The Oslo peace process: RIP

Some issues didn't change this summer. The Israelis and Palestinians are still at each other's throats. For two years now, the only news coming out of the Middle East is of blood, war and violence, with almost no hope of peace or of anything productive ensuing.

What Israel's late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin lost his life over is now crumbling before our eyes, only eight years since the historical Oslo peace treaty was signed between the PLO and the State of Israel. Just two years ago, Prime Minister Ehud Barak was willing to hand back over 90 percent of the West Bank and split Jerusalem in half in order to ultimately reach a final peace with the Palestinian people. In my opinion, Arafat should have taken what he got then and there, and said thank you. No Israeli leader was ever willing to make such concessions in the past. And after the current Palestinian unrest, I doubt in the future that any Israeli leader will go as far as Barak did.

But now two years later, we are at a state of war. We were so close and now seem farther apart than ever. I am left with only questions. How can this be? What has changed? And now I want answers.

One possible answer is that nothing has changed and that is the whole problem. Since the creation of Israel in 1948, what I have seen of the Arab mentality has remained the same. Deep down in their hearts, I believe that Arabs cannot wait for the day the Jewish State will be destroyed. Palestinians hold rallies burning Israeli flags and chanting "Death to the Israelis." Iran and Syria are continuously funding the Hezbollah; meanwhile the Hamas and Jihad terrorist organizations are working around the clock, planning out terrorist attacks against Israel.

In contrast, rallies in Israel are being held at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv weekly to support peace and pray for an end to the violence. The daily Palestinian unrest is dangerous and a threat to the sovereignty of the State of Israel. While some newspapers, such as The New York Times, continue to show one-sided views of 15-year-old Palestinian kids being killed, the fact remains that they made the choice to be out there on the streets. In my opinion, those Palestinian children are a threat to the soldiers and are therefore chased away or, in extreme cases, fired upon. The men defending Israel are only three years older at the age of 18, and no 18-year-old takes joy in shooting an M-16 and taking another person's life.

Another possibility is that maybe we (Arabs and Israelis) are just not as alike as everyone thinks we are. Daily, Israeli children sit in schools discussing ways to end the violence, which they want no part of. In contrast, Palestinian children are being sent to the front lines to get killed in a desperate and immoral attempt by the PLO to win international support for their cause. Violence will not get them anywhere.

To Israelis, whether they are right wing or left wing, war is not the answer. We want peace. Unfortunately, from what I can gather, this is not the same for our Palestinian counterparts. Even when the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, Palestinian terrorists went on rampages throughout Israel, carrying out bus and car bomb attacks which killed dozens of Israelis.

So then what is the goal of the violence? I think that the goal of the violence was for the Palestinians to show their true faces to the Israelis. The Palestinians are saying that they do not want peace. If the Arabs wanted peace then Arafat would have accepted the 90 percent of the West Bank that Barak offered him at Camp David. So really when you look at it, the Palestinian violence has succeeded in one thing and one thing only: creating a new political slogan for the Israeli right wing, "We told you so."

No matter what the answer is, I am indeed starting to see the true face of the Palestinian people. From what I see, they speak peace and practice war. Now I feel like it's just good that we found this out about them now and not after we gave them half of Jerusalem. It seems to me that they don't want to see Jews and Arabs living side by side. Instead, they want to see us out of what they claim to be "their" land. In my opinion, this unacceptable behavior has led to the death of the Oslo Accords. The killers were the Palestinian people under their leader, Yasser Arafat.



Ilam Behm is a freshman who has yet to declare a major.