Caroline Glick: Why Oslo still rules
Faisal Husseini, who held the Palestinian Authority's Jerusalem portfolio, gave an interview shortly before his death in the summer of 2001 in which exposed the fraud at the heart of the Oslo process. Speaking with Al Araby newspaper, Husseini said that Yasser Arafat, his deputies and henchmen never saw the "peace process" as a way of achieving peace with Israel. Oslo for them was a means to advance their goal of destroying Israel, "from the river to the sea."
Husseini described the Oslo process as a "Trojan Horse." Arafat and his people were the hostile army that infiltrated the city "in the belly of the wooden horse." When Arafat rejected Palestinian statehood and peace at the Camp David summit in July 2000 and initiated the Palestinian terror war two months later, it was as if he and his men exited the horse and began the fight.
"This is the beginning of the real work," Husseini explained.
The PLO used the seven years that preceded the Palestinian terror war to build up their power. Arafat held "peace" talks and Israel paid through the nose for the privilege of sitting across the table from him and his apparatchiks. Israel gave them the Gaza Strip. Israel gave them the Palestinian cities and villages in Judea and Samaria. Israel gave them weapons and ammunition. Israel gave them international legitimacy. Israel – and with Israel's permission, the nations of the world – gave PLO terrorists billions of dollars every year. Israel permitted the EU and the CIA to arm and train Arafat's terror legions.
Arafat promised that in exchange for all that, he would fight terror and build the institutions necessary to run a state. Instead, he and his minions transformed the cities Israel gave them into terror bases. They used the funds to finance terror armies. They used the international legitimacy Israel's recognition conferred to escalate and expand their political war against Israel's right to exist.
The Israeli public didn't need Husseini's interview to know that Oslo was gravest strategic error in Israel's history. The first Palestinian suicide bomber blew up at a crowded bus stop seven months after Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat shook hands at the White House on Sept. 13, 1993. Between their handshake and the beginning of the Oslo war in September 2000 the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists was twice the total killed from 1967-1993.
Despite the public's opposition, today, 28 years after Oslo's launch, we are still living the world Oslo unleashed. The strategic and political realities the Oslo process created still dominate the life of the country. The Palestinian Authority still exists. It still finances and incites terror and wages its political war against Israel. The Oslo-obsessed "international community" still demands that Israel "make painful concessions for peace," and together with the Israeli Left, insists that the "two-state solution" is the only possible way to resolve the Palestinians' never-ending war for the annihilation of Israel.
Melanie Phillips: The unstoppable engine of infamy
The NGOs that contributed to the Durban auto-da-fé are still producing vicious and sustained anti-Israeli lies and incitement. Yet no governments denounce them or hold them to account.
The United Nations itself continues to act as the crucible of the campaign to delegitimise and destroy Israel. Last year, for example, the UN General Assembly adopted 17 one-sided resolutions against Israel and only six against any of the other 192 member states for human rights violations.
Last September, the UN’s Economic and Social Council condemned Israel alone for allegedly violating women’s rights — even though Israel is the only upholder of women’s rights in the Middle East.
Last May, the UN’s World Health Organisation accused Israel of violating the Palestinians’ health rights over COVID-19 — a wickedly false claim, and with Israel once again the only country to be singled out during the entire assembly.
The UN’s charter says its role is “promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion”.
The world body betrays this commitment almost every day. Conspicuously failing to deal with the racism and gross abuse of human rights around the world, it chooses instead to persecute Israel, a country that guarantees human rights for all its citizens.
The Durban conference displayed the moral bankruptcy of the United Nations for all to see. Yet the west continues to treat it as the legitimate arbiter of world peace and justice. Support for the United Nations is the pivot for the west’s loss of moral compass.
The boycott of the New York meeting is thus an empty gesture. It’s the United Nations itself that is allowing evil to triumph — and in which the two-faced, cowardly and self-indulgent west is all-too complicit.
19 principled nations have withdrawn from #Durban @UN antisemitic hate-fest.
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) September 17, 2021
These countries in #Europe though not prepared to #SayNoToDurbanIV. They are Ok with antisemitism & racial hatred@PolandMFA ????@dfatirl ????@NorwayMFA ????@SweMFA ????@SpainMFA ????@MFA_Lu ????@SwissMFA ???? https://t.co/MbGhmFBTOq
Sweden releases pledges to combat antisemitism, ahead of its hosting of the Malmö International Forum on Combating Antisemitism.
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) September 17, 2021
We ask @SwedishPM @SweMFA @Anna_Ekstrom: So why are you legitimizing next week's antisemitism-tainted Durban IV event?https://t.co/t6Iztczq0D