Word: oslo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...violence, and they have no interest in negotiations over a two-state solution. That's why the late Yitzhak Rabin had the foresight to recognize that stopping the peace process in response to terror attacks gave extremists veto power over the destiny of both peoples. He kept the Oslo process going even when suicide bombers attacked, believing that the terrorists would ultimately be defeated by the completion of the peace process. Rabin's motto was "fight terrorism as if there is no peace process; pursue peace as if there is no terrorism...
...demoralize the Israelis and soften their positions at the negotiating table. Violence has worked before. The hijackings of the 1970s kept the Palestinian cause alive in a way that Kurds and Basques can only envy. The first intifadeh, though far less brutal than this one, brought the Palestinians the Oslo peace talks. And, most relevant to Arafat today, Lebanon's Hizballah militia compelled Israel to withdraw unconditionally from south Lebanon two years ago--just before the fateful Camp David talks--by bloodying Israeli troops in the field and Israeli civilians along the border. What Hizballah got, Arafat wants...
...being helpless victims. Facing a superior Israeli army with its formidable arsenal, they felt morally victorious as the children of the stones became heroes of defiance. While that sense of victory served Arafat as a psychological platform to launch his peace initiative and recognition of Israel, it was the Oslo agreement and the peace process that followed that disillusioned the Palestinians and threw them into a new episode of confrontation. The reluctance of Israeli governments to implement promised withdrawals from Palestinian land, and then the catastrophic failure of the Camp David talks, prepared the fertile soil for a new breed...
...hopelessness of the past and the hopelessness of the present are different. However bleak the world was before the Oslo peace process began, there was still a sense that progress might be made, if only visionary leaders could emerge and guide their peoples forward into the light. Then there was Oslo, and the heroism of Yitzhak Rabin, and the apparent conversion of Yasser Arafat to the cause of peace. There were Nobel Peace prizes for all concerned, and limited sovereignty for Palestine, and the promise that there would be an end to war, because peace was the desire of both...
That time has now passed. Two years ago, in the waning moments of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Palestinians were offered what they had claimed to want all through the years of the Oslo process—an independent nation, with a capital in Jerusalem. And in the name of a fantasy, an impossible “right of return” for people displaced a half-century ago, this offer was rejected...