Dr. Yair Hirschfeld, one of the architects of the Oslo Accords, talks to Israel National News from the "Oslo Conference - Lessons and Insights for the Future" of the Bithonistim movement, the Jerusalem Center for Public and State Affairs, and the Israeli Victory Project.
Regarding the claim that the agreement is nothing but a disaster, Hirschfeld says that there was incitement towards Oslo and it was a public relations failure along with real failures. "People say what is not good and do not say what is good. Most of Israel's existential questions for this public have no answer," he is convinced.
He also defines the blaming of Oslo for the hundreds of people murdered in the years after the agreement as part of the incitement against the agreement and not part of the truth. "They showed us a nice diagram where you can see that until Barak there were problems, the big problems started after Barak broke the principles of Oslo. Beyond that, the truth is that from the moment Oslo was signed, there were murders of about two Jews in Judea and Samaria every week, which is as it was before and was also more serious, but from February 1994 when Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 praying Muslims, from that moment the whole explosion becomes something else."
"Oslo created security cooperation with the Palestinians, Oslo created peace with Jordan, which is an extraordinary security achievement. Put down the incitement and talk about the truth and we will have a strategic discussion and it will be for the better," says Hirschfeld, who refuses to accept the responsibility for delivering guns to the Palestinian Authority and its people. "Today, cooperation protects the State of Israel."
"The logical assumption was that if Arafat signs the process with us, and if he does not keep his promise, there will be terrorism, and we will act against terrorism. His opponents would become stronger and he will have to return and use force," he says and suggests examining things from a general Middle Eastern perspective and not focusing on the Palestinians.
"We are in a local, regional, and global space. If you don't look at everything, you don't understand anything. From a political point of view, Oslo is dead, but if the king is dead, long live the new king, which is the Abraham Accords. The Abraham Accords are a very important breakthrough," he says, adding that he believes that the new reality enables political and economic development and a new regional opportunity that did not exist before.