Although only 13 Israelis died during the Gulf War, a death toll of over 1,700 Jewish lives is rooted in the political chain of events that followed.
Harav Boruch Povarsky of Ponevez Yeshiva gives a shuir on the weekly Torah portion.
Purim falls in late March this year but it arrived early and at a most opportune time on February 28 1991 coinciding with the end of Gulf War when a US-led military coalition reversed Iraq’s conquest of its oil-rich southern neighbor Kuwait.
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Trying to break apart the US-led coalition that included several Arab countries frightened by Baghdad’s aggression Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein attempted to draw Israel into the war firing 39 Scud missiles into Israel during the six-week campaign. Two Israelis died from direct hits four from heart attacks and another seven from the improper use of protective kits meant to save them from biological or chemical attacks. Considering just one Scud fired on a US military barracks in Saudi Arabia killed 28 US soldiers Israelis of all stripes viewed their comparatively small casualty count as an open miracle. However a case can be made that a far higher death toll — nearly 1 700 Jews as a result of the Oslo process — is deeply rooted in the political chain of events that followed the Gulf War.
On March 6 1991 six days after the Gulf War ended a buoyant commander-in-chief President George H. W. Bush told Congress: “The time has come to put an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict.” In those days a peace process was unheard of but Bush was confident he could make it happen. He had convinced Israel not to counterattack when Saddam’s Scuds hit. Now he turned to his Arab coalition partners and told them that Israel could make peace as easily as it could tame itself at war. After eight months of shuttle diplomacy by Secretary of State James Baker the US roped all the players into attending the Madrid Peace Conference in October 1991. As most Middle East peace conferences do this one also ended in failure. In June 1992 Israelis voted Shamir’s Likud Party out of office. In came Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin and his second-in-command Shimon Peres. Together they revived the Madrid framework through back-channel negotiations with Jordan and the arch-terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) resulting in the Oslo I and Oslo II Agreements between 1993 and 1995. Oslo sowed political and religious dissension in the always-fractious Israeli society as never before. For the political left it was a welcome change.
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