Ilan Price misses the point: Gordon

VICTOR GORDON

Victor Gordon of Pretoria writes:

Re:  “Alas, Rootshtain’s critique largely missed the point”

Ilan Price’s benign sounding reference to the PLO’s “monumental compromise” in 1988 which endorsed the idea of a two state solution is presumably based on Yasir Arafat’s landmark speech at the UN in Geneva. What Price overlooks was Arafat’s uncompromising insistence on the right of return of all refugees, which would have quite obvious heralded the end of the Jewish State.

This was further endorsed within the Oslo Accords in August 1993 when Arafat agreed to the recognition of Israel (but not as a Jewish state).  All this, at the time, seemed both encouraging in its moderation and pragmatism and, for just a moment, Israel began to believe that this murderer had shed his terrorist clothes.

Price has seemingly forgotten the visit that Arafat then paid to Johannesburg a mere 7 months later where, in a speech to his adoring followers at a local mosque he said,

“This agreement, I am not considering it more than the agreement which had been signed between our prophet Mohammed and Koraish, and you remember the Caliph Omar had refused this agreement and [considered] it a despicable truce. But Mohammed had accepted it and we are accepting now this peace offer. But to continue our way to Jerusalem”

For those unaware, the agreement with Koraish allowed Mohammed to pray in Mecca under Koraish control for ten years until he had grown stronger. Thereafter, he abrogated the agreement, slaughtered the tribe of Koraish and conquered Mecca.

This is the man, the organisation and the ideology in which Ilan Price expects Israel to place its trust in accepting a two state solution, the success of which depends entirely on trust, good neighbourliness, mutual respect  and the ideal of peace.