“They have also healed the hurt of My people slightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace!’ When there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14)

My soul has dwelt too long with one who hates peace. I am for peace; but when I speak, they are for war. (Ps 120:6-7)

Israel was born in battle. And from 1948 until today, Israel has lived in a perpetual state of war, with at least one full-scale war impacting the country every decade, and an ongoing terror war incessantly bleeding the nation.

Israel was also born with its hand stretched out to its neighbors for peace. No nation on earth has borne hatred and endured as much violence as has the Jewish state, all the while offering to make – and making – concessions to its enemies.

The world at large refers to the diplomatic process that has been unfolding in the Middle East since the late 1970s as “the peace process”. Israel’s experience, however, which it is still undergoing as we write this, is that this is a “war process” – a process which has weakened the Jewish state geographically and strategically; a process which has deeply riven the nation internally; a process which has placed large chunks of Israel’s historical heartland into the hands of its still sworn foes; a process which has entrenched tens of thousands of armed Arabs inside the land of Israel.

So what is it to be for this tiny Jewish country afloat in the enormous Arab sea? War or peace? Peace or war?

What does the Oslo Process entail? What, and who, birthed it? What were and are their motives? Real peace for Arabs and Jews, or the dissolution of the Jewish state and the birth, in its place, of a one-man, one-vote humanistic democracy?

And how does the Arab and Islamic world view this process? How does Yasser Arafat characterize it? Does he see it as the beginning of a new era of hope for his people? Or is his belief that this is another phase in his unfolding destiny which will ensure to eventual wiping of the Jewish state off the face of the map?