The details of the Sharon capitulation are just beginning to come out; there is still much that is not known, and I suspect much that is being kept back from the Israeli public.

The capitulation is in many ways the very worst such appeasement in the history of Oslo.

For the past month or so, Israel was in a state of heightened alert and tension that was compared by many to the weeks of waiting just before the Six day War. Surely the National Unity government and army were mobilizing, preparing for the showdown, making plans. After all the atrocities, after the mass murder of Tel Aviv school children, surely the government was simply getting the stage set, unifying its ranks, prepping the Americans. The day of reckoning was just days off. Israel’s dignity and honor would at long last be redeemed.

We now know there will be no day of reckoning, no retribution, no restoration of sanity. Merely one more capitulation, one more cowardly set of appeasements.

The Sharon capitulation begins with a refusal to hold the PLO accountable for all of its violations of all of the other previous Oslo "agreements". It does not require as a prerequisite that the PLO fulfill all the previous obligations it has never fulfilled. Like Shimon Peres, Sharon now agrees that Oslo agreements obligate Israel but not the PLO. Hence, while Israel will give the PLO a list of terrorists to be arrested, the PLO will be unable to locate them. And if it actually does stumble across a few, the PLO will not even be asked to turn these over to Israel in extradition, something that the PLO agreed to do at the time of the very first Oslo Accord with Rabin, but has never complied. At most, the PLO will throw a few people into its revolving-door "jailhouse" cafes, where no one really bothers to check if they are inside, and where the inmates are more often on the street than in house.

The Sharon capitulation does NOT require that the PLO turn over to Israel all the mortars and missiles it is holding illegally and in violation of all past agreements. Hence Sharon is acknowledging the basic Oslo premise that the PLO is exempt from fulfilling its obligations. The mortars will be used the next time the PLO wants to win some more concessions. PLO schools will continue to be Nazi indoctrination centers. PLO scout troops will continue to train suicide bombers.

Sharon has agreed to release all imprisoned Palestinians who were "not directly involved in terror". And since the PLO and the US insist that mere tossing of Molotovs and rocks or mere stabbing is not terror, all these useful citizens will be released.

The PLO will continue to insist that it is incapable of locating the Hamas and Jihad leadership, in contrast with the CNN and BBC camera crews who have no such problem.

Israel will freeze settlement building to grant the PLO a strategic reward for eight years of violations and nine months of atrocities. No construction activity by Arabs will be halted. The "settlements" to be frozen apparently include Jerusalem suburbs, and so for the first time ever Israel is acknowledging that the status of Jerusalem’s Jewish neighborhoods is somehow up for grabs and negotiable.

The mutual and reciprocal ceasefire will be a unilateral Israeli ceasefire. In effect, Israel will agree to an open-ended continuous unilateral ceasefire. Sharon conditions the ceasefire on "4 or 5 days of tranquility", but that just means relative tranquility, where the PLO "only" murders two Jews a day instead of three, or "only" fires 5 mortar shells at Jews instead of 20. The ceasefire will continue no matter how many Jewish babies are murdered by the PLO.

Sharon will reopen all the access roads to Israel to make it easier for West Bank and Gazan terrorists to plant bombs, and after each bomb the US will assure Israel that Arafat is really trying his best. Arafat will issue some sort of duplicitous statement about how violence is unpleasant, while tapping his finger to the side of his nose and winking. Arafat will sign a pledge to end "incitement", and the incitement will continue, Holocaust Denial and Hitler worship and all, but Arafat will insist the anti-incitement clause be used to shut down Israeli Rightist organizations.

The PLO will not be stripped of any arms and will not be asked to reduce the size of its Wehrmacht. The US will decide when the PLO is in violation of the agreement, not Israel, as Sharon has relinquished yet another bit of Israeli sovereignty.

Israel will resume paying monetary tribute to the PLO.

And the Oslo formula of land-in-exchange-for-a-few-weeks-relative-quiet-before- the-next-atrocity will continue, with Ariel Sharon at the helm.

Israel has produced three "Napoleons" who were cowardly defeatist McClellenist ex-generals, elected because it was believed mistakenly that they were security hawks and dependable no-nonsense tough guys on defense. Each of the three was a colossal fool, of the sort that only poets could describe with justice.

Napoleon I was Yitzhak Rabin, who plunged Israel into the Oslo fiasco. Napoleon II was Ehud Barak, the man who wanted to destroy Jerusalem and the Western Wall.

Napoleon III, Ariel Sharon, has signed a capitulation that may be worse than either of his two generalissimo predecessors. He may go down in history as the stupidest of them all.

Copyright © 2001 by Steven Plaut.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission