In the summer of 2011, it will have been 18 years since the Oslo Accords were signed by Shimon Peres, secretly and without the knowledge of the Israeli public whose rights to their own land were being signed away. The accord was based on meetings by left wing academics with terrorists that were illegal under Israeli law, signed covertly by a disgraced politician who had been an admirer of Marx and finally sealed with a public handshake between the world's greatest terrorist and an Israeli Prime Minister suffering from such severe dementia that he had trouble recognizing the man beaming down on them both as the President of the United States, who 5 years later would be facing impeachment.

That handshake with Arafat took place on September 13th, 8 years minus 2 days, before terrorists would duplicate a feat that only Arafat's own terrorists had previously accomplished, by simultaneously hijacking 4 aircraft. Even as the United States had begun pandering to Arafat, the rise of the next wave of terrorism was already underway with Bin Laden hard at work on the organization that would evolve into the Al Queda we know today. The Oslo Accords would play a crucial role in the rise of Islamist terrorism creating a vacuum into which the Muslim Brotherhood could step into with groups such as Hamas and Al Queda. And the Oslo Accords would also come to define Israel's worst defeat since the accords it had signed with Rome over two thousand years ago.

Now as that fateful 18 year mark approaches, there is still a crack in the door remaining through which Israel can save itself. In Hebrew the word for life is Chai, whose letters code as 18. And eighteen years after the scourge of Oslo has brought war and death into the heart of Israel, turned its town and cities into targets for missiles, made its roads into highways of death and now threatens to divide Jerusalem itself-- Israel has the chance to choose life over death by appeasement.

Each year since Oslo, the situation has grown steadily worse. Not just militarily, not just in relation to the children who have been left without arms and legs by Arab terror. But even diplomatically as well. The political war against Israel has reached an unprecedented height with no comparison to even the ugliest days of the Intifada. And all of it has one common element, a blood lust spurred on by Israel's willingness to accommodate, appease and retreat. Not only has any Israeli concession, any act of goodwill and compassion, not changed the way Israel is portrayed-- but each one has only fed the furious hate that Islam and the international left feels for it.

Today when Israel does nothing more than sit on the other side of a fence and absorbs the missiles fired at its schools by terrorists-- the left shrieks itself hoarse with an orgy of hate against "The Wall" and for "The People of Gaza", particularly those wearing bomb belts who are being kept from their religious duty of blowing themselves amid crowds of Jews. As Mohammed proclaimed in the Hadith, "The Hour [of Resurrection] will not arrive until you fight the Jews". While Israel supplies Gaza with electricity and swine flu vaccines, and builds bomb shelters under its schools-- the world demands that Israel tear down its cruel wall and open the doors to the terrorists of Hamas. The message is painfully clear, nothing short of Israel's destruction will suffice.

Now with Gaza held by Hamas, the party that was the choice of the Palestinian Arabs in the last legal election, and an unelected Fatah regime maintained in the West Bank by American money, both of which continue carrying out terrorist attacks against Israel-- the Obama Administration and European leaders continue pressing Israel for more concessions, even when there isn't even a single state available to make those concessions to. This madness has nothing to do with the desire to set up a Palestinian state, an entity that could no more exist than pigs can fly, and everything to do with the Dhimmi desire to trade off Israel to the Muslim world in the hopes of pacifying their anger.

Israel's left wing Labor party made the devil's bargain of Oslo in order to stave off the conservative Likud party that had come to dominate Israeli politics and brought real reform and change to Labor's moribund socialism. And with that they created a precedent in which every Israeli Prime Minister, regardless of party, has been dragged off to negotiate with the terrorists setting off bombs on Israeli city buses and pizzerias, sometimes even while the negotiations were underway. Netanyahu is only the latest pawn in this peace shell game (can you find the peace, is it under shell number one, number two or number three. Here's a hint, it's under none of them. The dealer pocketed it while switching around the shells.) and there is no way to win except to stop playing.

Not only can Israel not achieve peace with either Fatah or Hamas (let alone both at the same time), something which everyone in Israel but the most delusional leftists already know, but it cannot win the approval of the world for trying to make peace with them. Israel's willingness to make peace has made it into a target by an international community that blames Israel for Muslim violence around the world. As their thinking goes, if Israel would just do whatever it takes to make peace, then Muslim violence would stop not just in Israel, but in Paris, Manchester, Basra, Kabul and yes of course, Oslo.

Meanwhile the international left has embraced Islamic terror as the new radical chic, and the grandchildren of Nazis have discovered how much fun it can be to don a Keffiyah and call for Jewish boycotts, just as their grandparents did in the 1930's. Their hatred for Israel, which has nothing to do with anything that the country or its people actually do, is fed by Islamic propagandists and the leading figures of the left, who view Israel as one of those exploitative capitalist nation states that must be destroyed to pave the way for a global humanism, and share the old implacable Communist and Socialist hostility toward the idea of the Jews gathering together in one state.

Oslo was a show of weakness by a country that had heretofore deterred aggression by demonstrating that it could and would defend itself. It and every successive concession poured more blood into the water. Islam and the International Left, both inside and outside the country, are determined to destroy Israel. And though the average Israeli continues to ignore the situation, replying with bluff good humor that the IDF could clean out Gaza in a few days, the reality is that under internal and external pressure Israel is busy destroying itself.

As deep sea creatures evolve in peculiar ways to survive the atmospheric depths, Israel's left has devolved into an arm of Islamic terrorism, from its politicians to the Supreme Court to organizations such as the New Israel Fund (itself an arm of the International Left) down to the academics and anarchists are doing everything possible to destroy the country and terrorize its residents. They have done their best to turn the IDF and the police into a weapon against the most patriotic and Zionist of its citizens. They have turned the media and the newspapers into a non-stop barrage of hate against anyone who questions their destructive policies of appeasement. They have criminalized dissent as incitement, turned the court system into a legislative body to promote their own agenda and tied the hands of the military in fighting terror. In concert with the terror wrought by Islamic terrorists, they have wrought terror against ordinary Israelis, destroying farms, homes and synagogues on behalf of the terrorists.

Israel can still survive, but to do so it must make it clear that further negotiations are off the table until there is a dramatic change in the situation on the ground. It must put a halt to the envoys and diplomatic missions. It must tear down the wall and annex the West Bank and Gaza. It must show the international corps of media propagandists, the frowning talking heads tsking the latest manufactured atrocity and the photographers handing out coins to Arab boys in exchange for tossing some stones at a soldier, to the door, and invite them to never come back. And the left must be pushed back to the margins, where they were until Oslo.

There is no doubt that Israel will suffer by doing this, both politically and economically. But it will suffer less than it would from another 5 years of appeasement and concessions. The international left will go on screaming, but they always have. And without any visible effect, they will move on to something else. The international community will be outraged, but once they learn that Israel will not back down, they will move on as well. The Muslim world will rage, and the few countries that have open relations with Israel will break them off... something that has already happened for the most part anyway.

With the 18th year of Oslo approaching, Israel has the chance to revive itself. Or to go further down the dark road of appeasement until it has so thoroughly destroyed itself that there is no way back.

Israel's Last Chance of Survival