Desperately seeking EU's conscience
By Amotz Asa-El

(May 17) Conscience - as H.L. Mencken once put it - is that 
inner voice which warns us that somebody must be watching; 
unless you're a European politician, the famed American 
journalist and linguist might have added. 

Sadly, conscience is for the European Union what meat is for 
the butcher: in the morning he handles it with care, by 
noontime he chops, wraps and sells it; and in the evening he 
dump the remains in the garbage. 

Next month it will be 21 years since a characteristically 
pretentious, self-righteous and pontificating European Community 
- precursor of today's European Union - issued the groundbreaking 
Venice Declaration, which called for "an end to Israeli 
occupation," condemned "the Jewish settlements in the occupied 
territories" and the legislation of the Jerusalem Law as 
"illegal," and recognized "the need to involve the PLO in peace 
negotiations." 

It was then, in Venice, that Western Europe for the first time 
made a clear statement on the Middle East. Some experts even 
see in it a watershed not only for the Middle East but also 
for the European states involved, which until then had 
carefully avoided making the transition from uniting their 
economies to synchronizing their diplomatic systems. 

Either way, for the Middle East that was the beginning of the 
road that led to Oslo, because there, in Venice, a Yasser 
Arafat whose diplomatic sway had previously been confined to 
the non-democratic world, first broke ground - and grandly so - 
in the free world. 

Back in 1980, as a recently discharged soldier, I argued 
feverishly with relatives and friends who went to live beyond 
the Green Line. "If only we give them a land of their own," 
I said, parroting that European-inspired line, "the 
Palestinians will ultimately accept us and live in peace side 
by side with us." 

But that was then. 

Today, we moderate Israelis who voted Rabin, Peres and Barak 
are aghast that we led Israel to offer the ultimate land-for-peace 
proposal - practically the entire West Bank and Gaza, plus a 
sliver of pre-'67 Israel and east Jerusalem - and got in return 
not only a rejection, but also no counterproposal, and not only 
did we get no counterproposal, but we got a war, and not only 
did Yasser Arafat wage a war on us, but he did so in a blunt, 
arrogant and nonchalant violation of his own signed commitment 
in the Oslo Accords to settle all future disputes with Israel 
around the negotiating table. 

OUR conclusion from all this is that while we were negotiating 
the right deal, we were doing so with the wrong interlocutors. 
Never mind Labor voters who supported Ariel Sharon, according 
to a recent poll published by Ha'aretz even 40% of those who 
voted Meretz now support Sharon's policies. Why? Not because 
Middle Israel has ceased to believe in the viability of the 
land-for-peace formula, but because it has lost all faith in 
and respect for the other side's leadership. 

Indeed, that critical mass of Israelis who in recent months 
abandoned the Venice-Oslo vision are now convinced that the 
crux of our conflict is neither about land nor religion. It's 
about freedom. The way we see it, peace requires concessions, 
and concessions require education. We in Israel, whether in 
Yitzhak Rabin's gruff ways or in Shimon Peres's pedagogic 
manner, have gone out of our skins to educate for peace. 
The other side has not. Heck, they have abandoned us to the 
devices of a vicious, elaborate, regime-sponsored propaganda 
machine, built very much along the contours of those sported 
by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. 

Moreover, in the mid 1990s, when given on a silver platter the 
opportunity to build an economy of his own with billions of 
American, European and Japanese dollars, Yasser Arafat manipulated 
things so that practically none of that constructive activity 
would actually take place. That is how he kept his young 
generation so utterly unskilled and unemployed, and consequently 
readily available for and fueled with all the wrath which has 
been indispensable for the recent months' violence. 

Moreover, a flourishing economy, just like the free press he 
never gave his people, would have helped create a broad middle 
class that would have, in due course, sought political freedom, 
and ultimately might have deprived Arafat of his dictatorship. 

And so, what was first preached in Venice and eventually concocted 
in Oslo proved to be a charade. Yasser Arafat has lied all along 
to his many Western partners, myself included. Faced with this, 
we moderate Israelis, like the Americans who were suspicious of 
Arafat all along, now see as the root of our predicament not our 
territorial generosity - we have already offered everything, 
for heaven's sake - but the enemy's refusal to embrace freedom, 
prosperity and tolerance. 

Europe, however, knows better than us. 

Now that Europe, which was so instrumental in shoving a manifestly 
lethal Arafat down out throat in the first place, is the same one 
that threatens an embattled Jewish state with sanctions; the same 
Europe that has a field day counting bodies in a war it helped 
ignite; the same Europe that preaches about where Jews should 
and shouldn't live; the same Europe that does nothing about the 
daily tramplings of human rights - never mind democracy and 
economic freedom - anywhere between Morocco and Iraq. 

Sadly, unlike Middle Israelis, the European Union will express 
no remorse about the thread it led from Oslo, to Venice, to Munich, 
where its political ancestors also willingly danced with 
unreconstructed dictators, deluding themselves that justice, 
prudence and history weren't watching.