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OpinioNet Contributed Commentary - Steven Plaut

April 21, 2002

Steven Plaut

Let’s Make a Deal!!


  1. It was in the days of Ehud Barak’s regime, when Barak was determined to resolve all conflict with the Palestinians through "negotiated" capitulations and appeasements. When the pogroms broke out on Rosh Hashana that year, Barak was determined to stay the course.

    Then the PLO’s hordes assaulted Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus, which the PLO had ackowledged to be a Jewish shrine under the first Oslo accord, and had pledged to protect it and the right of Jews to pray there. When the PLO brownshirts attacked the shrine in the middle of the High Holiday pogroms, Barak decided to resolve the problem by asking the PLO to protect the shrine. When the PLO’s own "police" fired into the shrine, a Druse border patrolman on duty was badly injured. The medics tried to save him. Eventually he bled to death on the floor. Barak refused to send in Israeli troops to get him out. The same Israeli army that had liberated the hostages held by the PLO in Entebbe Uganda in 1976 was now suddenly incapable of breaking through the cordons of brownshirts in Nablus to rescue the soldier.

    This much has been known for a year and a half. What is NOT known is what was going on behind the scenes. THAT was revealed in the Haifa weekly Kolbo April 19, 2002.

    It turns out that while the soldier was bleeding to death, Israel was trying to get Jibril Rajoub, the head of the PLO’s "police", to rescue the soldier. The same Rajoub who is daily proclaimed by the Left to be a pragmatic and moderate man. Rajoub said he would consider rescuing the soldier in exchange for 50,000 sheqels. Israel reminded him that he was obligated under Oslo to serve as a force for suppressing violence and preventing terrorist attacks on Israelis, and was obligated to intervene. Rajoub hung up. Barak’s people called back, and began negotiating the size of the payoff Rajoub would get for the rescue. While conducting these "negotiations", the soldier died. His family now knows that he died because Israel was playing Let’s Make a Deal with Rajoub, instead of mowing down the attackers on the shrine.

    And of course the Barak government ALSO knew what happened there. The only people who DID NOT know what happened were Israeli citizens, until the press report this weekend.

    The Israeli Left still insists that the moderates in the PLO are reliable and pragmatic people.

  2. Uri Segel is an ex-honcho in Peace Now and an orchestra conductor in Louisville Kentucky. He had a contract to lead some local orchestras in haifa and Beer Sheba this month. But instead Segel (spelling?) announced that he was joining the boycott of Israel because Israel was occupying palestinian lands, I guess meaning Haifa and Beer Sheba.

    You might want to look him up and send him or the Louisville newspapers a demand that Segel be kicked off of the occupied Indian lands he is occupying. You could also suggest some creative uses of a baton....

Steven Plaut
University of Haifa


Read other commentaries by Steven Plaut.

You can e-mail Steven at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il.

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Copyright © 2002 by Steven Plaut
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-Published with permission

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