“Land for Peace” < Life
A guest post by Lurker:
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
— Albert Einstein
A few days ago, DovBear presented an argument that since the mitzva of living in the Land of Israel is not categorized as yahareg v’al y’avor (a mitzva for which one is required to sacrifice one’s life), it would therefore be appropriate to surrender land to the Palestinians, rather than endanger lives.
He also noted that this is not simply his own personal view, but rather, the view of a number of halakhic authorities. And in fact, he is quite correct about this: R. Ovadiah Yosef has ruled that due to the halakhic imperative of pikuah nefesh (preservation of life), it is permissible to cede parts of Eretz Yisrael in order to save lives. The late R. Eliezer Schach also issued a similar ruling.*
DovBear is also correct that anyone who would accuse him of being a “heretic” for embracing this particular legitimate opinion, is simply a fool.
Where DovBear is wrong is in his belief that lives can, in fact, be saved by giving land to the Palestinians. This assumption has been tried, and has failed completely, multiple times over the past fifteen years. The idea has been done to death, quite literally: The plain, harsh reality is the exact opposite: Giving land to the Palestinians endangers the lives of Jews, and has resulted in the deaths of thousands of them.
It is for this reason that R. Ovadiah — who still stands by his halakhic ruling in principle — has stopped supporting the surrender of land to the Palestinians in practice.
Here is a question to which not many people know the answer: How many suicide bomb attacks there were before the Rabin government signed the Oslo Accords with the PLO?
Answer: ZERO (0). Yes, really. Suicide bombings first began only following the signing of Oslo.
In 1993, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres (now President) inaugurated a complete reversal of prior Israeli policy: They decided to negotiate with terrorists, and to arm them with land, money, and weapons. Plenty of Israelis were aghast, and wondered how this could possibly lead to anything other than disaster. Unfortunately, their fears were borne out in spades: The September 1993 Oslo Accords sparked a massive wave of terrorist attacks in Israel, of unprecedented proportions: Immediately following the signing, terrorism skyrocketed to levels that had been previously unknown. Regardless of this, the Rabin government was undeterred: Ignoring the mounting carnage, they negotiated and then signed the Oslo II agreement in 1995 — in spite of the constant suicide bombings, which had become a matter of routine by then. And not surprisngly, the rate of terror death climbed even higher with Oslo II.
In the 30 months beginning with the Oslo signing, more Israelis were killed by terrorists (213) than in the entire preceding decade (209 from January 1983 to September 1993). You can find graphs illustrating this phenomenon here. [Note: These graphs cover the relatively “quiet” period prior to the much bloodier “Second Intifada” period, which began in October 2000.]
This massive explosion of terror attacks continued until Binyamin Netanyahu came to power in 1996. Netanyahu had campaigned on a platform that precluded any further territorial concessions as long as the terror onslaught continued. And interestingly, as soon as he assumed office, the terror attacks dropped dramatically, for the very first time since the Oslo Accords had been signed. Netanyahu’s term in office marked the first time that the level of terror attacks dropped back down to pre-Oslo levels. (You can see this visually, along with the figures, on the graphs cited above.)
This respite didn’t last very long, unfortunately. In 1999, Netanyahu was succeeded by Ehud Barak (now Defense Minister), who declared his intention to continue the policies of Rabin and Peres. True to his word, at Camp David, he offered Arafat a final-status deal that included the entire Gaza Strip, 97% of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Arafat’s response was to angrily reject the offer, and to launch a new terror war (the infamous “Second Intifada”) that dwarfed even the monstrous levels of bloodshed that had hit Israel during the Rabin and Peres governments.
More Israeli civilians — men, women, and children — were slaughtered in the years since Oslo than in all the years since the founding of the state in 1948 up until the accords were signed in 1993. The numbers speak for themselves.