It was a risk Rabin took not because he knew it would succeed, but
because he knew it did not have to fail. Moreover, even if complete
success proved elusive, Rabin believed that Israel would still be
better off so long as it made no critical and unrecoverable security
concessions. Israel could off-load responsibility for controlling a
hostile population, improve its regional and international position,
and enhance its own morale and unity in the knowledge that if the
process failed the fault would not lay with Israel. That is why he
believed that not to try would be worse than failure.

Did Rabin believe that a stable final status agreement was probable,
however? Not likely, and if necessary he was ready to impose a
"separation", its unilateralism derived from Moshe Dayan and its map
from Yigal Alon. But Rabin knew that Israel could not impose
separation without some degree of international and especially
American acquiescence, and that required Israel to first demonstrate
a maximal effort to reach contractual peace with the Palestinians.

In other words, from Israel's perspective the peace process was a
calculated exercise in moral realism. It was not a utopian delusion,
a case of unilateral withdrawal, a sign of Israel's loss of nerve, or
a manifestation of post-Zionist political masochism, as various and
sundry detractors now claim. Prime Minister Ehud Barak began his
tenure in June 1999 with an attitude similar to that of Yitzhak
Rabin, except that when Barak assumed office the utility of Oslo's
interim logic had, in his view, come to an end. Three months or so
would be enough to find out, he said, whether a stable final
settlement was possible--for all the arguments were known and what
remained was only the summoning of courage on both sides to make the
tough decisions.

So what has happened? It took a little longer than three months, but
we have found out. At Camp David in July, Barak went to and arguably
beyond the threshold of Israeli tolerance in offering concessions to
the Palestinians. Yasir Arafat failed not only to accept Barak's
offer but even to engage it in negotiation. In the following weeks it
became clear that Arafat prefers to steal a smaller prize that avoids
a promise to end the conflict than to negotiate for a larger prize
that requires it. He thus labored to establish the basis for
unilaterally proclaiming an independent state, and when this effort
fell short--when European, Russian, Chinese and even Arab support was
not forthcoming--the chairman found himself cornered. So he resorted
to violence in such a way as to regain the international sympathy he
required. In other words, he needed "martyrs."

Arafat has employed this tactic many times to good effect, but this
time he went too far. The scale of violence, its obviously
premeditated nature, and the incessant official incitement goading it
to and occasionally beyond control--all following the most generous
Israeli negotiating offer politically possible--shocked even the most
dovish Israelis.

The symbolic center of it all was the video footage of the murder and
mutilation of two Israeli reserve soldiers in Ramallah. The crowd
captured on film was happy; even young women in their scarves shouted
in a frenzy of joy over the spilling of Jewish blood. To see this
Palestinian mob was for Israelis the coda to Arafat's unwillingness
to negotiate in good faith. Not only would the Palestinian leadership
not negotiate peace on honorable if necessarily imperfect terms, but
many Palestinians seem determined to wage a guerrilla war for
independence. Having convinced themselves that Israel was forced from
southern Lebanon by just a few thousand Hizballah fighters, they
think that the Palestinian masses backed by more than 40,000 armed
police can do the same in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem.

As most Israelis now see it, thanks either to the perfidy or the
failure of the Palestinian leadership, every demonstration of
Israel's desire for peace has been interpreted on the Palestinian
"street" as evidence of Israeli weakness. Hence the escalation of
Palestinian ambition with every Israeli invitation to normalcy, and
hence the deterioration of the situation to the edge of protracted
guerrilla warfare.

Is this a fair appraisal of where things now stand? Yes, it is. Does
it mean that Oslo was a mistake from the start? No, and anyone who
claims now to have known for certain from that day on the White House
lawn in September 1993 how the peace process would turn out--whether
for good or ill--is not to be taken seriously. As Rabin knew, history
is profoundly contingent. If Arafat had chosen real leadership, and
if Israel had enforced Oslo's terms more stringently from the start
to better shape that choice, things might have worked differently. As
for the United States, it was not wrong to encourage the process; but
it could not make peace happen if either of the parties demurred--and
one has.

The key question, still, is whether Israel is better off having gone
through the Oslo exercise. The answer is, I believe, yes. Israel did
free itself from the debilities of ruling a hostile population. Oslo
was a precondition for the peace treaty with Jordan, which is of
enormous benefit to Israel. Through the peace process Israel deepened
the separation of the interests of the Arab states from the
Palestinian agenda, a long-sought Israeli goal that was demonstrated
when the leaders of the major Arab states refused to tie their fates
to Arafat's at the October Arab Summit in Cairo.

Most important, and as Rabin knew, it was necessary to go through
Oslo, or something like it, in order to find out if a deal among
politicians was possible. He knew that peace among peoples would have
to follow. For the time being, at least, we know that a deal is not
possible, let alone real peace. But the way we found out carries the
benefit Rabin foresaw. The practical price Israel has paid for this
knowledge has not been great. Israel can deal readily with the
Palestinian areas by force majeure, and it now has the will to do so
because, though stung by disappointment, Israelis are more united on
basics than they have been in years. They know what has gone wrong,
they know their own leadership is not to blame, and they know what
they have to do to restore the credibility of Israeli deterrence.

As it happens, at least one other government--that of the United
States--shares Israel's basic view of recent events. Alas, it's
lonely at the top. As for the rest of the world, most Jews, whether
Israeli citizens or not, entertain few expectations. The last few
weeks have also shown that the capacity of the "Seventy Nations"--the
rabbinic shorthand for the gentile world--to discount the rights and
lives of Jews has yet to find its limit. This is not a conclusion to
which one jumps, but approaches only with great reluctance.