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JOEL FISHMAN:
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A 'people's war'

The purpose of the Declaration of Principles which Israel and the PLO signed on the White House lawn a decade ago, was to initiate a peace process.

Since this hopeful event, Israel has suffered more than 1,080 casualties: 256 from September 1993 to September 2000, and 824 from September 2000 to June 2003 (and more since then).

One must ask therefore: If we are supposed to have peace, why are we counting bodies?

With the perspective of a decade, it is evident that each party entered this transaction with different intentions. Through a lightheaded "leap of faith," Israel's leaders hoped to reach a peace with the PLO by fostering ties of economic interdependence and "territorial concessions."

For its part, the PLO regarded the peace process as an opportunity to work for its main political goal, the destruction of the Jewish state and its replacement with an Arab Palestinian state. It was never a secret because PLO leaders declared this openly. On May 10, 1994, in a Johannesburg mosque, Yasser Arafat likened the Oslo Accords to Muhammad's Hudaibiya truce with the Qureish tribe which he signed with the intention of violating once his power was consolidated.

The late Faisal Husseini, in an interview that appeared posthumously in June 2001, called the Oslo agreement a Trojan horse and declared that "we are ambushing the Israelis and cheating them," and that the "ultimate goal is [still] the liberation of all historical Palestine from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] SeaŠ."

Israel's leaders chose to ignore such frank statements and to deny their possible correlation with the many acts of terror and incitement that were taking place.

One learns from history that continuity is usually the rule. From 1969 to 1974, the PLO tried to wage guerrilla war against Israel but failed because it lacked a territorial base. Adopting the Strategy of Stages in 1974, the PLO disguised its real intentions and gradually gained sufficient international respectability and support to pass as a potential "peace partner."

When it entered into the Oslo Accords, the PLO acquired the territorial base it lacked - an asset of tremendous strategic value - in exchange for vague promises. According to Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) in July 2002, "Israel made the biggest mistake of its life when it supported the Oslo Accords."

At present, the PA is hurrying to build its military strength and organize a regular army. It is contriving to destroy Israel's ability to defend itself by ruining the economy, demoralizing the public through terror, and undermining its social cohesion. Using propaganda as a tool of political warfare, it is attacking Israel's legitimacy at home and abroad by portraying it as a criminal state.

The model for this type of total conflict between societies, which combines the methods of political and military warfare, is the "People's War" which came into being in China and in Vietnam. Protracted conflict is new for Israel, which has traditionally preferred to fight conventional wars quickly and on enemy territory.

Israel has misunderstood the enemy's strategy. The PLO has renounced violence only in words. Peace, or any kind of a compromise settlement, is simply not in prospect.

If Israel wants to assure its continuity and survival, it will have to reexamine the assumptions upon which it has based its policy during the past decade and take effective measures. Instead of bringing peace, the Oslo Accords have placed Israel in close range of a new threat, one potentially as serious as any it has faced in the past.

The writer is an associate of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.