CANDIDLY SPEAKING: The requiem for the Oslo Accords warrants a unity government
The controversy over the Oslo Accords, which bitterly divided the nation over the past quarter- century, is no longer a contentious issue.
The late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin personally told me on numerous occasions of his concern that the deal with Yasser Arafat, whom he despised as a murderer, was a gamble that Israel had to take in order to satisfy itself and the world that it had sought every opportunity to achieve peace.
In contrast, Shimon Peres, then foreign minister, in response to a few critical questions I posed in the days after the Oslo announcement, lost his cool and angrily stated, “They took Entebbe away from me, but they will never do the same with the peace process.” Today Peres is possibly the sole remaining senior politician who still maintains that the deal with Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization should be retained as the basis for a peace settlement.
The consensus, extending beyond right-wing politics, which recognizes the failure of the Oslo Accords, was articulated by the former director- general of the Foreign Ministry Prof. Shlomo Avineri, an esteemed intellectual doyen of the Zionist Left. In an article published last October in Haaretz, Avineri enumerated a host of reasons on both sides that contributed to the failure. But overriding these was the fact that the Palestinian position did not consider the conflict as territorial but regarded all of Israel as a colonial implant which had to be uprooted. Avineri concluded that we are obliged to face the reality that there is no way Israel could achieve any mutually acceptable peace agreement in the foreseeable future.