The end of the 'great hopes'

The identities of the main participants were different, but the rest of the elements, especially the text and the setting at Annapolis, was frighteningly reminiscent of half a dozen previous "peace events," all of which ended in bloodbaths.

The official peace events in the United States began in September 1993. Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat came to the White House lawn to sign the Oslo Accords. Paraphrasing Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, they promised each other - in what became giant, celebratory headlines in the Israeli newspapers - "Enough of blood and tears."

The heads of the Israeli government did not forget to emphasize that the agreement was signed despite the opposition of those against peace "on both sides." But before not very many days had passed, the tears - in quantities previously unknown - began to flow from the eyes of mothers, fathers, sons, daughters and other relatives. Arafat, after his flowery speech in Washington, began dispatching suicide bombers against us, and they blew themselves up in buses, cafes and stores.

"We will not allow terror to murder the peace," Rabin and Peres declared. They continued the "peace process" and returned about two years later to Washington - even though the head of Military Intelligence at the time, Moshe Ya'alon, proved to them that their partner in dialogue had given an explicit green light for terror attacks - in order to sign Oslo B, with Arafat, in a second festive and well-attended White House ceremony (with "great hope," according to one festive headline).

In the wake of the hopes, the terror attacks multiplied once again. Peres, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was ahead of Benjamin Netanyahu in the election polls at the time (1996). Peres hoped, of course, that his co-laureate Arafat would not keep him from being elected prime minister. But Arafat continued to wage a suicide terror campaign even on the eve of the Israeli elections.

Netanyahu won, and he too was swept into the whirlwind of lies and deception - especially self-deception. In January 1997, after talks with Arafat under pressure from the Americans, Netanyahu gave him, in a festive occasion, and as required by Oslo B - Hebron. Despite the suicide bombers, the murder by ambush on the roads and the decisive declarations, the Likud was not very different from Labor when it came to walking the path of folly.

The terror attacks continued even after the withdrawal from Hebron. Netanyahu, who was revealed, particularly after the incidents surrounding the Western Wall tunnel, as a weak prime minister, lost the trust of his party and of his voters. Despite this - what is the bait that draws Israel's leaders, time after time, into these honey traps? - Netanyahu went to the Wye River talks in October 1998. Even after this conference, despite the festive promises the likes of which we heard in Annapolis on Tuesday, the murderous attacks, which were the main reasons for the end of Netanyahu's term as prime minister, continued.

Less than two years later, in July 2000, his successor, Ehud Barak, went to Camp David for talks with President Bill Clinton and Arafat. Barak promised Arafat 96 percent of the territories plus de facto sovereignty over the Holy Basin in Jerusalem. The result: a cruel war of terror, the bloodiest and longest in Israel's history (with about 1,100 dead and thousands more injured), which has not yet ended.

True, in Annapolis, festivity and cautious hope took the place of euphoria. But there is no place for festivity either. It was sufficient to observe the violent demonstrations in the cities of Judea and Samaria, the strongholds of Abu Mazen [Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas], to understand how little support he has. And that's not even talking about events in Gaza.

The question remains, unanswered for 15 years: Why are the leaders of Israeli policy and the media that gives them backing and sometimes even leads them, unable to learn, time and again, the lesson?