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RICHARD PERLE:
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The Idealists' War
 I'd call it the idealists' war. And the idealists were those like Shimon Peres, Yossi Beilin, and Shlomo Ben-Ami, who were convinced, in the absence of convincing evidence, the Palestinian Authority as it is now led was prepared to reach a compromise with Israel that would guarantee the permanence of the Jewish state on territory to which the Palestinians had long laid claim.
The issue was never acceptance of the 1967 borders. It was and remains the acceptance of the Jewish state anywhere on the territory that Arafat regards as Palestinian. And it was naive to believe that they were ready to abandon long-standing claims that would threaten the very existence of the Jewish state. This is not to say that there are no Palestinians who would accept a Jewish state and a territorial compromise that would assure its safety and security.
But the idealists on the Israeli side were not matched by those idealists on the Palestinian side.
The lesson is clear: The present Palestinian leadership, and even more the nature of the Palestinian dictatorship, is inconsistent with the hopes of those Israelis who believed that Oslo offered a reasonable prospect of peace.
Richard Perle is chairman of the Defense Policy Board of the
US Department of Defense and a director of The Jerusalem Post.
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