The End of Oslo

Misreported and flawed from the start, the Oslo peace
process has entered its terminal phase of violent
confrontation, disproportionately massive Israeli
repression, widespread Palestinian rebellion and great
loss of life, mainly Palestinian. Ariel Sharon's
September 28 visit to Haram al Sharif could not have
occurred without Ehud Barak's concurrence; how else
could Sharon have appeared there with at least a
thousand soldiers guarding him? Barak's approval
rating rose from 20 to 50 percent after the visit, and
the stage seems set for a national unity government
ready to be still more violent and repressive.

The portents of this disarray, however, were there
from the 1993 start, as I duly noted in The Nation
(September 20, 1993). Labor and Likud leaders alike
made no secret of the fact that Oslo was designed to
segregate the Palestinians in noncontiguous,
economically unviable enclaves, surrounded by
Israeli-controlled borders, with settlements and
settlement roads punctuating and essentially violating
the territories' integrity. Expropriations and house
demolitions proceeded inexorably through the Rabin,
Peres, Netanyahu and Barak administrations, along with
the expansion and multiplication of settlements
(200,000 Israeli Jews added to Jerusalem, 200,000 more
in Gaza and the West Bank), military occupation
continuing and every tiny step taken toward
Palestinian sovereignty--including agreements to
withdraw in minuscule, agreed-upon phases--stymied,
delayed, canceled at Israel's will.

This method was politically and strategically absurd.
Occupied East Jerusalem was placed out of bounds by a
bellicose Israeli campaign to decree the intractably
divided city off-limits to West Bank and Gaza
Palestinians and to claim it as Israel's "eternal,
undivided capital." The 4 million Palestinian
refugees--now the largest and longest existing such
population anywhere--were told that they could forget
about return or compensation. With his own corrupt and
repressive regime supported by both Israel's Mossad
and the CIA, Yasir Arafat continued to rely on US
mediation, even though the US negotiating team was
dominated by former Israeli lobby officials and a
President whose ideas about the Middle East showed no
understanding of the Arab-Islamic world. Compliant but
isolated and unpopular Arab chiefs (especially Egypt's
Hosni Mubarak) were humiliatingly compelled to toe the
American line, thereby further diminishing their
eroded credibility at home. Israel's priorities were
always put first. No attempt was made to address the
injustice done when the Palestinians were dispossessed
in 1948.

Back of the peace process were two unchanging
Israeli/American presuppositions, both of them derived
from a startling incomprehension of reality. The first
was that after enough punishment and beating,
Palestinians would give up, accept the compromises
Arafat did in fact accept and call the whole
Palestinian cause off, thereafter excusing Israel for
everything it has done. Thus, the "peace process" gave
no considered attention to immense Palestinian losses
of land and goods, or to the links between past
dislocation and present statelessness, while as a
nuclear power with a formidable military, Israel
continued to claim the status of victim and demand
restitution for genocidal anti-Semitism in Europe.
There has still been no official acknowledgment of
Israel's (by now amply documented) responsibility for
the tragedy of 1948. But one can't force people to
forget, especially when the daily reality is seen by
all Arabs as reproducing the original injustice.

Second, after seven years of steadily worsening
economic and social conditions for Palestinians
everywhere, Israeli and US policy-makers persisted in
trumpeting their successes, excluding the United
Nations and other interested parties, bending the
partisan media to their wills, distorting the
actuality into ephemeral victories for "peace." With
the entire Arab world up in arms over Israeli
helicopter gunships and tanks demolishing Palestinian
civilian buildings, with almost 100 fatalities and
almost 2,000 wounded, including many children, and
with Palestinian Israelis rising up against their
treatment as third-class citizens, the misaligned and
skewed status quo is falling apart. Isolated in the UN
and unloved everywhere in the Arab world as Israel's
unconditional champion, the United States and its
lame-duck President have little to contribute.

Neither does the Arab and Israeli leadership, even
though they are likely to cobble up another interim
agreement. Extraordinary has been the virtual silence
of the Zionist peace camp in the United States, Europe
and Israel. The slaughter of Palestinian youths goes
on while they back Israeli brutality or express
disappointment at Palestinian ingratitude. Worst of
all are the US media, cowed by the fearsome Israeli
lobby, with commentators and anchors spinning
distorted reports about "crossfire" and "Palestinian
violence" that eliminate the fact that Israel is in
military occupation and that Palestinians are fighting
it, not "laying siege to Israel," as Madeleine
Albright put it. While the United States celebrates
the Serbian people's victory over Milosevic, Clinton
and his aides refuse to see the Palestinian insurgency
as the same kind of struggle against injustice.

My guess is that some of the new Palestinian intifada
is directed at Arafat, who has led his people astray
with phony promises and maintains a battery of corrupt
officials holding down commercial monopolies even as
they negotiate incompetently and weakly on his behalf.
Sixty percent of the public budget is disbursed by
Arafat to bureaucracy and security, only 2 percent to
the infrastructure. Three years ago his own
accountants admitted to an annual $400 million in
disappeared funds. His international patrons accept
this in the name of the "peace process," certainly the
most hated phrase in the Palestinian lexicon today.

An alternative peace plan and leadership is slowly
emerging among leading Israeli, West Bank, Gaza and
diaspora Palestinians, a thousand of whom have signed
a set of declarations that have great popular support:
no return to the Oslo framework; no compromise on the
original UN Resolutions (242, 338 and 194) on the
basis of which the Madrid Conference was convened in
1991; removal of all settlements and military roads;
evacuation of all the territories annexed or occupied
in 1967; boycott of Israeli goods and services. A new
sense may actually be dawning that only a mass
movement against Israeli apartheid (similar to South
Africa's) will work. Certainly it is wrong for Barak
and Albright to hold Arafat responsible for what he no
longer fully controls. Rather than dismiss the new
framework being proposed, Israel's supporters would be
wise to remember that the question of Palestine
concerns an entire people, not an aging and
discredited leader. Besides, peace in Palestine/Israel
can be made only between equals once the military
occupation has ended. No Palestinian, not even Arafat,
can really accept anything less.

arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)