The Oslo Idea
The Euphoria of Failure
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- $57.99
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- $57.99
Publisher Description
The idea of peace is always enchanting, for it encompasses the tranquility and serenity for which every human yearns. The nation of Israel has never known peace, but it dreams of peace. In practice Israel navigates between the poles of war and peace, with endless middle-of the-road situations like cease-fire, truce, armistice, and other temporary cessations of hostilities. The Oslo Idea traces the roots of the current campaign to delegitimize Israel. The campaign is not linked to Israeli resistance, to the absence of an acceptable settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, or to Israel's reluctance to abandon territory. It results from a change of tactics by the Palestinian leadership. Israeli argues that these tactics have been used to exhaust, reduce, and replace Israel rather than produce a compromise. Half the Palestinian people and other uncompromising Arabs and Muslims have stated that goal openly and act to achieve it. Raphael Israeli deconstructs the immense illusion of the Oslo peace accords, which initiated the so-called -peace process.- He shows how Oslo lured a naive Israeli leadership into a trap. He shows how outside factors, bent on finding and supporting an evasive peace, have helped perpetuate the fiasco Oslo represents. He shows how Oslo's supporters have advanced the -peace process- by coaxing and threatening Israel behind the scenes, and binding Israel alone with the Oslo commitments and their derivatives. More importantly, the author outlines and analyzes the basic and seemingly unbridgeable points of contention that remain: security, refugees, settlements, water, borders, and the status of Jerusalem itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Israeli writer and lecturer Israeli (The Iraq War: Hidden Agendas and Babylonian Intrigue) traces the current quagmire of Palestinian-Israeli relations to the failure of the Oslo Accords in this inflammatory and one-sided treatise. The author hits the ground running, blaming Yasser Arafat's "machinations" for dooming the Oslo idea from the start, and asserts that Israel now faces "one of the worst world campaigns of delegitimation and demonization." Israeli maintains that the purpose of his book is to show that "Israeli recalcitrance" is not the cause for the violent stalemate; opting instead to blame "the Arab determination to preserve" the impasse rather than consider another solution. While Israeli admits that the Palestinian refugee situation is lamentable, the author criticizes the UN and Palestinian authorities for corroborating a narrative of hereditary exile. Though Israeli proposes steps to reconciliation beginning with an equitable distribution of drinking and irrigation water, and recognition of Israel and its history in Palestinian textbooks his tone is politically bleak and unwavering. Presented in labyrinthine prose, Israeli's argument though supplemented with extensive footnotes will likely prove too polemical and biased for most readers.