If Israel is ever destroyed, Yossi Beilin will have more than his fair share of responsibility
for it, second only to Shimon Peres himself.
Beilin was in many ways the mother hen to the Oslo debacle. He had risen in the Labor Party machine after completing a doctorate in political science at Tel Aviv University. (I am one
of those very few who have actually seen his ‘dissertation,’ a copy of which is floating around
the library at Haifa University. It is a shallow, long-winded story about the potential of the
ideologically pure “young guard” in the Labor Party to do really nice things if they take over, and it reveals all of the shallow silliness of Beilin, “The Labor Party Intellectual.” It is a disgrace that Tel Aviv University awarded a doctorate to its author.)
Beilin had organized secret negotiations with the PLO in Oslo back when any contact with the PLO was illegal in Israel. He was accompanied by two other mediocre Israeli “academics.” Beilin accelerated the talks after Yitzhak Rabin got elected on a platform of no deals whatsoever with the PLO.
Beilin’s view was that Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was the source of all the country’s problems, and that it must be ended at all costs, no matter how the PLO behaved, and no matter how many Jews had to get themselves killed along the way to achieve this greater good. In a bastardization of a line by Ben Gurion, Beilin insisted that Israel must fight terror as if there were no peace process and pursue the peace process as if there were
no terror.
In fact, Israel pursued both the peace process and the war against terror as if there were no
terror, all thanks to Beilin.
When the buses started exploding – thanks to the West Bank and Gaza having been turned into bomb factories as part of Beilin’s grand plan – it was suggested by your humble curmudgeon that a new graveyard be erected for the victims and named Beilingrad. After the
Oslo Accords produced their inevitable bloodshed, Beilin led the campaign to turn all
of East Jerusalem, including the Old City and the Western Wall, over to the PLO and to
reconstruct the Berlin Wall in Jerusalem. Beilin unblushingly insisted that the most effective way
to retain Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was to turn it into the capital of “Palestine.” When Oslo
produced hundreds of murdered Israeli civilians, Beilin coined the expression ‘sacrifices for
peace.’
As a result of his political role, Beilin became not only the darling of the leftist Eurotrash and the laughingstock of the Jewish people, but a man despised even within his own Labor Party.
As Labor shrank and approached single-digit percentages of the Israeli electorate, Beilin was
dumped by his own party. In last year’s Labor primaries, he was consigned to political
invisibility, this by the same party that, under Amram Mitzna, had lurched as far leftward as it
had ever dared.
But even the Labor Party of Mitzna saw Beilin as an embarrassment and blocked him in the primaries from getting a seat in the Knesset. Within days, Beilin announced that he was
resigning from the Labor Party and was recruiting himself to rescue the Meretz Party and the
4 percent of Israeli voters who support it, by joining it to erect a new “Social Democratic” party.
Beilin’s latest gambit is to “negotiate” publicly on behalf of himself with the PLO and to crayon yet another grand document for total resolution of all outstanding Arab-Israeli issues through surrender to the PLO – this despite the fact that he does not represent Israel, does not
represent the Labor Party and does not even represent Meretz.
Even Ehud Barak, who came close to offering Arafat at Camp David what Beilin now
suggests and who turned Israel’s northern border over to Hizbullah, has denounced Beilin.
Nevertheless, Beilin has been meeting in Geneva with a PLO representative and they have
produced the “Geneva Understandings,” the newest Beilin answer to the Munich capitulations.
Jewish-Arab ‘peace dialogues’ have been polluting the planet for many years. These are
those meetings between Palestinian fascists and Jewish leftists that inevitably end up endorsing
all of the Arab positions regarding the Middle East as a balanced compromise. These are
dialogues of the deaf and the extraordinarily dumb. They are meetings of the mind between
Arabs seeking Israel’s destruction and Jews seeking Israel’s destruction.
Nevertheless, the Beilin “Understandings” are suddenly the subject of buzz all over town.
Haaretz, the main Palestinian newspaper published in Hebrew, can barely control its bladder
because of its excitement. Why, even the Euro-leftists and Egyptians are endorsing the
“breakthrough”! The editors at Tikkun no doubt tossed another cannabis branch onto their
Sukkah in its honor.
The “Understandings” propose a more or less complete capitulation by Israel. They are the old Beilin plan for retreat by Israel to its 1949 borders, complete with turning over East Jerusalem and the Old City to the PLO. The PLO would promise really, really sincerely to let some Jews pray at the Western Wall. Israel would agree to the West Bank and Gaza being ethnically cleansed of Jews in exchange for Israel keeping the neighborhoods of Jerusalem built outside the 1949 “Green Line.”
And what, exactly, would Israel get in exchange? Well, the PLO would promise to really, really try to control the terror, that same old used Buick it has been reselling over and over to
Israel for a decade. The PLO would also have to issue some sort of duplicitous statement about how it was sort of willing to give up its demand for the “Right of Return” of anyone claiming to be a Palestinian to pre-1967 Israeli territory, but could add lots of caveats to this “concession.”
Now, the Gargoyle of Ramallah is likely to reject the Beilingrad “Understandings” because of that last clause. For the moment, however, Arafat and his terror crew are applauding the “breakthrough.” Their presumption is that they will pocket all of Beilin’s proposals for Israeli
capitulations as faits accompli and later demand that any new talks begin from the starting point of the Beilin “Understandings” (and from there proceed to new PLO demands and Israeli
appeasements). No one seriously thinks Arafat will agree to any rhetorical renunciation of the
right of the Palestinians to destroy Israel through a “Right of Return.”
Question: If Beilin is entitled to make up his own negotiated compromise peace plan as a result of dialogue with himself, why can’t I do the same?
Answer: Here are the Plaut Understandings, a new plan to be presented to Ariel Sharon and the cabinet.
1. Israel offers the PLO absolutely nothing.
2. The only exception to point 1 is that it offers to return all of Yossi Beilin’s personal property, including his home, to Palestinian refugees.
3. Israel indicts Yossi Beilin for 1,300 counts of being an accomplice in second degree murder based on depraved indifference to Israeli human life.
4. Israel reduces all Hizbullah villages to powder, and for each shell fired into Israel from the north it erases a Damascus neighborhood.
5. Israel re-occupies and de-Nazifies the West Bank and Gaza Strip and builds 1,000 new
“settlements.”
6. Israel turns administration of the Temple Mount mosques over to Turkey with joint Turkish-Israeli flags waving there.
7. Israel indicts those responsible for the Oslo debacle.
8. Israel finances the erection of the National Museum of Folly in Jerusalem, near the Hill of Evil Counsel, to document the mega-stupidity of the Oslo cult.
9. Israel strips leftists who have endorsed Arab terrorism of their citizenship and deports them to Syria.
10. Israel adopts capital punishment and applies it with great, er, liberality.
Meanwhile Haaretz and the Left are clicking their tongues this week. You see, Israel is at long last destroying some illegal tunnels from the Gaza town of Rafiah that run into Egypt, through which explosives and arms are smuggled in for Palestinian civics activities.
The Left is awfully upset, because blowing up those tunnels involves destroying and bulldozing some houses that hide those tunnels. Haaretz demands to know whether it is really worth knocking down so many homes in which so many “innocent” Palestinians live simply to shut down a “mere” three tunnels.
Translation: Haaretz and the Israeli Left are indifferent (at best) to Israeli children and other civilians being mass murdered by Palestinians using explosives smuggled in through the tunnels, or to the sufferings of those residents of Negev towns being bombarded by PLO rockets, and so would prefer that these children and other civilians continue to be murdered by the score
rather than upset the world by showing on TV the buildings, beneath which the tunnels run,
being bulldozed. Of course, prohibiting TV crews from entering Rafiah would also do the trick, but that is a great unthinkable.
I know a lot of Israeli leftist professors and leftist journalists whose homes could be turned over to any Rafiah residents losing theirs as a result of the tunnel destruction, and into which these “refugees” could be resettled. For peace, of course.
Steven Plaut is a professor at Haifa University. His book ‘The Scout’ is available at
Amazon.com. He can be contacted at [email protected].
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