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EYAL MEGGED:
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Right vs. righteous

If I had to give an answer to the question of what the light at the end of the Oslo tunnel is, it would be the awakening from an illusion: the realization that the axiom we in Israel have held since childhood - that Israel wants peace and the Arabs don't - is as true now as it was then.

The kind of wishful thinking that led to the baseless assumption that the Arabs no longer wanted our destruction disappeared together with the Oslo Accords.

This is the good news about Oslo, since recognizing the truth is always better than living under an illusion.

The bad news is that the Arabs told the truth all along. It was we who created the illusion by not giving them the respect they deserve about meaning what they say.

It was we who forced ourselves to enter into a ridiculous accord that included ridiculous conditions, the most blatant of which was that the enemy would be in charge of destroying the only threat he had against us - the terrorist infrastructure. This is the most contemptuous aspect of Oslo, the result of which was that it meant us spending each day doing an inventory of which parts of the agreement they were upholding and which they were not.

The other result was that while they were blowing themselves up on buses, they were exploding with laughter. This is because they were enjoying all the benefits of the farce, as they still are, during the "road map" period. For example, during the last phase of the so-called "hudna," instead of killing 20 people a day, they were killing 20 people in 20 days - something we referred to as a "lowering of the flame of terror."

The real damage of the Oslo process was to create a blurring of good and evil, of right and wrong. It caused the public to forget certain fundamental truths, such as the fact that what counts is who is right, not who is righteous. This can be seen in the distortion of casualty statistics, for example, citing the numbers of dead Palestinians to illustrate the injustice of certain military moves. After all, one could have said that more Germans died than Americans during World War II, but this would have been irrelevant to the justice of the Allied invasion.

And it is this that has led to the Israeli public's loss of its instinct for survival and existence.

The lesson to be learned from Oslo (and the road map, which is more of the same) is that a unilateral withdrawal is the only alternative to the current situation. Such a unilateral move to a border Israel deems acceptable has to be accompanied by a declaration on our part that we want nothing in exchange. The message that has to be conveyed to the Palestinians, like that conveyed to Hitler, is that there are no more agreements - only complete surrender.

The writer, the author most recently of The Black Light, is a novelist and pundit.