My friends, exactly eleven years ago, on September 13, 1993, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin publicly shook hands on the White House lawn. That gesture ushered in the Oslo "Peace Process," so often called after the Norwegian capital where its ground work had been laid.
But the White House ceremony did not inaugurate an era of peace. It inaugurated instead the worse decade of terrorism in Israel's history.
Just eleven days after the handshake, 22-year-old Yigal Vaknin was stabbed to death in a citrus grove by a Hamas death squad, which left a note boasting of the murder. Vaknin was the first of some 1200 men, women, children, and babies who would lose their lives to Palestinian terror, in the eleven years following Arafat's renunciation of violence. Some, like Vaknin, were knifed to death. Others were shot, were stoned or bombed. The terrorists have killed their victims at a discotheque, at a Bat Mitzvah party, at a Passover Seder, in a pizzeria, on rural roads, in private homes, on a university campus, in farmers markets, and in dozens of busses and bus stops.
I remember well the White House lawn ceremony on September 13, 1993. I watched the moment and the famous handshake live on television. It was, for me, a surreal and disquieting moment; I had never expected to see the world's most notorious terrorist, the foremost killer of Jews since the death of Stalin, hailed as a peacemaker.
Oslo quickly became a cult, worshiped with the fervor of adherents to a great cause. There was never peace, but there was a "peace process," and the more evidence of its failure mounted, the more fervently it was venerated.
Within a few months, it was clear to all that Arafat and the PLO leadership had not abandoned terrorism at all. Empowering them with land and money and authority and weapons had enflamed, not quenched, their thirst to "liberate" Israel from the Jews. Buses exploded and funerals proliferated, but Israelis told themselves that they were fashioning a "peace of the brave" and that there was no alternative but to return to the negotiation table and offer new concessions.
Yet each concession further convinced the Palestinians that the Jews were weakening, and that increasing the violence would make them even more desperate for peace. Not until September 2000 did Israel begin to waken from its stupor. That was when Prime Minister Ehud Barak made his unprecedented offer - a sovereign Palestinian state consisting of ninety-eight percent of the West Bank, one hundred percent of Gaza, and shared control, and sovereignty of Jerusalem - and Arafat replied by unleashing the deadliest terror campaign Israelis has ever known.
It seems to me that Oslo was not a good idea that went sour. It was fatally flawed from the start. The fundamental premise of Oslo - that the Palestinians were ready to live in peace with Israel - was always a lie. To Arafat and the PLO, peace was merely a tactic, one step forward in the "liberation" of Palestine. On the very day he shook Rabin's hand, Arafat ensured a Jordanian TV audience that the liquidation of Israel was still his goal. It was a message that he and his lieutenants would repeat time and time again.
Now, just a few weeks ago, comes the World Court and the General Assembly of the United Nations, voting 150 in favor and 6 opposed, with 10 abstentions, to compel Israel to abandon and dismantle its separation barrier on the West Bank and pay compensation to Palestinians affected by its construction.
Despite its grudging references to terrorism and carefully crafted, often constructively ambiguous phrases calling upon parties to enter into negotiations, the United Nations resolution was simply pandering to an agenda that seeks to focus on the response to terrorism and to marginalize the gravity of terrorism itself.
The barrier which was the subject of the World Court on July 9th and the United Nations resolution on July 20th is nothing is less than the "Arafat fence," made necessary by the intifada launched four years ago against Israel by the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. There's been a ninety percent decline in successful terror attacks, a seventy percent reduction in people killed, and an eighty-five percent decline in people wounded in areas where the barrier -The Arafat fence - has been completed.
By the way, just for your information in your future travel plans - voting against the resolution in addition to the United States and Israel were Australia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau. Abstaining were Cameroon, Canada, El Salvador, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Uganda, Uruguay, and Vanuatu. [I say we all agree to have a grand celebration of Hanukkah in Vanuatu this coming December!]
It's funny, Israel still struggles to justify itself, its very necessity and existence, before the court of world opinion.
The Prime Minister of Israel calls upon the Jews of France as he does upon the Jews all over the world to make aliya. What else would you expect the Prime Minister to do? But when he calls upon the Jews of France to make aliya, the Prime Minister and government and people of France become outraged, demanding an explanation and declaring Prime Minister Sharon persona non grata, a man without recognition, because he dared to question the security of the Jews in the land of fraternity, equality, and liberty. And he did so from the perch of Israel, whose imperfections are there for all the world to see.
Do I need to remind you of the imperative for Israel's existence? Is the renewal of fashionable anti-Semitism in Europe giving any of you a charge?
A story can be found in Martin Gilbert's great single volume history, The Holocaust. It took place in 1942 in a Polish city. German soldiers had entered the ghetto shooting and searching. A mother and her three children were hiding in a house, the mother in one corner, the children behind sacks in another.
Upon entering the room, the Germans discovered the children and quickly pulled them out. One of the children, a little boy began to scream, "Mama, Mama!" but a sister around the age of 4 shouted to her brother in Yiddish: "Zuch nisht di mame;men vet zi oych tsunemen." "Don't call mother; they will take her too." The boy stopped screaming. The mother remained silent as the children were dragged away. She knew she could not save them.
That was the plight of the Jew just two generations ago before there was Israel. Now, for the first time in two thousand years, we Jews do not have to feel guilty about wanting to live. Because of Israel Jewish children can cry "Mama." There is someone who can hear; there is someone who can respond. I say with the Jews of France and the remaining Jews of the former Soviet Union, get out and come home. Now, someone can hear. Now, someone can respond. Israel is not a nice gift of the United Nations in response to the sad trauma of the holocaust. Israel is national liberation and our precious homeland. The State of Israel has become our eternal national "mama".
Saul Bellow, the noted and great American novelist said 20 years ago, Israel is for the West what Switzerland is for Winter sports: the world's moral resort area. It is the place where moral vacationers slip from reality and become deeply concerned about Israel's soul. They wax nostalgic for the Israel of yore, the noble and vulnerable Israel, always on the brink of annihilation. The respected British periodical "The Economist" has put it quite honestly when it quoted Isaiah 40: "When Israel was a child then I loved him." This is the Israel that embarrasses Jews because of its determination to fight for its survival and security. The Israel which caused Woody Allen to say in the face of the first intifada: "Are these the people whose money I used to steal from the little blue-and-white cans after collecting funds for Jewish homeland?"
Yes everybody in the west loves the victim, the object of pity, the charity case. The west feels obliged to offer indignation, but that is all, rather than suggest alternatives to a country besieged by enemies dedicated to its destruction.
The fact of the matter is that no sovereign state can give free reign to rioters, to looters, and to terrorists. Even an occupying power must keep order. No country has a moral obligation to keep its security and that of its people in jeopardy. How, after all, would the world's moral critics stop rock throwing, fire bombing, and wanton terrorism? How would the NYPD react? What about the LAPD? How would the United States react if a group of Mexicans started to lob grenades and rockets into suburban San Diego from a safe haven on the Mexican border? How would they react, if the demand were for the return of southern California to the rightful Mexican owners? And how would we react as well?
All of these lachrymose crocodile tears over Israel's soul! What about Israel's body? Yes what about her body? What about her right to mere existence, which remains unacceptable to her neighbors, Syria, Iran, and the Palestinian leadership?
Both the first and second intifada had as their slogan Itach al yahud - slaughter to the Jews. As the late Yitzhak Rabin often said, "I would love to be able to cope with violence by spreading flowers."
The shock of Israel's response to the first and second intifada has not been so many casualties, but so few.
In 1965 when the Palestinians rioted in Rafiah in the Gaza strip, the Egyptian occupying authorities killed over 100 Palestinians. The world's response was not even a whimper. In 1982 Nabbi Berri and the Lebanese militia slaughtered 2500 Palestinian moslems at Sabra and Shatilla. The world's response was to blame Israel and even the Israeli response was to cause the Israeli government and the top Israeli general, Ariel Sharon, to resign in disgrace. In 1982 Syria slaughtered some 20,000 members of the Moslem Brotherhood in the city of Hama. The world was silent. In 1970 King Hussein of Jordan killed an estimated 70,000 Palestinians in his civil war with the PLO. No United Nations resolution followed.
I am speaking this evening to reaffirm that the question in Israel and in the Middle East remains the essential viability of Israel and its right to exist in peace and security, free of terrorism, vulnerability and fear.
Is Israel a moral pariah in today's world?
Here is the full story: when Vietnam, having expelled the Americans, proceeded to expel their refuse, their "boat people," simply casting them off at sea, Israel - tiny Israel - absorbed more boat people into its population than any other country in the world, including the United States, on a per capita basis.
The Arab population of Israel enjoys more democracy, more literacy, more prosperity, better state-provided health, and better health and life expectancy than any Arab population in the world. Whenever a natural disaster strikes anywhere in the world, the Israeli emergency teams are always the first there and the best to perform.
Israel leads the entire world in book publishing per 1000 population and in scientists and engineers per ten thousand population. Over 60, 000 visiting students from 114 countries (many without diplomatic recognition of Israel) are learning, teaching, farming, obtaining and providing medical care and nutrition, showing Israel to be a beacon of progress and sharing of technology and information for the entire world. At the hospital in Afula, with which the Jewish physicians of greater Danbury have partnered, Arab and Jewish doctors work side by side performing open heart surgery in which Arab and Jewish hearts are routinely exchanged in an ongoing life-saving enterprise.
Israeli social service agencies are known throughout the world as the best - the best in the world - in tackling some of the most difficult challenges facing humanity. Specifically I speak of Hofim, an Israeli agency established for Ethiopian children arriving in Israel without parents; of Yad Lekashish, an extraordinary agency in which senior citizens and handicapped persons are given productive work and as well as dignity and purpose; of Maon La Tinok, a home for infants, orphaned by terrorism; of Yad Sara, providing the highest standard of home care for shut-ins that exists anywhere in the civilized world.
Israel is not our shame and is not our burden and its not our albatross. It is our pride and joy, our national homeland, into which our eggs rest securely.
And let me make this point to you succinctly: we American Jews are not equal partners in the miracle of Israel, we are limited partners. They - the Israelis - are the ones who are vulnerable; they are the ones who at risk; they are the ones who serve in their defense forces, pay their taxes, cast their votes, and agree to be governed by their decisions. There is a price to be paid for not making aliya - and that price is the lost entitlement to participate in Israeli decision-making and democracy. We are limited partners in the enterprise - an enterprise with enemies eager to convert any benign criticism of ours into an instrument of hate.
My friends, Israel, the tiny state of Israel, has transformed the meaning of Jewish existence more than any event since the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 of the Common Era.
And now, in the midst of her 56th year, when old Europe has returned to its fashionable anti-Semitic atavism- when the United Nations has become the headquarters of the new Gentlemen's Agreement - when Israel is expected to cooperate in her destabilization and demise - in the midst of her 56th year, may she live and thrive for thousands of years in peace and security, a homeland of opportunity and prosperity and justice for her inhabitants - and a beacon of spiritual strength and guidance - of hope and of life for all of Israel and, through her, for all of humanity.
And let us say, Amen.