermons by Arafat-appointed mullahs, and to inform the Israeli public and the wider world of their venomous anti-Israel, anti-peace and often anti-Semitic and annihilationist content.

"PEACE THROUGH ABANDONING ZIONISM"

[There was] synergy between the exertions of the nation’s cultural elites and those of the political leadership, the former providing guidance to the latter and influencing the government in its undertaking of reforms of national institutions, perhaps most notably the national education system. These reforms were primarily aimed at making the state and its institutions less Jewish and less Zionist, weaning the public away from Zionist perspectives and Zionist verities and rendering it more accepting of radical concessions as its leaders pursued their delusions of peace.

The penetration of the anti-Zionist and post-Zionist perspectives so common among Israel’s cultural and academic elites into national policy extended even to the military. Asa Kasher, professor of philosophy at the University of Tel Aviv, went beyond the harsh critiques of the state offered by many of his colleagues to criticize the very existence of Israel. Yet such views did not preclude his being selected by Ehud Barak, then chief of staff of the IDF, to chair a committee to develop a new code of ethics for the Israeli military. The “values” and basic principles” laid out in the code are generic universalist ones that might apply to any military. An IDF soldier’s loyalty is to be to the state, its citizens and the principles of democracy. Nowhere is there any reference to the Jewish state, the Jewish people, or the land of Israel. As Yoram Hazony notes, the extensive missions undertaken by the IDF to rescue European Jews and to help persecuted Russian Jews escape the Soviet Union – as well as other missions on behalf of Diaspora Jews in distress – would be inconsistent with The Spirit of the IDF. For they were not undertaken in defense of the state, its citizens or democracy but rather out of loyalties and a sense of obligation and responsibility not to Kasher’s taste. Despite its radical redefinition of the proper role of the IDF and its soldiers, The Spirit of the IDF was adopted by the defense establishment in 1994 virtually without protest or dissent.

The history of militant advocacy of “universalism” and antipathy to so-called “Jewish particularism” is suggestive of the connection of such sentiments to the siege. Jewish anti-Zionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was fueled by fears that Jewish nationalism would fan anti-Jewish sentiment in surrounding societies in the Diaspora and instigate a rolling back of de jure gains by Jews toward civil equality in the West. Insistence on “Jewish” being comprehended as representing exclusively a religious identity and vocation with an exclusively universalist message and meaning, was likewise inspired by the wish to placate anti-Jewish sentiment.

But to insist that Jews alone, who have, in fact, pledged themselves in their faith for millennia to precepts entailing moral, ethical obligations both to their own people and to all of humanity, be proscribed the right of independent national life in the name of a universalist agenda is anti-Jewish bias and reflects the contorting of oneself to accommodate anti-Jewish indictments. Casting such a universalist agenda in moral terms, as representing some higher, more liberal, more humane sensibility, and refusing to acknowledge the underlying fear of anti-Jewish sentiment, largely reflects a cultivating of intellectual dishonesty and self-delusion in the service of that fear.

Shortly after the start of the Oslo process the writer David Grossman declared that to see the process to its fruition in peace Israelis must concede to the Arabs not only geographic territories but territories of the soul. They must surrender their belief that it is of overriding importance for the Jewish people to have the military capacity to defend itself in its own land, the belief that the Holocaust was further evidence of the necessity of this, and the belief that the willingness of Israelis to sacrifice for the defense of the country, and to want it to take an active role in that defense, is a virtue. They must also give up the belief that the creation of Israel represents a national return for the Jews from a long and too often horrifyingly painful exile. They must even yield their belief in the value of Jewish peoplehood.

In this statement about the need for such concessions of the soul in the service of the Oslo process, Grossman takes steps toward setting aside the lie that his and others’ advocacy of these concessions really represents some single-minded striving for “universalist” and “democratic” ideals. But the statement still, of course, perpetuates another lie, the delusion—based on exhaustion with the siege and a desperate and overwhelming desire for its end—that the right self-abnegations by Israel, the right mix of territorial and spiritual retreat, can win Israel the peace it desires no matter how much the objective evidence of words and deeds by the other side indicates otherwise.

Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist. His essay Jews, Israelis and the Psyche of the Abused appeared in the December 1996 and January 1997 issues of Outpost.