“I do not believe that the Israelis and the Palestinians have achieved peace, nor do I believe that this will mark an end to the blood and tears,” the 20-year-old student argued in a 1993 op-ed in his college paper. This wasn’t a popular view at the time. The writer, Pennsylvania Governor and potential Democratic vice presidential nominee Josh Shapiro, wrote that “although I am an advocate of peace I’m also an advocate of realism. I’m somewhat skeptical of this notion of a peace plan or at the very least an agreement to coexist in a civilized manner.”
Shapiro was weighing in during the euphoria of the Oslo Accords, when the famous Rose Garden handshake between Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO terror maestro Yasser Arafat electrified the hopes of peace lovers everywhere. Shapiro refused to be seduced by the wishful thinking that marked those heady days.
In the op-ed, he argued that the Palestinians are too “battle-minded” to pursue peace with Israel. “The only way the ‘peace plan’ will be successful is if the Palestinians do not ruin it,” Shapiro wrote, adding, “Palestinians will not coexist peacefully.” He went as far as calling peace between the parties “virtually impossible.”
The op-ed has landed Shapiro in hot water and forced him to distance himself from what he wrote. But why should he?
Even at the age of 20, when students are at their most idealistic, Shapiro was able to see what most diplomats, politicians, pundits and peace processors could not: Arafat was a phony. His desire to eradicate the hated Zionist entity never waned; it was his brand, his calling, his source of glory with his people.
Just ask President Bill Clinton, who blamed Arafat directly for the failure of the Camp David peace summit in 2000. Ask any serious analyst, for that matter, and most will tell you the same thing: The Palestinian refusal to accept a sovereign Jewish state under any borders, the glorifying of terrorism and the repeated rejection of Israeli peace offers suffocated the naive dreams of Oslo.
I once asked Dennis Ross, arguably the man most involved with the peace process, if he had any regrets in the wake of the Oslo failure. He replied immediately: They should have done more to enforce the anti-incitement clauses. Evidently, the fact that Palestinian leaders were encouraging the murder of Israelis while pretending to discuss peace was a recipe for, yes, an impossible peace plan.
Shapiro, as a prescient observer, saw all that ahead of most everyone.
Now, under pressure, he’s trying to distance himself from the prophetic message of his college days.
“Something I wrote when I was 20, is that what you’re talking about?” Shapiro told a reporter during a news conference on Friday. “I was 20.” He added defensively that he had been in favor of a two-state solution, with “Israelis and Palestinians living peacefully side by side” long before the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that started the war in Gaza.
He’s also come under scrutiny because he mentioned in the op-ed that he “spent five months studying in Israel and volunteered in the Israeli army.” So what? As his spokesperson Manuel Bonder explained in a statement: “When Shapiro was in high school, he volunteered on a kibbutz in Israel as part of a service project requirement. The program also included volunteering on service projects on an Israeli army base. At no time was he engaged in any military activities.”
Nevertheless, the outcry has come hard and fast from the usual suspects.
“We are deeply disturbed by the racist, anti-Palestinian views that Governor Shapiro expressed in this article,” Ahmet Tekelioglu, executive director of the Philadelphia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement. “We are also concerned by his failure to clearly apologize for those hateful comments, especially given how quickly and harshly he has targeted college students protesting the Gaza genocide for their speech.”
But why should he apologize for speaking the hard truth? Why should he distance himself from a brand of realism that is sorely needed today?
Take Gaza. After Israel called the Palestinians’ bluff in 2006 and evacuated the Strip, Hamas doubled down not on peace but on destroying Israel, culminating on Oct. 7 with the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Meanwhile, the indoctrination of Jew-hatred under the so-called more “moderate” Palestinian Authority has continued to rage throughout its society. And with a genocidal Iran and its terror proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Gaza and Yemen as hostile and aggressive as ever, the Jewish state may be going through its most perilous time.
Doesn’t that call for hard-nosed realism rather than the dreamy delusions of Oslo? Instead of asking Shapiro to distance himself from his 1993 op-ed, perhaps the world needs to catch up to him.
In any event, it’s not as if Shapiro was some kind of warmonger 31 years ago. Indeed, he was enough of a peace lover that he wished to be proved wrong. “I strongly hope and pray that this ‘peace plan’ will be successful,” he wrote, despite his skepticism.
A realist who doesn’t lose hope– isn’t that the mark of a strong character?
If Shapiro gets the nod as a candidate and becomes the first Jewish vice president in U.S. history, this combination of hard-nosed realism mixed with hope– a Jewish value in its own right– will be an invaluable asset for our country. Instead of apologizing, he ought to double down on both.
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