"It was designed to make sure there would never be a Palestinian state," says Diana Buttu, Palestinian analyst and former legal adviser to the PLO. "They made it clear that they weren't going to include the phrases 'two-state solution,' 'Palestinian state,' or 'independence.' It was completely designed to make sure the Palestinians wouldn't have their freedom."
The Failure of Oslo
The question worth asking on this 25th anniversary of those accords, which essentially drove policy in the U.S., Israel, the Palestinian occupied territories, and European capitals for a quarter of a century, is this: Were they doomed from the beginning? Billions of dollars and endless rounds of failed negotiations later, did Oslo ever really have a chance to succeed?
"I think it's wrong to retroactively say that it was all a trick," says Salim Tamari from the Jerusalem Quarterly's editorial offices, once located in that holy city, now in Ramallah. The initial agreement was void of specifics, leaving the major issues -- settlements, Jerusalem, control of water, refugees and their right of return -- to "final status negotiations." Israel, Tamari believes, unlike the Palestinians, achieved a major goal from the outset. "The Israelis wanted above all to have a security arrangement."
In "Oslo II," implemented in 1995, Israel got its cherished security cooperation, which meant that Palestinian police would control Palestinian demonstrators and so keep them from directly confronting Israeli forces. Those were, of course, the very confrontations that had helped fuel the success of the First Intifada, creating the conditions for Oslo. Today, that's a bitter irony for Palestinians who sacrificed family members or limbs for what turned out to be such a weak agreement. But at the time, for many, it seemed worth the price.
For Palestinians, Oslo remained a kind of tabula rasa of hopes and dreams based on the formula of getting an agreement first and working out the details later. "Arafat thought that if he was able to get into the Palestinian territories, he would manage his relations with the Israelis," says Ghassan Khatib, former minister of labor and planning for the Palestinian Authority (PA) as well as a prominent analyst and pollster. "And he did not pay attention to the details in the written documents."
More important to Arafat was simply to return from exile in Tunisia and then convince Israel to end its settlement policies, give Palestinians East Jerusalem, share the region's water supplies, and come to an equitable agreement on the right of return for Palestinian refugees dispossessed in 1948. Yet Arafat and his cadre of fellow PLO officials from the diaspora, Khatib argues, "had no real understanding of or expertise in the Israeli way of doing things, the Israeli mentality, etcetera, etcetera."
Just as bad, says Omar Shaban of the Gaza think tank Pal-Think, was the ineptitude of Palestinian institutions in convincing Israelis that they could govern competently. "We didn't do a very good job... We did not build good institutions. We did not build real democracy. And we did not speak enough to the Israeli public... [to] convince them that we are here to work together, to build together," and that "peace is good for the Israeli people."
For Gershon Baskin, however, the failure of Oslo had far less to do with any cultural misunderstandings or bureaucratic mismanagement and far more to do with an act of political violence: the assassination of Rabin by an Israeli right-wing extremist in 1995. His death was "the major event that changed the course of Oslo."
As Baskin, who served as an adviser to Rabin's intelligence team for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, recalls, "I know what kind of direction Rabin was moving in when he agreed to Oslo." In the early Oslo years, the prime minister's deputies were at work on secret negotiations with the Palestinians -- the Geneva Accords and the Beilin-Abu Mazen agreement -- that would have made major territorial concessions and called for East Jerusalem to be the future Palestinian capital. Some Palestinians were not impressed; they noted that by approving of the Oslo accords, they had already agreed to cede 78% of historic Palestine, settling for the 22% that remained: the West Bank and Gaza. And they pointed out that some settlements remained in both of these unofficial agreements and that neither included any kind of Palestinian right of return -- considered by Israelis as a potential death blow to their state and by countless Palestinians uprooted in 1948 as a non-negotiable issue.
"There's so much revisionist history," Diana Buttu says. She points out that when American settler Baruch Goldstein assassinated 29 Palestinians praying in a mosque in Hebron in 1994, Rabin could have seized the moment to end the settlements. Instead, she points out, he "entrenched the army, entrenched the settlements. It's very cute for them to say it all related to the assassination of Rabin. But it really relates to what he intended to do in the first place."
The Soldiers Take Control
Yet Baskin believes that when Rabin, having just addressed 100,000 Israelis at a peace rally in Tel Aviv, was gunned down, Israeli priorities changed strikingly. "It was a peace process taken over by the military and the security people who had a very different understanding of how to do it." This "change of mentality," he adds, went "from cooperation and bridge building to walls and fence building -- creating a system of separation, of permits, of restriction of movement." The division of the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C, or ostensibly full Palestinian control (18%), joint control (22%), and full Israeli military control (60%), was supposed to be temporary, but it has remained the status quo for a quarter of a century.
Whatever the motives and intentions of the Israeli architects of Oslo, they were soon superseded by Israelis who saw the claim of Eretz Israel -- all the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River -- as a prime territorial goal. As a result, the endless expansion of settlements (and the creation of new ones), as well as seizures of Palestinian lands in the West Bank and even of individual Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem neighborhoods, has become the endgame for successive Israeli governments, abetted by their American counterparts. "The basic fact is that Israel has their cake and they're eating it," says Tamari. "They have the territories. They're not withdrawing. They're happy with the security of A, B, and C. There's no pressure on them from the Americans. On the contrary."
In the Oslo era, American presidents and secretaries of state, at most, issued mild diplomatic rebukes for settlement building, never threatening to suspend U.S. aid if Israel didn't stop undermining the "peace process." The last time that happened was when Secretary of State James Baker threatened to suspend $10 billion in loan guarantees to Israel during the presidency of George H.W. Bush in 1992.
And so, steadily, with every new visit to the Holy Land, I would witness the latest evidence of an expanding occupation -- new or larger settlements and military bases, more patrols by jeeps and armored vehicles, new surveillance towers, additional earthen barriers, giant red and white warning signs, and most of all, hundreds of military checkpoints, ever more ubiquitous, on virtually every mile of the West Bank. Less visible were the night raids on Palestinian refugee camps and the nearly 40% of Palestinian adult males who have spent time in Israeli prisons, where the military court conviction rate for them is 99.74%. Also on the increase was the Palestinian Authority's expanding "security cooperation" with Israel. That, in turn, often pitted Palestinians against each other, embittering villagers and city dwellers alike against the governing PA.
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