On September 2, 1993, I got a call from Richard Bernstein of The New York Times, asking me to comment for an article on the "peace agreement" that was about to be signed by Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel, and Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization. As it happened, I was in Jerusalem, where my daughter was then living, and along with everyone else in the country we had been watching the evening news.

My foreboding was registered in the next day's paper: "Ms. Wisse's concern is that in dealing with Mr. Arafat, the Israelis are, in effect, intervening in Arab politics, choosing the PLO chief, whom she called 'a killer,' to be the leader of the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. If things go wrong and she believes there is a good chance they will it is Israel that will bear responsibility, she said. 'It's the first time that an Israeli government is doing something for which I, as an American Jew, would not like to bear moral responsibility.'"

Bernstein's gentle summary barely conveyed my anguish. The reestablishment of a Jewish state was, to my mind, the most hopeful achievement of the 20th century, and the noblest proof if proof was necessary of the high worth of Jewish civilization.

Because of the many difficulties the country still faced, I believed that Israel had the right to ask of Jews like myself who lived outside its borders every kind of economic, political, and spiritual support. However, I did not believe that Israel could claim my support for putting into power a mob of professional murderers and extortionists. As a non-citizen, I could do nothing to stop the leaders of Israel from carrying out this plan. But as a citizen of the world, I knew that this was the worst possible move they could have made.

The physical threat to the country was then uppermost in the minds of many other American opponents of the Oslo Accords. Norman Podhoretz, Frank Gaffney and others predicted that hostilities against Israel would likely increase if Arafat were installed as head of a proto-Palestinian state. For the same reason, the voters of Israel had elected Rabin on a platform that explicitly rejected overtures to the PLO.

Military experts in Israel pointed out that the overhasty agreement had not taken account of security needs or developed a set of fall-back procedures should Arafat fail to keep his side of the bargain.

Although the intifada was claiming many Israeli lives in stabbings and other such random attacks, friendly columnists warned that things could get much worse if Israel compromised its policy of deterrence.

I fully shared these apprehensions for Israel's safety. The Arab war against Israel, which began formally on the day of its creation in 1948, was the most lopsided war in modern history prolonged by the preposterous asymmetry of fast-growing Arab Muslim populations and a Jewish people already decimated by the destruction of its European population. Arab dictators and monarchs, none of whom rules democratically, had refused to accept the reality of a sovereign Jewish people in its historic homeland. In rejecting the partition of Palestine, they had also condemned its Arabs to the status of permanent refugees to provide enduring "evidence" of Jewish liability.

Israel had been defending itself on the axiomatic premise that peace could only come if the Arabs stopped their aggression against it. It was now about to reverse that sensible policy by rewarding its most virulent enemy. Arafat was before Osama bin Laden the world's leading terrorist. As confounder of Al-Fatah in the late 1950s and head of the PLO since 1969, Arafat had spearheaded an "armed Palestinian revolution" against Israel. The PLO's targets were always civilians: The murder of the Olympic athletes at Munich in 1972 was but the most notorious example of its methods.

Moreover, this terrorist network was paid by Arab governments to act as their proxy hit man in the ongoing war against Israel. The PLO was tolerated, supported, and encouraged by Arab rulers only to the extent that it furthered the war against Israel and bought protection for their own regimes.

Yet Israel was now prepared to recognize the PLO terrorist network as the representative of the Palestinian people, entrusting its 20,000 armed "policemen" with the protection of Israel from terrorists. Although Rabin said he expected Arafat to end the violence against Israel unrestrained by the human rights concerns of a democratic society, Arafat was much likelier to use his dictatorial powers to increase the violence of Palestinian aggression against Israel.

The risks of this so-called peace process far exceeded questions of security. The PLO founded in 1964, before Israel gained the disputed territories was the most dedicated ideological font of anti-Semitism since Adolf Hitler's Nuremberg Laws institutionalized Aryan racism.

The PLO "Covenant" a term that parodied the sanctity of God's brit (convenant) with Abraham was not a summons to national self-liberation, such as Zionists or other modern national leaders issued in their time. The PLO denied Jews their history and peoplehood in order to claim national legitimacy in their stead. It did not simply oppose the Jews as occupiers of part of the land it claimed for its own, but rejected the historical reality of a millennial-old Jewish people.

The PLO charter read in part: "The claim of historical or religious ties between Jews and Palestine does not tally with historical realities or with the constituents of statehood in their true sense. Judaism, in its character as a religion, is not a nationality with an independent existence. Likewise, the Jews are not one people with an independent identity. They are rather citizens of the states to which they belong."

Whereas anti-Semitism in Europe had stigmatized the Jews as an alien and unassimilable people, the PLO brought Palestinian nationalism into being as a replacement for a Jewish people it said did not exist.

Consider, then, what it meant for Israel to give the PLO responsibility for governing the Palestinian Arabs on the basis of a letter that promised to inaugurate "a new epoch of peaceful coexistence."

First, Israel was capitulating to Arafat because it felt it could no longer tolerate the toll of terrorism, yet asking the terrorists to renounce the methods that had handed them this major triumph. Surely, the evidence entitled Arafat to believe that terrorism had vindicated his professional calling.

Second, all that Israel extracted from him in return was a promise that "those articles of the PLO Covenant which deny Israel's right to exist, and the provisions of the Covenant which are inconsistent with the commitments of this letter are now inoperative and longer valid."

Arafat would submit (note the future conditional tense) the necessary changes to the Palestinian National Council for approval. But if the PLO covenant was predicated on Jewish illegitimacy, what possible import could Arafat have ascribed to an agreement with the people he intended to supplant?

Third, the precipitous deal with Arafat, based on secret negotiations conducted by non-elected Israelis, had the hallmarks of a revolutionary act rather than a considered democratic process. Declaring Arafat an ally over the objections of many patriotic citizens and overseas supporters had the absurd effect of repudiating friends with the expectation of gaining security from enemies.

The self-styled "fixers" who thought they were reforming Arafat actually furthered his agenda. They did not even require as a precondition of his reign public disavowal of the entire PLO Covenant and the articulation of a new set of ideological principles for cooperation with a sovereign Jewish state. Just as no new vocabulary of coexistence was extracted as the minimal test of reconciliation, so Arafat's flagrant violations of the accords were ignored from the day after its signing in Washington. In the ensuing months, instead of requiring that the US and Europe help to monitor every PLO action and communication within the disputed territories in acknowledgement of the enormous risk Israel had taken, Israel's officials threw all their diplomatic resources into promoting financial and diplomatic assistance for the PLO. The hate message of terrorist extremists became the daily fare of an entire generation of Palestinian schoolchildren.

A recent article by Dan Polisar ["The Myth of Arafat's Legitimacy," Azure, summer 2002] documents the regime of corruption that was created by Arafat "a regime characterized by a massive police force whose specialty was intimidation of political opponents; an executive branch in which Arafat alone made all major decisions and in which the civil service was reduced to a corrupt patronage machine; the institutionalized absence of the rule of law, and a judiciary that lacked any independence; and the intimidation of the media and human rights organizations ."

Polisar challenges the "myth of legitimacy" that Arafat acquired as leader of the Palestinian Arabs, without mentioning Israel's role in granting him that legitimacy. When Israel empowered a terrorist on the basis of promises it had no rational cause to expect him to keep, it freed him to rule as he wished, and allowed him to do so as a trusted leader. There has rarely been so keen an example of the Talmud's teaching that kindness to the cruel becomes cruelty to the kind.

The effect of Oslo on Israel's reputation was also exactly the opposite of what its architects promised. To be sure, public opinion initially applauded the treaty and the Nobel Peace Prize seemed to grant it the seal of approval. By plucking Arafat out of Tunis and placing him in charge of a Palestinian Authority, Israel had implied that it could put an end to Arab aggression; the term "peace process" suggested that Israel's concessions would bring an end to the war against it. But since Israel could no more impose peace on the Arabs through concessions than it had by winning wars, this charade only meant that Israel would be blamed more relentlessly when it turned out that the conflict had never ended at all.

The painful truth of the so-called "Arab-Israeli conflict" is that only the Arabs have the power to stop it. Oslo did great damage inside Israel by encouraging the false hopes of an anxious society. Tenfold greater was its damage in the international arena by conveying the misimpression that Israel could put an end to Arab belligerence if only it were more forthcoming.

When the Arabs resumed their vilification of Israel, Europe joined in with a vengeance. Once Israel had fostered the impression that its concessions could bring peace to the Middle East, Europeans could blame Israel on the pretext that it had not made enough concessions. The political and economic balance between Israel and its enemies is anyhow tipped so strongly in favor of the Arabs that Europeans would normally court Arab oil and markets at the expense of Israel's security.

Many European politicians look for an excuse to hold Israel responsible for the aggression against it. This excuse seemed on hand when Israel said that peace could be won by yielding Arafat authority. In truth, the resurgence of European anti-Semitism has been the most shocking outcome of the Oslo accords. Israelis feel that they should be respected for having given such obvious proof of their good will. Instead, the country has been increasingly slandered as the obstacle to peace.

This brings us to the third, and by far the most damaging, consequence of Oslo: the creation in Gaza and the disputed territories of a terrorist polity. President Bill Clinton was not thinking of the danger to America when he hosted Israel's signing of the treaty with Arafat on the White House lawn.

But the legitimation of Arafat was a boost to the coalition of all anti-democratic forces ranged against the West. Those forces may have used Israel as the excuse for anti-Western aggression, but Israel was only the most vulnerable target of hostility aimed at democracy entire.

How many of the terrorists freed by Israel at the behest of America and Europe as part of the "peace accord" have since plied their trade against democracies other than Israel? How much anti-Western propaganda did Arafat pump into the region, and how much did his perceived triumph over Israel help to inspire al-Qaida and other Islamists in their wars against America? How much help and encouragement did Arafat's troops provide to other terrorist groups and Middle Eastern dictators?…

Although placing Arafat in charge of a P.A. was hailed as a "peace initiative," it actually opened the door for anti-Western propaganda and conspiracy on an unprecedented scale. The terrifying spread of suicide bombers signals the creation of an Arab-style Hitler youth that is being trained to sacrifice itself for a murderous ideal. Just as the Jews were merely the first, but by no means the only intended victims of German conquest in the 1930s, so the Jews are merely the first, but by no means the only intended victims of those who have declared war on Western civilization. The perceived capitulation of Israel to Arafat endangered democracy no less than it endangered the country itself, for it seemed to prefigure the way any democracy might act if confronted by terrorism for long enough.

It is not pleasant to think back on a political blunder that could have and should have been avoided. No one wants to pour salt into Israel's open wounds. Foresight would have been an advantage only if the opponents of Oslo could have prevented catastrophe. Yet we must face up to the damage of what the American columnist Charles Krauthammer rightly called "the most catastrophic, self-inflicted wound by any state in modern history."

As the current government of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces try valiantly to undo some of the disaster of the "peace process" that brought Arafat and the PLO into power, the most important task facing champions of democracy is to examine and weigh the false premises that allowed for the false promises of Oslo.