“We make peace with enemies,” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin reassured a concerned citizen shortly after the September 13, 1993 conclusion of the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (DOP, or Oslo I). “I would like to remind you that the [March 1979] peace treaty with Egypt had many opponents, and this peace has held for 15 years now.”[1] True enough. But peace can only be made with enemies who have been either comprehensively routed (e.g., post-World War II Germany and Japan) or disillusioned with the use of violence—not with those who remain wedded to conflict and war. And while Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was a “reformed enemy” eager to extricate his country from its futile conflict with Israel, Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership viewed the Oslo process not as a springboard to peace but as a “Trojan Horse” (in the words of prominent PLO official Faisal Husseini) designed to promote the organization’s strategic goal of “Palestine from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea”—that is, a Palestine in place of Israel.
Arafat admitted as much five days before signing the accords when he told an Israeli journalist, “In the future, Israel and Palestine will be one united state in which Israelis and Palestinians will live together”[3]—that is, Israel would cease to exist. And even as he shook Rabin’s hand on the White House lawn, the PLO chairman was assuring the Palestinians in a pre-recorded, Arabic-language message that the agreement was merely an implementation of the organization’s “phased strategy” of June 1974. This stipulated that the Palestinians would seize whatever territory Israel surrendered to them, then use it as a springboard for further territorial gains until achieving the “complete liberation of Palestine.”