Blunder Or Betrayal?
“Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else.”
Yasser Arafat
Shimon Peres has not been held accountable for the Oslo War now shattering life and limb in Israel. He has not been held morally responsible the more than 1,000 Jewish men, women, and children that have been murdered by Arab terrorists during this war. He roams around Israel without fear of ever being indicted for endangering his country and betraying the Jewish people. Indeed, so corrupt is Israel’s political system that Peres can’t even be voted out of office for having perpetrated “the greatest diplomatic blunder in history”—the words of Charles Krauthammer.
But was Oslo merely a “blunder”? Oslo represents the policy of “territory for peace,”whose end is a Palestinian state on Jewish soil. This policy is based on the belief that the conflict between Israel and the Arab Palestinians is a territorial one rather than a religious or cultural one. Is this Peres’ blunder?
However pertinent this question may be, it can easily lead us astray. For the core of the problem is not a particular belief of Mr. Peres’ mind but the desires or ambition of his heart to which that belief is related.
We are enjoined in the Shema: “Do not go astray after your hearts…” (Numbers 15:39). The Babylonian Talmud interprets “going astray after one’s heart” as referring to the pursuit of false ideologies or distorted beliefs concerning God (Berachot 12b). Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman, one of the great leaders of European Jewry in the generation leading up to the Holocaust, asked—and here I paraphrase: Why does the Torah warn against false ideologies and distorted beliefs, and why does it speak of the heart and not the mind? He answers: False beliefs result not so much from a defective intelligence as from a perverted heart. The heart is the seat of our desires and will, and those desires are the source of all distorted thinking.
Peres is not merely a person who harbored an erroneous belief about how to make peace between Jews and Arabs. Far more significant is Mr. Peres’ contempt for religion in general, and for the religious beliefs of these adversaries in particular. His blunder at Oslo resulted from his unfeeling if not scornful attitude toward the Jewish people’s religious attachment to Judea and Samaria, eastern Jerusalem, the Temple Mount. Moreover, his miscalculation regarding the descendents of Ishmael is a consequence of his indifference to Islamic history on the one had, and to the historical experience of the Jewish people on the other.
A year after Oslo Peres uttered this remark: “I have become totally tired of history, because I feel history is a long misunderstanding” (Wall Street Journal, September 30, 1995). The inanity and arrogance of this remark derives from a callous heart. To be tired of history, Peres must not only be indifferent to the one and only people of Universal History, the Jews, but he must also be unaffected by the brutal character of the scores of nations that have tormented and decimated the Jews during the past 2,000 years. Oslo must be viewed in this light.
Mr. Peres’ unfeeling heart corrupted his mind. His will or willingness to abandon Judea and Samaria, the heartland of the Jewish people, is logically and psychologically related to his abandonment of Judaism. This is why Oslo cannot be understood primarily as a diplomatic blunder. It was above all an act of betrayal.
It is well known that Peres has long harbored the desire to transform the Jewish state of Israel into a “state of its citizens.” Consistent therewith, the Rabin government of which he was the foreign minister, deleted the terms “Judaism,” “Zionism,” and “Eretz Yisrael,” from the Soldiers Code of Ethics. This is what Oslo is all about. “Territory for peace” really means negating “Judaism, Zionism, and Eretz Yisrael for peace”! In other word, Peres arrogated to himself the goal of erasing the national and historical identity of a people regarded by various gentile philosophers, historians, and statesmen as the wisest and most virtuous people on earth!
“Territory for peace”! With religious barbarians, with Arabs whose implacable and murderous hatred of Jews is obvious to all but fools? If Peres is an unmitigated fool, his folly results from a heart which, were it not devoid of Jewish faith and feeling, would know all too well the character of Ishmael’s descendents. Genesis 16:12 defines Ishmael as a pera adam, a human beast—which exactly defines Yasser Arafat.
Did Peres have nothing more in mind than making peace with the godfather of international terrorism? Is it not obvious that the foreign minister who engineered Oslo and who subsequently applied for Israel’s membership in the Arab League is more than a blundering idiot? Oslo’s hidden agenda was to facilitate Israel’s demise as a Jewish state. It was intended to eviscerate Jewish national consciousness, which is bonded to Hebron, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the Old City, the Temple Mount. This was well understood by Israeli leftists. Ha’aretz journalist Gidon Samet gleefully saw Oslo’s abandonment of Judea and Samaria as nullifying the century-old effort of Zionists to restore Jewish “national identity.” Author David Grossman cynically described Israel’s military redeployment from Judea and Samaria, as prescribed by Oslo, as “a redeployment from entire regions in our soul.”
The hostility of these Jews toward Judaism blinds them to the genocidal hostility of Islam. Scornful of history, Peres engineered the Oslo agreement in total disregard of recent Arab-Islamic history. Was he ignorant of how Arafat’s Arab Palestinians left Lebanon soaking in its own blood? Was he oblivious of how Israel’s own Arab citizens (only two years before Oslo) had supported Saddam Hussein despite his threat to incinerate Israel, and how they and their Arab kinsmen in Judea and Samaria danced in joy while Scud missiles fell on Tel Aviv?
Is the heart of Ariel Sharon any different from that of his first and possibly next foreign minister?
