It has been eight years since the signing of the Oslo Accords and what do we have? Hundreds of dead Jews, thousands of injured Jews - some of whom are crippled for life - and an untold number of widows, widowers and orphans. The arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat has received international legitimacy, enabling the Nobel Prize Committee to award him the Nobel Peace Prize of 1994. His new status also gave Arafat legitimacy in the eyes of the United States. America had begun a dialogue with the PLO in 1988, when Arafat offered the first of many renunciations of terrorism. The United States ended that dialogue after an Arafat atrocity in 1990, but resumed it after Israel signed the Oslo Accords in 1993. Most horrendous of all, the State of Israel has provided Arafat with the weapons to launch his murderous campaign against Israel.



The Trojan Horse is within our gates.



Who opened the gates for the arch murderer, Arafat, and his criminal gang? Who brought us to this tragic situation? The irresponsible, dishonest and arrogant architects of the Oslo Accords. Chief among them is Shimon Peres. He, along with the other Oslo architects, damaged the Jewish state and the people of Israel with their disloyalty, dishonesty and colossal arrogance. Theirs was an irresponsible gamble that did not pay off.



There was no objective need for any Oslo Accords. By 1993, Arafat was at his lowest point ever. Nobody trusted him. He had made twenty-two cease-fire agreements with Jordan. He broke all of them. He made thirty cease-fire agreements with the Lebanese militia. He broke all of those, as well. He had supported Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War in 1991. He was thrown out of Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The Oslo architects literally picked Arafat up from the dung heaps of history. In their arrogant stupidity, they decided that they knew what was best for Israel - to divest ourselves of our Biblical heartland, Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and to bring in the arch-terrorist Arafat from his exile in Tunis in order to make him our so-called ?peace partner.?



In addition to the foolish ideology behind them, the Oslo Accords themselves were born in sin. The negotiations leading up to the Accords were secret, even though, at the time, we had an Anti-Contact Law, passed in 1986, forbidding meetings with terrorists such as those of the PLO. The negotiations were known to be against the law and so were held secretly. Furthermore, the law required authorization by the Israeli Cabinet for any government agreement, yet that authorization was never sought prior to the signing. As to the co-signers to the agreement, the PLO, as a terrorist organization, had no legal capacity to sign any treaties with the state of Israel.



The self-incriminating words of the main architect of Oslo, Shimon Peres, in his book, The New Middle East, speak for themselves:



?It was in the wee hours of the night, on August 20, 1993, that the delegates initialed the finalized document on which we had been working so long and so hard. An Arab-Israeli Accord has at long-last been reached. Here was a small group of Israelis, Palestinians and Norwegians ? partners to one of the best-guarded diplomatic secrets ever, a secret whose imminent revelation would make a watershed in the history of the Middle East.?



Some time after the Oslo Accords were signed, Shimon Peres was interviewed by Tom Segev, of the Haaretz newspaper. In that interview Shimon Peres explained that ?I have held these views imbedded in the Oslo Accords, long before 1993.?



Tom Segev asked Peres, ?How come you didn't reveal this to us??



To which Shimon Peres answered, ?I knew the Israeli people were not ready for it.?



Shimon Peres has never aspired to be a truly democratic leader. In fact, Peres boasts, ?I may not know what the people want; I do know what is good for the people.? (Jerusalem Post International Edition, December 23rd, 1995)



Furthering his personal goals throughout his long career, Shimon Peres has always tried, and often succeeded, to undermine official government policy. For that reason, many Israeli leaders have expressed a genuine fear of Peres himself. For instance, former Prime Minister of Israel, Moshe Sharett, made the extraordinary claim that the nation would be obligated to tear their clothing in mourning if Peres were to rise to a position of power. The late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wrote in his book, The Rabin Memoirs, published in 1979, that Peres is an inveterate liar and that he never believed one word Peres uttered. Another former Prime Minister, Golda Meir, would only agree to accept the position of Prime Minister if Peres was kept out of her cabinet, for she claimed that Peres, in order to advance his own personal aims, deliberately leaked State secrets, thus harming our nation.



Today, after the Cabinet has declared the Palestinian Authority to be an entity that supports terrorism and, again, when it later decided to sever ties with the Palestinian Authority, Peres loudly told every local and international forum he could reach how foolish he considered both decisions. Prime Minister Sharon has stated repeatedly that he will not negotiate under fire. Peres, on the other hand, announced in an interview with Palestinian television that Israel would reopen diplomatic negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, if there were "only" two to three shooting attacks per day. Peres made this incredible pronouncement a few days before the recent terror attacks in Jerusalem and Haifa, where twenty-seven people were killed and hundreds seriously wounded. However, Peres could theoretically have claimed that these were only two or three shootings a day. The limit placed by Peres was on the number of terror attacks per day, not on the number of dead and wounded.



Furthermore, Peres' political judgment has always been extremely faulty. He fought tooth and nail against the Entebbe rescue plan in 1976. He opposed the demolishing of Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor plant at Osirak, near Baghdad, in 1981. Former Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered that operation, because the Iraqi dictator was on the verge of assembling his first nuclear weapon. Yet Peres moved heaven and earth to try to abort this operation. Since then, every Western leader has agreed that the Israeli initiative was the right one at the right time. It would have been that much more terrible for the United States in the Gulf War if Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons.



In 1993, Shimon Peres and his fellow Oslo architects took a giant gamble with the Oslo Accords. The tragedy is that this grand experiment has cost so many people their lives. Instead of admitting that he committed one of the worst blunders in all of Jewish history, Peres continues to demand that we consider Arafat our peace partner. Therefore, Shimon Peres and his Oslo cohorts should be brought before the bar of justice, or at least a State Commission of Inquiry, to stand trial for the illegal and negligent actions that they took when they tried to trick the people of Israel into thinking that peace was within their grasp.

------------------------------

Ruth Matar ([email protected]) is the co-chairperson of the grassroots movement Women in Green, which champions Israel's cause. She hosts a weekly show on Arutz Sheva Israel National Radio.