The members of the Labor Party punished Yossi Beilin in last week´s primaries when they relegated him to an unrealistic place. Beilin, unable to lose with honor, hurriedly tried to secure himself a Knesset seat by joining Meretz at the last moment.

No one has been more closely identified with the Oslo Accords than Beilin. Although most Jews regard Oslo as the source of the evil that led directly to the Palestinian terrorist offensive, Beilin continues to believe in the agreement, and in the partner to it, Yasser Arafat.

As a result Beilin has garnered more continuous media exposure than most other Labor Party Knesset candidates, people such as Yuli Tamir and Colette Avital, for example. Despite this, however, they got good places on the Knesset list while Beilin was humiliated.

As deputy foreign minister under Shimon Peres, from the end of 1992 onwards Beilin directed the secret, illegal contacts with the PLO behind prime minister Yitzhak Rabin´s back. Rabin first learned about the contacts from a secret Mossad report.

After Rabin fell into the trap with his eyes open, Beilin continued as the motivating force behind the implementation of an agreement which brought Arafat and thousands of his armed terrorists into the heart of Israel.

As minister of justice in Ehud Barak´s government, during the negotiations in Taba Beilin was prepared to make an initial concession to Arafat at the beginning of 2001, even regarding the "right of return," and he called for the settlements to be uprooted en masse, and for a return to the 1967 "ghetto borders."

Hardly surprising, then, that Beilin became so well-liked by Arafat and his gang. They regarded him less as a political Trojan horse, more as a Trojan donkey, using him to deceive the Jews into thinking that if only they retreated from the territories they would get peace.

To the Arabists in the US State Department, Beilin was a man after their own hearts. And wealthy, naive Jews in the US, Europe - and Israel - helped him, enticed into believing that he was the prophet of peace and the Oslo Accords his doctrine.

NOT EVEN when Arafat sent his human bombs to Israel and financed other terrorist operations did Beilin cease his active opposition to the policy of the national-unity government, in which the person who invented Beilin the politician was also a member. But at least Peres, while serving in Sharon´s government, occasionally attempted to create an impression of trying to correct the terrible damage Oslo had caused.

Not only did Beilin not forgive Peres for this, he called on him to resign from the government, while continuing to preach in public, as well as in conversations with diplomats in Europe and the US, that Israel should give in to Arafat´s demands and negotiate even while the terror continued. All the blame, he explained, lay with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his policy.

Beilin spread this poisonous propaganda on CNN and other world media, helping to blacken the image of a state fighting for its very existence.

When US Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Jerusalem last April, Beilin went so far as to request a meeting. Powell´s visit followed the Palestinian suicide bombing in which 29 Jews were slaughtered on Seder night in Netanya´s Park Hotel, triggering the IDF´s Defensive Shield operation in Judea and Samaria.

In the meeting with Powell, Beilin -- who was not even an MK -- again talked as if he had a mandate from the nation to tell the secretary that Israel needed to make immediate concessions to Arafat and his gang, and, of course, lift the siege imposed on Arafat´s Mukata headquarters in Ramallah.

"Who is this Beilin?" Powell later asked Sharon in amazement.

"An apparatchik," Sharon replied, dryly.

Last week the members of the Labor Party confirmed that Beilin is indeed no more than an apparatchik. Suddenly the air has rushed out of this balloon, out of the advocate of surrender to the PLO and Arafat.

Every Israeli government until now has avoided setting up a commission of inquiry into those who were responsible for the Oslo agreement. But the Labor Party members have handed down their verdict on its incorrigible prophet.

It is the first sign, albeit a small one, of the process of national recovery. The writer is the Mideast correspondent of The New York Post. (© 1995-2002, The Jerusalem Post 12/18/02)