[..] Oslo did not fall out of a clear blue sky. It began as a reaction – or more precisely, as a non-reaction – by Israel to the provocation of the first intifada. Arabs who were regular guests in my home in those days warned me well ahead of time. The described requests made to the authorities to immediately expel rock-throwers and, more generally, to right away employ an iron fist, before the rioters managed to take control of the Arab street through internal terror.
Mukhtars (village heads) from the Dehaisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem approached the Israeli civil administration officer in the summer of 1987, months before the intifada broke out, and warned that the shabiba (Fatah Youth) was taking over the camp and preparing an insurgency. Such warnings made their way to the authorities from all sides, but no one wanted to listen.
Today, a thousand signs indicate to me that there were more than a few people in the establishment who knew and understood, but who purposefully allowed the flames to spread. They did so because they, in their great foolishness and evil, also wanted to put an end to Jewish rule in Judea , Samaria and Gaza . They concluded that only Arab violence would bring about their phony redemption, which they called a “diplomatic solution.”
In their twisted minds, those establishment leaders believed that they could control the flames; however, their restraint and the “diplomatic solution” they brought in the form of the Oslo Accords has killed more than 1,500 Jews since then – double the number of all the victims in the Lebanon War over which they called Menachem Begin a “murderer” – in addition to many thousands of Arabs, a great many of whom were innocent.
In those days, Arab owners of factories in Hevron told me that when they were first pressed to close their businesses and take part in a strike in the context of the intifada, they refused. After rioters burned down their businesses, they naturally turned to the Israeli civil administration and requested protection. Yet, at that point, they were told explicitly: ‘We cannot protect you.’ From that moment on, they obeyed all the instructions of the intifada leadership.
Just before most of Hevron was handed over to Yasser Arafat, a stain that Binyamin Netanyahu will never be able to clean, a group of young Hevron Arabs, in their early thirties, approached me with the request that I assist them in getting an audience with the Hevron military governor. Two of them, the chief spokesmen, showed me documentation identifying them as officers in Fatah’s Force 17. They wanted to plead with the Israeli authorities – “in the name of those behind the intifada and who regret it,” as they expressed themselves – not to withdraw from Hevron and not to hand the city over to Arafat.
Their reasoning was simple: we saw what happened in Gaza and Shechem – how much devastation and destruction, abuse and exploitation, anarchy and abandonment came with Arafat’s rule; and we want to spare our city that bitter fate.
Of course, I approached the governor, whom I knew well, but to my great surprise he refused to meet the group. His explanation was that they were not reporting anything new; he was flooded with such delegations, day after day.
I asked him: ‘And you report this up the military chain of command and to the civilian authorities?’
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘and I also include my own recommendations, but no one wants to listen.’
As for the “cursing incident,” in which a Jewish woman called an Arab girl a word in Arabic that starts with “sh” and means “prostitute,” the media once again only exposed the tip of the iceberg. Before the Jewish woman said her piece, we heard a long string of obscenities from the Arab youth. Yet, the Israeli media, which was so in love with the cursing Jewess, was not at all interested in knowing what the Arab had shouted; maybe they were far worse curses and profanity?
But that is just a parenthetical observation. More interesting to note is that the family of the young woman, Abu-Aisha, carries another name: Koreida. And if you were to look in the Book of Hevron, you would discover that a man named Ahmed Koreida saved the lives of the family of Daniel Mizrachi – 66 souls – during the 1929 massacre. He saved more Jews during those riots than any other person. The grandson of Ahmed Koreida was a client of mine, and he told me that it is known among his family that they are descended from Jews – from the Koreida clan that was expelled from the Arabian peninsula by Mohammad and later converted to Islam.
And now, take a look how malignant the accursed peace of Oslo is – along with the Disengagement, the Road Map and all the other twisted “diplomatic solutions” – to the point that we witnessed an ugly incident, whose main characteristic is unbounded hatred, involving even a daughter of the Koreida family.
I don’t mean to say that all the Arabs of Hevron are righteous. There was 1929 and there have been rock-throwing attacks throughout the years, even before the intifada, and there is terrible, fatal violence among the Arabs, and there is Islamist fanaticism, and there is hatred of Israel – despite all that, we have experienced many moments of humanity with them, which are now needlessly absent.
In general, hatred is an illness of the hater that is hard to contain. It starts with the hatred of the stranger and spreads inwards, in the nation and even in the family.
And we must always remember that we have the power, or we had the power, and we have used it with closed-minded stupidity.
