Oslo under fire by Saul Singer June 16, 2002 Oslo has come under particularly heavy fire lately. The Knesset actually debated establishing a committee of inquiry into the Oslo Accords, as one would for any national catastrophe. Charles Krauthammer, in a brilliant speech, calls Oslo "the most disastrous messianic seduction since Shabtai Zvi." At a time when that agreement is literally blowing up in our faces, it is certainly tempting to get caught up in this fervor. The risk, however, is that some important lessons from Oslo's failure are being missed. The Knesset, for starters, should be ashamed of stooping to the level of the bumper stickers that shout out, "Try Oslo's Criminals!" A mistake may be colossal, but that does not make it a crime. The agreement was negotiated by an elected government and ratified by the Knesset. Like it or not, the signing of Oslo on the White House lawn was greeted by a form of euphoria, and not just among the half of the country that had been pining to take this path. A cloud of illegitimacy did hang over the Oslo agreement from the beginning because it did not have the support of a majority of the Jewish members of the Knesset - despite the fact that saying so is considered undemocratic. In any case, it is not necessary to resort to distinguishing between Jewish and Arab MKs to argue that such a fateful decision should have required a larger majority - such as the two-thirds majority required to ratify treaties in the US Senate. The subsequent efforts of both Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon to base their governments on broad majorities were a tacit acknowledgment that passing Oslo by a single vote was a mistake. But none of these misgivings rise to the level of criminality, and it was cowardly of some Likud MKs to pander to their constituency by voting for the defeated Knesset resolution. Oslo, in fact, was dangerous not because it reflected some rogue operation but because it reflected the widespread delusion of which Krauthammer speaks. Krauthammer points out that what for Yitzhak Rabin was a calculation, was for Shimon Peres a leap of faith in the idea that the Arab world was ready to accept Israel's right to exist. Oslo was an insane gamble, Krauthammer argues, in which Israel "entrusted the security, the safety, and perhaps even the existence of the Jewish State into the hands of sworn enemies." Peres is unwilling to accept that this was a mistake even in retrospect. In the Knesset debate, he claimed that "those who halted the Oslo process are to blame," and - stooping to the level of his attackers - proposed an inquiry into illegal settlements. At some level, however, both Peres and his critics are missing the point. Krauthammer may well be right that Oslo was doomed from the get-go, but we will never really know because the Oslo agreement was never implemented. If the Labor Party - not just Oslo's critics - had cried foul when Yasser Arafat started smuggling terrorists and weaponry in his car, when he failed to curb incitement, and when he failed to lift a finger against Hamas, the situation could be different. It was Oslo's defenders who howled that Binyamin Netanyahu was killing the agreement by demanding "reciprocity" - also known as implementation. Those who really doomed Oslo were not its opponents but its champions. Like those who let Germany violate the Versailles Treaty out of laziness or misplaced magnanimity, Oslo's defenders invited war, not peace. This is a lesson we will need for the future, whenever we end up attempting further peace agreements. The underlying fallacy that beguiled those behind Oslo was that peace is produced by fulfilling perceived Arab grievances. Oslo's proponents believed fervently that the Arab desire to destroy Israel either was no longer dominant or could be overlooked. The peace processors are fond of saying, in response to Arab intransigence, that peace is made with enemies, not with friends. But in the case of other sworn enemies, such as France and Germany, peace was made possible by the utter defeat and transformation of the aggressive party. The insanity of Oslo was not so much that it attempted to make peace without such a transformation, but that there was not any vigilance to make sure such a transformation was taking place. The best hope for peace with the Muslim world is a transformation of its most radical states, Iran and Iraq, into pro-Western democracies. Now that the United States has realized that such a transformation may be required for its security, it is hardly unthinkable. Israel need not wait until then to pursue peace, but it cannot repeat the mistake of assuming that Israeli concessions can take the place of making Arab regimes accountable to their own people.