In October 2009, less than a year after taking office as President of the United States, Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The arguments were vague in nature, but superlative in their enthusiasm, since Obama had not yet made peace anywhere. There was a statement of intent nonetheless. In May, the new president met with King Abdullah of Jordan, Israeli President Shimon Peres, and then Prime Minister Netanyahu, as well as Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. Obama's direction for peace was clear: declaring support for a Palestinian state in his first international speech, at Cairo University.
A taste of HBO's "Oslo" // Archive photo
The prize committee was very impressed, as sometimes the very talk of "peace" fills the soul with a sense of elation, not to mention the euphoria of "hope." Reality is sometimes too depressing, and who doesn't like peace? While the committee's reasoning did not purport to claim that Obama's meetings and speeches did indeed bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians, he "succeeded in capturing the attention of the world and presenting its residents with hope for a better future. His diplomacy is based on the understanding that the people who lead the world should do so based on values and attitudes shared by the majority of his population." And when it was written on paper and said out loud, dreamers could believe that the mere election of a black president as president of the United States was a miraculous solution to all problems.
Obama with the Nobel Prize. A miraculous solution to all problems,
Obama was not the first to receive the Nobel Prize because of words that appealed to listeners and because of well-worded support for the two-state solution. In 1994, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat won it for the Oslo Accords, a year after they were signed and before it became clear that the joy was premature, and that beautiful signing ceremonies and even prizes made in Sweden could not solve all the world's problems, let alone Palestinian murderousness against Jews.
When you are forced under the agreement, however unsuccessful, to give up the definition of the enemy, you are stuck in a twilight zone where there is ostensibly peace, with paper and noble
The Oslo Accords were secretly drawn up behind Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's back and in violation of the law. The Israeli left has always thought that it knows how to make peace properly, with the proper slogan: "Peace is made with enemies." Unfortunately, the left believed then, and still believes now, in two basic assumptions whose correctness is questionable. The first is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a geographical dispute and therefore a successful drawing of borders will resolve it properly. The second is that the conflict has a solution. One after which they put down their weapons and go shopping in Tulkarm.
Always guilty
People like me, born and raised on the left, had two options for referring to Oslo. One is to go along with utopian rhetoric and reject reality. The second is to recognize the fact that the agreements did not bring peace or security, and to question the geographical definition and the proposed solution – "land for peace." The path of questioning led to a closer look at how the Oslo Accords were sold to us with media enthusiasm, which was careful to ignore everything that did not fit the vision and treated the attacks as an unfortunate mishap in a positive process. I, personally and not politically at all, began to keep my distance from buses for fear that they would explode with me in or next to them.
Having grown up on the left, I, too, had the feeling that I was always right. But whoever wants to always be right – he better not fall in love with his mistakes. And Oslo was a piece of mistake. But oh, hello! And oh, hope! Reinforce the left's insistence on sticking to mistakes at all costs, preferring false hope and false peace to dealing with waves of terror attacks and Arafat's explicit declarations that Oslo is, as far as he is concerned, another stop on the road to the destruction of Israel. Somehow I missed the line for distributing utopias, so the seeds of doubt were planted and put down roots with every suicide attack. And after the disengagement – I was already a foot and a half out.
Kfar Darom during the "Disengagement". I was already a foot and a half out, Photo: Yossi Zamir/GPO
A political camp can make a mistake with good intentions. But refusing to admit a mistake is a disease I saw no point in contracting. I saw a murderous hatred that I couldn't be convinced stemmed from a border dispute. And I've seen a left that insists on being enthusiastic about rituals, documents, a stubborn belief in a strategy that fails after failure, yet refuses to acknowledge failure and replace it with something else. The only thing that has changed is the rhetoric.
"We are here – they are there" has been replaced by "two states for two peoples," plus an elegant skip over the fact that one state will be free of Jews and the other – it will be possible to continue fighting for a state of all its citizens. On the other side is the dystopia: a binational state and apartheid. There are no other options. Either a dream or a nightmare. But the core of Oslo remains the same: we will put a limit and everything will work out. We will leave Gaza and the terror will stop. The same insistent refrain, the same song for peace, the same indulgence in slogans and sociological explanations: it's because of geography, it's because of the occupation, it's because of poverty, it's because of despair, and most of all, it's because of us.
War made with enemies
Oslo is a mammoth carcass stuck in the heart of Israeli politics, a crumbling monument to the leftist utopia that still insists on its correctness. Thanks to the Oslo Accords, the consciousness of the enemy under whose auspices we acted against the Palestinians was erased. The Palestinian Authority is not an enemy but a kind of ally.
An ally who pays salaries to murderers of Jews, but an enemy? All of a sudden. And when you are forced by the agreement, however unsuccessful, to give up the definition of the enemy, you are stuck in a twilight zone where there is ostensibly peace, with paper and noble and poor Palestinians but also with over two hundred Israelis murdered in the four years after the signing, and then missiles from Gaza, and occasionally a war of limited scope that everyone insists on calling "operation." After all, not only peace is made with enemies, war is also made with enemies. And we have no Palestinian enemies, so there is no war either. And that's a kind of "peace" too, isn't it?
In order to remain on the political left, one must prefer the Nobel Prize over reality. Americans have the privilege of taking Obama's peace seriously. We are Jews and therefore have to make do with little. For example, go on Route 60 near Huwara and get out alive. Oslo was the moment after which my primitive Jewish soul rejected the vision of the left.
The picture of Rabin and Arafat shaking hands under cover of Clinton's embrace convinced me much less than the live broadcasts of the attack from Line 5.
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