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It was September 1970 when the threat to his kingdom became so intolerable that King Hussein of Jordan launched a massive assault on PLO fighters on its soil. The battle was harsh and «it surpassed all imagined horrors of fratricide,» according to noted historian Samuel Katz.

Surrounding Amman to prevent assistance and immobilizing the refugee camps, Jordanian soldiers and tanks fought Palestinian militants so fiercely that about 200 PLO terrorists preferred to cross the river into Israel and surrender there rather than be captured by the Jordanians. In Palestinian history, this event is known as Black September.

The Israelis, sadly, have their own Black September, too, with more than 1,000 killed, thousands wounded, scores of orphans and widows and an entire nation traumatized. It all began so nicely though, that beautiful, sunny morning of Sept. 13, 1993, at the White House lawn. Moved, the world saw legendary Six-Day War hero Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands with mythical leader of the Palestinian revolution Yasser Arafat. Bitter enemies were making peace. The speeches were eloquent and hopeful. A new era had just begun.

Or so it seemed. For -.- when the signing-ceremony had ended, the applause had died out, the elite guests had parted, the diplomats had finished toasting and the Western media had heralded a promising awakening in the Middle East — the first crack in the just-inaugurated peace process occurred.

On that very day, just hours after speaking of peace to the world, the Palestinian leader was interviewed by Jordanian television. In Arabic, to an Arab audience, Arafat delivered a different message. He spoke of violence and destruction through a reference to the «1974 plan,» known in the Arab world as the «Phased Plan» for the annihilation of the Jewish state.

Thus began, with fooling and duplicity, the most controversial political process in contemporary Mideast history. A year later; Rabin, Shimon Peres and Arafat were awarded a Nobel Peace prize. Since then, Israel has been facing Palestinian atrocities and terror.

Events unfolded rather differently from the way that the the Oslo process envisioned. Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic; waves of suicidal-terror washed Israel with blood; Israeli society fractured along ideological lines; the political system suffered alarming instability ; and the economy deteriorated badly. Israel lost historically important and strategically valuable territories without gaining in regional recognition or international legitimacy. Israel is a nation still having to justify its existence in university classrooms, United Nations fora and newspaper oped pages.

Ten years ago, well-meaning Israelis rescued a bunch of radicals expelled from Jordan and Lebanon and welcomed them at home. They granted undeserved legitimacy to a gang of international criminals once chased by the police of 10 countries. They gave them assault rifles and a sanctuary from which to plan the war that would come.

This encouraged the family of nations to shower them with money and ended up facilitating the establishment of a terrorist entity on its borders. Incredible though it may sound, naive Israelis assisted the Palestinian revolution committed to its destruction. To call this a political miscalculation is to understate the meaning of criminal negligence.

In September 2000, with the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa intifada, the «disastrous experiment of sharing the Holy Land with the less holy of ail national movements of our time,» in Israeli commentator Yossi Klein Halevy’s words, came to an end. When it became evident that those previously seen as peaceful were in fact Jihadists in hibernation, visions of a new Middle East and fantasies about the brotherhood of men finally began to evaporate.

Sept. 13, 1993, will forever remain as a day of infamy in Israel’s history. As we mark tomorrow the 10th anniversary of this epic disaster, let us bear in mind its most important lesson: Never again shall wishful-thinking cloud political realism.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Buenos Aires.