Dr. Ze'ev Begin, a most honest man, sees the world in black and white. He has never believed in a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through historic compromise.

Dr. Ze'ev Begin, a most honest man, sees the world in black and white. He has never believed in a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through historic compromise and remains consistent in his views to this day, eight years before a Jewish minority will rule a Palestinian majority in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, putting an end, heaven forbid, to the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish democratic state. I salute his honesty and consistency, and regret his naivete and the terrible pessimism in his article.

His arguments are a painful reminder of the arguments made by those Palestinians who oppose the Palestinian Authority: All the Jews are the same; the right and left are the two sides of the same Zionist conspiracy to steal Palestinian land from its original inhabitants; the Zionist right tells the truth openly, while the left does it with saccharine sweetness that led the Palestinians into a honey trap: a five-year agreement that doesn't include a path to a final solution, an autonomy which Israel will continue to rule free of responsibility for its economy, continuing settlement, and all this through an agreement with the PLO.

The result, say those same critics, is that the Oslo agreement allowed King Hussein to sign a peace agreement with Israel, freeing himself of his commitment to wait for the Palestinians, and allowed Hafez Assad to negotiate with Israel for peace, also free of any commitments to the Palestinians. It granted Israel diplomatic relations with North African and Gulf region countries, and brought economic prosperity to Israel, while reducing the standard of living, and raising the mortality rate, for Palestinians. At the end of the five years, then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not even bother to discuss a permanent agreement, and seemingly proved that it was a Zionist conspiracy to "screw" the innocent Palestinians, leaving them with nothing other than skyrocketing unemployment, poverty and no hope for any political agreement that would meet even some of their expectations.

Just as Dr. Begin is well-armed with documents that seemingly prove the Palestinians are expert at double-speak, the Palestinians can look up David Ben-Gurion's biography ["Ben-Gurion: A Biography"], written by one of his greatest admirers, Dr. Michael Bar-Zohar. There, on page 357 in Volume 1 [in Hebrew], Bar-Zohar explains Ben-Gurion's support for the Peel Commission's 1937 decision for partition: "As for Ben-Gurion? He had decided that the northern border of the country is the Litani River; the southern border is Wadi al-Arish; the eastern border would be the great desert beyond the Gilad and Bashan. How could he accept the tiny sliver of land from what he regarded as the entire Land of Israel? The answer was unequivocal: He did not regard the partition as the end, on the contrary, as the starting point."

Bar-Zohar quotes from Ben-Gurion's letter to his son, Amos, who did not understand how his father, a man of the Greater Land of Israel, could make such a compromise. "A partial Jewish state is not the end but the beginning. We will bring into the state all the Jews we are able to bring, and organize a sophisticated defense force, an elite army - I have no doubt our army will be one of the best in the world - and then I am sure that we won't be denied settling throughout the rest of the land whether through agreement and mutual acceptance with our Arab neighbors, or through other means"!!!

The Palestinians can say that Benny Begin is quoting public speeches in which their leaders seemingly ratify the "stages" doctrine, as they try to prove to their followers that principles were not betrayed, that these are only partial steps on the way to the final goal. Ben-Gurion, on the other hand, wrote the same thing in a letter to his son, describing a doctrine of stages that clearly reflects his truth!

For years, Israeli consensus opposed negotiations with the PLO. A similar consensus existed in Palestinian society against any negotiations with Israel since that would mean recognition of a state that seemingly does not have the right to exist. The Oslo agreement was a historic recognition between two national movements that understood that only compromise between them could lead to a suitable settlement. Neither movement gave up its dreams and what it believed to be its rights. The opponents of the agreement on both sides perceived every expression of nonconcession as the true policy of the other.

A coalition of pragmatists - yes, pragmatists, not moderates - which regarded the agreement as fulfillment of national interests, encountered a violent opposition. On each side, there were those who saw the opponents to the agreement on the other side as the "bad cops," sharing the work with the "good cops," but with no real difference between the two cops.

But no, Benny. Baruch Goldstein, the doctor in the Israel Defense Forces uniform, who opened the Pandora's box of Palestinian suicide terrorists, was no partner of Shimon Peres, and Yigal Amir was no partner of Yitzhak Rabin; Sheikh Yassin is no partner to Abu Mazen, and Dr. Rantisi is not a partner of Prof. Sari Nusseibeh. In both camps, there are some like this and some like that.

Israel's stature and economy were changed by the hopeful years of Oslo. It was not a dream or virtual reality. Those years of a cooperation between the two pragmatic camps enabled tremendous security cooperation. The years of relative quiet, from the middle of 1996, with tens of thousands of Israelis in the Jericho casino every night and bargain-hunting in Bidiyeh, without security men or special arrangements, were the same years in which Israel won preferred economic status in the EU, and full membership in the UN when it was accepted into the West European and Others framework.

The terrible crisis of the intifada was not the result of any theory of stages. If that was really the doctrine guiding Arafat, he would have grabbed the state offered him at Camp David and used it to launch his campaign to drive the Israelis into the sea. The intifada was the result of a mutual lack of trust and mutual violations - some innocent, others deliberate - of the Oslo agreement.

There is a dynamic of peace and a dynamic of war. In the dynamic of peace, mutual trust is built and cooperation is created. In a dynamic of war, there is a tendency to national unity against the common enemy and a tendency for vengeance and inhumane brutality toward the other. That is the dynamic in which the fears on both sides come true. On our side, people look at the dialogue between Hamas and Fatah and say "we told you so, the Palestinians remain the same," and despite all the differences, every Sunday they see Shimon Peres and Effi Eitam in the cabinet and say, "We told you so, all the Israelis are the same."

So I say to Benny Begin, not all the Palestinians are the same, and not all of us are the same. When we return to sanity, we will sit down with the pragmatic Palestinian camp and reach agreements on a final settlement, in the spirit of Oslo and on the basis of the Clinton framework, because just as it was in 1937, 1947 and 1993, that is the only way to achieve our national aspirations and to save the two peoples from the chasm they are approaching.

Benny Begin and his colleagues have never offered an alternative solution. That weighty responsibility now rests on the shoulders of the Israeli peace camp.