Paper peace, paper god

Cavemen prayed to stones and talismans, but modern men worship paper gods.

Today’s worshipers claim they are not superstitious or even religious, yet they cling devoutly to a cult that bows to a mountainous paper peace that is really just pieces of paper, a mountain of paper, a paper-thin god who answers no prayers.

The belief is often sincere, an article of warm faith, not cold analysis. Neville Chamberlain, returning from talks with “Herr Hitler,” brandished a piece of paper like it was the staff of Moses, and claimed “peace in our time.”

To Chamberlain’s credit, he admitted his mistake after Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Chamberlain handed over power to Winston Churchill, a pugnacious student of history who had faith in his own two eyes and no faith in phony peace.

Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin erred like Chamberlain, trusting Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas to be men of peace. Rabin even said the PLO would fight terror. Almost immediately, Arab terror grew, but Peres-Rabin never returned their Nobel Peace Prize or apologized for a colossal error in judgment.

Haim Ramon, a leftist Israeli politician with a sharp tongue, sang the praises of PLO peace even after a thousand people died in the worst decade of terror in Israel’s history. Ramon called the casualties korbanot hashalom: “the sacrifices of peace.” Ramon never apologized to the families sacrificed to the paper god.

Yossi Beilin, the high priest of the PLO phony peace, never asked for forgiveness. Instead he got a solid gig as a commentator on strategy on a few Israeli TV networks.

Arafat violated almost every paper signed with him. From the first instant after signing an agreement with Israel, he was smuggling weapons to attack Israel. This was no surprise to many of the leaders in the region. King Hussein and Hosni Mubarak often said Arafat never kept his word to them, either.

Dramatic documentary evidence – the Orient House archives and files from Arafat’s office in Ramallah – shows Arafat and his deputies (like “moderate” Feisal Husseini) ordered murders or even conspired with Hamas to plan attacks on Israelis.

The Tanzeem organization and the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades were all non-uniformed killers who got ranks and salaries from Arafat. Special Fatah ID cards and letters confirming payments – signed by Arafat – tell the story.

Many Israelis and Westerners never saw this evidence.

Some day perhaps The New York Times or Israeli newspapers like Haaretz, Yediot Aharonot and Ma’ariv may want to examine the material, instead of paying their daily obeisance to the paper idols known as “The Oslo Accords.”

Normally we do not think of Israeli journalists like Haaretz’s Aluf Benn or Gideon Levy or Yediot’s Nahum Barnea as religious people. Nor do we classify Israeli politicians like Shimon Peres, Yossi Beilin, Zehava Gal-On, Shulamit Aloni, Haim Ramon and Ehud Olmert as particularly devout.

Yet, they are clearly men and women of faith, not reason, believing in the god of paper even as it burns in front of their eyes. When there is an Arab terror attack, they become agnostic, refusing to testify to the collapse of their paper god or to the existence of Arab terror unless shown a video of a terrorist threatening to kill, then killing, and then captured or killed.

When Arafat was caught dead to rights ordering attacks on Jews in September 1996, Shulamit Aloni said we should overlook the matter and deal with Dr. Mahmoud Abbas, the man who would some day succeed Arafat, and whom Aloni called by his affectionate nickname, “Abu-Mazen.”

When Abbas actually succeeded Arafat in 2002, he made it clear that he was continuing Arafat’s policy of never recognizing Israel – in any possible geographic configuration – as a Jewish state.

In January 2005, Abbas made a speech in Gaza calling on Hamas to turn its rifles only on Israel. This film was not shown on CNN, nor was it reported in the New York Times.

Since then, Abbas has avoided talking directly to Israel even more than Arafat. Abbas has stepped up the constant violations of the Oslo Accords, openly seeking to spur boycotts of Israel, to delegitimize it politically.

In various ways he has tried to impose “Palestine” on Israel rather than negotiate with Israel, and that is exactly the motive for Abbas’s move to get UN recognition of “Palestine” as a state.

If Abbas were a shoe salesman, we would be saying that he sold us the same pair of bad shoes several times, and then threw them at us, charging that we stole them.

Rather than saying that, the Phony-Peace-Faith bloc is saying that Abbas only threw the shoes at us because when we entered Abbas’s store, our feet smelled.

Yes, reaching peace often means taking risks and dreaming dreams, but it is just amazing to watch seemingly sensible Israelis spend years of their lives in the worship of phony peace, trying to find excuses for the fact that their idol is not even made of clay, but of highly degradable paper.

Israel repeated this amazing idol worship under Ariel Sharon in 2005, sacrificing thousands of families in Gaza in a unilateral pull-out that caused Israel great trauma. This time, Israel did not even get a piece of paper, but rather 5,000 rockets in exchange for 10,000 Israelis.

Israel, like Britain’s Chamberlain, sacrificed lives and resources for an article of faith. We cannot retrieve the lost lives, but we can stop making the blood sacrifices.

Let’s start by admitting what we can see and hear with our eyes and ears: The PLO Accords of 1993 and the Gaza pull-out of 2005 did not serve peace, only the PLO, Hamas and the false god of paper.

Let’s stop worshiping the false god, and let’s stop pretending that the PLO and Hamas ever want to be our friends.

The writer, an expert on Arab politics and communications, is the author of Battle for Our Minds: Western Elites and the Terror Threat, published by Threshold/Simon and Schuster. A former reporter, correspondent and editor, respectively at The New York Times, Cox Newspapers and The Jerusalem Post, he was strategic affairs adviser in Israel’s Ministry of Public Security and teaches at Bar-Ilan University.