Against history

Oslo not only crippled the peace process, writes Saleh Abdel-Jawwad* in the second of two articles, it signed away some of the Palestinians' most fundamental rights
"The renewed onslaught of land confiscation, settlement expansion and ring roads generated astounding demographic changes. At the time of Oslo, the total amount of confiscated land stood at some 16,000 dunums. A year later, this figure had doubled, setting a pace for land confiscation that would remain constant throughout Rabin's and Netanyahu's rule"
The Oslo accords and the entire compilation of associated agreements, protocols and annexes are so numerous, ambiguous, voluminous and detailed as to stump even the most proficient legal experts. Suffice it to say -- and this is no joke -- that these documents get down to specifying the size, colour and texture of beans the Palestinians are allowed to import (pp. 313-314 of The Interim Agreement of the West Bank and Gaza, Washington, 28 September 1995).
Regardless of the textual deficiencies of the agreements, what is important here is that the negotiating process failed because the Israelis themselves were never satisfied with what these agreements brought them and because they consistently failed to implement the few provisions that were favourable to the Palestinians.
The Palestinians, of course, knew that the Oslo agreement was unfair. As the French journalist Eric Rouleau observed, justice will only be realised when the Palestinian refugees are allowed to return to their land and their homes. Nevertheless, when they signed it -- and, in the process, signed away the historical territorial claims of the Palestinian people, or at least their right to 44 per cent of the original land of Palestine, as stipulated by Resolution 181 for the Partition of Palestine -- they still entertained the hope of a settlement that would guarantee the establishment of a Palestinian state within the full boundaries of 4 June 1967.
Palestinian lawyers such as Raja Shihadeh had cautioned against departing from the authority of the full body of UN documents and settling instead for binding agreements and the vaguely worded Security Council Resolution 242, even if its preamble condemned occupation by force. Moreover, Palestinian negotiators signed agreements in which there was no direct mention of a Palestinian state, and no mention of self-determination, a right that has been the basis of international law since the end of World War II. The force of numerous pressures, poor negotiating skills and Israeli greed embroiled the Palestinians in a series of peace agreements unprecedented in history.
The first setback the peace process suffered stemmed from Israel's refusal to release all Palestinian political prisoners, a measure the Palestinians had expected would be implemented immediately following the signing of the Declaration of Principles. Their expectations were only natural. The immediate release of prisoners of war following the formal cessation of hostilities, regardless of their actions during combat, is universally accepted practice.
Israel protested that it would never release people "whose hands were stained with Jewish blood," disregarding the fact that thousands of Israelis not only had their hands stained with Palestinian and Arab blood, but had committed full-scale massacres. Moreover, this Israeli criterion could only have applied to a few of the 4,500 Palestinians Israel was detaining at the time, most of whom had spent the greater portion of Israeli rule behind bars.
The Palestinians, who saw their political prisoners as freedom fighters, could not understand how Israel could come to terms with those its society had branded terrorist leaders, yet refuse adamantly to release the simple soldiers that were under their command. Nor was there any sense in the fact that in the past Israel had released over 7,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a few Israeli soldiers, and yet now, in the wake of an historic agreement, refused to release half that number. Israeli intransigence on this issue provoked intense resentment among the Palestinian people and has contributed to undermining the credibility of the peace process for seven years.
Hardly four months had passed since the ceremony on the White House lawn when there occurred an incident that would stun the Palestinians and the world. On 26 February 1994, an Israeli doctor and reserve officer from Kiryat Arba entered the Ibrahimi Mosque, a site sacred to both Arabs and Jews. Although he was fully armed, the guards had let him pass. It was prayer time during Ramadan and the mosque was full. In a matter of seconds, Baruch Goldstein had released a hail of machine-gun fire, killing and wounding dozens of innocent worshippers.
The massacre perpetrated by this Israeli reservist could have been passed off as the individual act of a madman or a fanatic opposed to the peace agreement from either side, were it not for the actions of the Israeli authorities during and after the massacre. During the assault, not only did the Israeli guards around the mosque fail to take measures to disarm the assailant; they opened fire on the defenceless worshippers who had taken that action into their own hands. When news of the massacre got out, thousands of frightened and angry citizens of Hebron rushed to the general hospital in order to donate blood and learn the identity of the victims. Instead of showing an ounce of compassion, Israeli soldiers opened fire on the crowds, killing at least another seven people in the vicinity of the hospital. During the demonstrations that erupted in the wake of these incidents, 17 more Palestinian youths were sent to their graves.
In over 33 years of occupation, Jewish settlers have killed hundreds of Arabs and committed acts of aggression in flagrant violation of Israeli law. Not once during all this time did an Israeli soldier fire so much as a warning shot to avert Jewish assailants. This is a clear violation of the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which stipulates that occupying powers must protect the civilian populations under occupation.
Had an Arab committed such a massacre, the Israelis would have arrested the assailant's extended family, bulldozed his home, killed another dozen Palestinians for good measure, imposed curfews, prohibited freedom of movement and travel -- in short, the collective punishment they routinely inflict. Goldstein, being a Jew, was buried with honours, his gun was returned to his wife and his grave became a destination for devotion and pilgrimage. Hebron, a city of 120,000, was placed under curfew for 40 days; the West Bank and Gaza remained under curfew for several weeks, bringing economic life and education to a complete halt. The entire Palestinian population was effectively imprisoned, ostensibly to protect 60 extremist Jewish families who had settled in the heart of Hebron, and whom the massacre allowed to make further encroachments into the city, close down the main street for five years and change the rules for gaining entrance into the Ibrahimi sanctuary.
For the Palestinians, the massacre in Hebron marked the turning point in the peace process. Any residual confidence in it had been irretrievably eroded. It was also a direct cause of the shift in the tactics of Hamas, which now began to mount reprisals against Israeli civilians through such operations as suicide bombings. Initially at least, the Hamas operations were welcomed by a broad segment of Palestinians, as they seemed to answer the desire for revenge and the prevailing sense of powerlessness and frustration. Simultaneously, they began to erode support for the peace process in Israeli society, unable to comprehend why an era of peace was claiming victims in its turn. This vicious circle led to the assassination of Rabin, who paid for his indecision, and his inability to stand up to the Israeli settlers and extremists; it also brought about the electoral victory of ultra-right demagogue Binyamin Netanyahu, beneath a banner of "peace with security."
Another important cause of Palestinian loss of faith in the peace process was the continuing process of land confiscation and settlement construction. Indeed, the hope that Oslo would bring this process to a halt was one major reason it received such popular approval despite its shortcomings. Israel, however, felt the agreement freed its hand in this area.
The Palestinians could not believe their eyes when, only days after the Oslo accord was signed, Israeli bulldozers started a new and intense burst of activity. Since 1967, these machines have been the symbol of an invincible occupation. They have razed Palestinians' homes, destroyed their fields, plowed down their orchards, transformed the countryside into concrete blocks.
Now, after Oslo, the people of Ramallah and Al-Bira watched as the buildings and borders of a mammoth settlement sprawled inexorably towards the Nablus-Jerusalem road. The Israelis no longer even bothered to notify the Palestinians that their property was about to be seized and demolished in order to make way for the expanding settlement -- in which homes, moreover, were not the usual prefab units, but were built with an eye to permanence.
The same phenomenon proceeded relentlessly throughout the West Bank and Jerusalem. It served several purposes: to create new realities on the ground, to gain full control over the main thoroughfares, and to transform the West Bank into a checkerboard of isolated cantonments, all of which constituted flagrant violations of the fourth article of the Oslo accord, which stated unequivocally that the West Bank and Gaza are a single territorial entity the integrity of which must be preserved during the interim period.
What gave the Israelis licence to launch this new wave of encroachment on Palestinian land? Quite simply, the Palestinian negotiators in Oslo had been duped into agreeing to the construction of a system of ring roads. By circumventing Palestinian towns and villages, the Israelis told them, these roads would help reduce friction between Jewish settlers and Arabs during the interim period and therefore would help bolster the peace process. Also, they added, there would be only a few new roads and these would be only temporary.
By the end of 1998, the new ring roads had engulfed more than 25,000 dunums (each dunum is 900 square metres) of Palestinian land. A highly efficient highway network linked the settlements with one another and with Israel, enabling the even greater intensification of settlement expansion. Thousands of Israelis who were not necessarily ideologically inclined to live in the colonies now had access to more affordable housing with an easy commute to their places of work. Another spin-off was that the ring roads placed physical boundaries on the urban expansion of the West Bank's seven major Palestinian cities.
The renewed onslaught of land confiscation, settlement expansion and ring roads generated astounding demographic changes. At the time of Oslo, the total amount of confiscated land stood at some 16,000 dunums. A year later, this figure had doubled, setting a pace for land confiscation that would remain constant throughout Rabin's and Netanyahu's rule. In addition, if it took 25 years of occupation (from 1967 to 1992) for the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, excluding Arab Jerusalem, to reach 100,000, it took only six years after Oslo for this figure to climb to 180,000. Faced with the reality of this process and the callousness and cynicism with which it was carried out, it is not difficult to perceive why Palestinians should have become so suspicious of Israel's intentions and so sceptical about the difference between the Israeli left and right.
More explosive yet was the ongoing Judaisation of East Jerusalem. From 22,000 settlers at the time of the signing of the Oslo accord, the figure skyrocketed to 170,000 by the end of the 1990s. This process of de facto annexation involved not only the staking out and construction of new settlements, but also encroachment on the Palestinian quarters of the Old City. In these areas, totalling only a few square kilometres, the Israelis have adopted a deliberate policy of squeezing out the local inhabitants through various restrictive measures, relocating various agencies outside the area, decimating the city's economy by cutting it off entirely from the remainder of the West Bank, and demolishing Arab homes on the specious pretext that they were built without legal permits.
Throughout the West Bank and Gaza, the Israelis sought to impede the development of any economic infrastructure that might give sustenance to an independent political entity. This process of economic strangulation also enabled them first to secure a source of cheap Arab labour; second, to maintain control over water supplies; and third, to flood Palestinian markets with Israeli agricultural and industrial products. The effects of this process on Palestinian agriculture and industry were disastrous: it transformed the bulk of the Palestinian labour force into an enormous proletarian underclass, forced into the most menial jobs without legal or union support. Over 70 per cent of the labour force in Gaza now is directly dependent on the Israeli economy.
The Gulf War gave rise to new strategies for economic strangulation and subjugation. Following the lengthy curfew imposed on the Palestinian territories during this period, the cancellation of Palestinian workers' entry permits into Israel, and the return of the Green Line as a boundary, strict work permit regulations were imposed and Israeli employers were now obliged to register their employees. At first, these regulations were applied to men, but it was not long before the stringent conditions for obtaining a work permit were extended to women, children and the elderly. Initially, the objective of these measures was to tighten the barrier between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza. Eventually, however, they succeeded in separating the West Bank from Gaza and, in a third phase, isolating Jerusalem from the West Bank. Palestinian territory was now partitioned into three separate and isolated entities, that could be closed off independently or, as the Israeli authorities were wont to do on occasion, subjected to a full-scale blockade, impeding all movement not only between one area and the next, but also between neighbouring villages. The Oslo accord effected further divisions that gave additional impetus to Israel's confiscation of the West Bank, with areas A and B comprising three and 27 per cent of the land respectively, leaving the remaining 70 per cent under full control of the occupation authorities.
These developments did not come as a surprise to many Palestinian intellectuals, who had cautioned against abandoning the terms of reference of international law, such as UN General Assembly Resolution 181, calling for the establishment of a fully sovereign Palestinian state, and Resolution 194 asserting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes or to obtain appropriate compensation. Equally, if not more importantly, by signing the Oslo accords the Palestinian negotiators tacitly removed the West Bank and Gaza from the full authority of the Fourth Geneva Convention governing the rights of peoples in occupied territories. Oslo's recognition of Resolution 242, with its vague reference to the inadmissibility of the occupation of others' land by force, is insufficient, if in keeping with the overall ambiguity of the Declaration of Principles. Of greatest consequence, however, were the nebulous and complex security arrangements, all of which the Palestinian negotiators accepted unhesitatingly (with a few token compromises), thus enabling the Israeli authorities to produce very tangible results on the ground. It is little wonder, therefore, that the Oslo accord not only failed to become an historic settlement, but will go down as a settlement that flies in the face of history.
* The writer is a professor of political science at Bir Zeit University, Ramallah.
Recommend this page
Related stories:
Secret weaknesses 8 - 14 March 2001
Ending the fiction 28 Dec. 2000 - 3 Jan. 2001
Demons no longer deferred 13 - 19 July 2000
The Oslo show 4 - 10 November 1999
Beyond Camp David 3 - 9 June 1999
Oslo's harvest 10 - 16 September 1998
Oslo's fruits 3 - 9 September 1998
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
Send a letter to the Editor