Otherwise There Can Be
No Further Israeli Concessions
New York — The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) strongly supports Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s remarks of July 31, 2003 that “Israel will insist on the fulfillment of every obligation included in the Roadmap. We will do this because only insisting that agreements be honored will bring the longed-for peace.”
Prime Minister Sharon’s comments, reported in Ha’Aretz on August 1, 2003, were delivered in a speech to Israel’s National Defense College. He added that, historically, “every case of restraint in the face of violations did not lead to the desired quiet, but to more violations, until the unavoidable descent in to war.” Then referring specifically to the mistakes of the Oslo process, he stated, “For the past three years, we have paid a heavy price for Israel’s restraint over the daily violations of the Oslo accords. We paid for the fact that terrorist organizations were not disarmed, that illegal weapons were not collected, that the intolerant incitement against Israel in the educational system and the media never stopped.”
Sharon also announced that Israel will not proceed to further stages of the Roadmap without full Palestinian Arab compliance, and rejected the notion that the plan can follow a timeline detached from performance.
In response to Sharon’s speech, Z.O.A. National President Morton A. Klein said: “After three months of Abu Mazen and the Palestinian Authority ignoring virtually every one of the Roadmap obligations, Prime Minister Sharon publicly stated that this cannot be tolerated. As he notes, we will relive the last three years of post-Oslo terror if we do not insist that the Palestinian Arabs live up to their Roadmap commitments.”
“We must remember that Abu Mazen told his Fatah commanders in Gaza in July, 2002 that ‘in the Oslo Agreement, we took land without giving anything in exchange’. Abu Alaa, Chairman of the Palestinian Legislative Council, similarly stated in June, 2003 that ‘Oslo was an achievement because we gave nothing in exchange’ (see An-Nahar (Lebanon), June 12, 2003). This is the lesson that the Palestinian Arab leadership has derived from the Oslo process, since neither Israel nor the U.S. insisted on P.A. reciprocity, and therefore Oslo was doomed to failure and tragedy.”