Humans have a weakness in thinking that anything that actually occurred in history must have occurred because its occurrence was “inevitable”. It is all too easy to believe in inevitability from the safe distance of hindsight.

A recent book by Jay Winik on the American Civil War, entitled “April 1865: The Month that Saved America” is an excellent place to start, in order to understand how problematic such belief in “inevitability” really is. We have all grown used to the belief that the American Civil War ended the way that it did because such an ending was “inevitable”. It was inevitable that the South would be overwhelmed by Northern economic might. It was inevitable that Robert E. Lee would surrender and the war would simply go away, neat and clean.

The Winik book is dedicated to showing how all of this was entirely NOT inevitable at all, indeed how unlikely such an ending was. In 1865 it was highly probable that the Civil War could have ended very differently. Lee could have dispersed his troops throughout the South who would then fight a low-level war of terrorism and attrition against Union troops, extending the war indefinitely, fighting a war of attrition designed to take endless Union casualties and eventually to demoralize the North, forcing it to abandon its attempt to annex the South, giving up its hands in weariness at the hopelessness of the task. The attrition would have been accompanied by assassinations of Union leaders; the original plot to kill Lincoln was supposed to take out other cabinet ministers and the Vice President as well.

The only reason that such things did not occur was thanks to Robert E. Lee. Lee was too much of a gentleman, a man of honor and dignity. He would not countenance such terrorism and attrition and assassination. He did not seek decades of violence. He wanted a clean end and a clean beginning.

Now I raise all of this because I think it is as good a way as any to illustrate the unfathomable megastupidity of "Oslo" and of the Israeli politicians who imposed it on the country. Had the South turned to terrorism and guerilla warfare in the Civil War it might well have lasted many decades. Such terrorism and guerilla warfare is notoriously difficult to suppress, as even the US learned in Vietnam.

Yet here we had the Israeli government, who voluntarily invited in the PLO to take control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and so ensure that such endless warfare would continue for decades. The PLO was off in Tunis. Then Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin invited the PLO in to engage in exactly this sort of endless terrorism, the same sort that the North so feared would be pursued by the South. The same endless bloodbath only prevented by the simple decency of the great Rubert E. Lee. And no, Senator, Yassir is no Robert E. Lee.

This act of astronomical stupidity has now created a situation where Israel can only fight the sort of war that the North feared Lee would impose. It is now apparent to all that the only choice Israel has is R&D, that is, Re-Occupation and Denazification of the “Palestinian territories”.

But such a Re-Occupation now necessitates endless attrition and house-to-house fighting with enormous casualties, thanks to Shimon Peres and his friends.

And speaking of “inevitability”, it should be obvious that there was nothing inevitable about all of this. What appeared inevitable in the 1980s was that the term “Palestinian” would simply disappear eventually from the world’s lexicon, like “Kurd”. There was nothing inevitable about the PLO getting its own state, nothing inevitable about the PLO taking control of the “occupied territories” and using them as attack bases against Jews, nothing inevitable about the contagion of Nazification reaching Israel’s own Green Arabs thanks to Oslo (the suicide bomber of Nahariya was born and raised an Israeli citizen, a member of democratic civilization and First-World living standards, entitled to vote and run for office in the only democracy of the Middle East). But Oslo fabricated all these “inevtiabilities”. And thanks to Oslo stupidity, it is now inevitable that the bloodbath of Jews will get much much larger. The blood of those who will die in re-occupying and denazifying “Palestine” is on the hands of the Israeli Left.

Copyright © 2001 by Steven Plaut.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission