By Graham Usher Prior to the Oslo accords, the PLO faced what for many of its supporters was an insufferable paradox. On the one hand, it had been strikingly successful in conferring international legitimacy on the national cause of its people. It was a legitimacy enshrined in numerous United Nations resolutions and endorsed at various international fora, including the UN General Assembly where, in 1989, Resolution 242 "along with the right to self-determination of the Palestinians" was passed by 151 votes to three. On the other hand, the PLO had been strikingly unsuccessful in wresting back from Israel a single inch of the land taken from its people, first in 1948, and then again in 1967. Five years after Oslo, that paradox no longer holds. The PLO -- now transmuted into the Palestinian Authority (PA) -- commands a form of limited self-government in around 6.6 per cent of mandate Palestine with the promise (made incessantly by its leaders) that this will evolve into a full sovereignty over 22 per cent, or the West Bank and Gaza as occupied by Israel in 1967. Yet it has achieved this by abandoning the international consensus to throw in its lot with those whom Noam Chomsky has termed the "real rejectionists" on the question of Palestine -- Israel and the US. In its increasingly unconditional pursuit of Israeli and US recognition of its representative status, the PLO, with and through Oslo, agreed to shelve those national goals of self-determination, return and Israeli withdrawal which had invested it with representative legitimacy. "The Palestinians have done their historic duty of saying yes" to the new US/Israeli order for the Middle East, commented Rashid Khalidi in 1993. What has been gained? In the period since Oslo, the PLO/PA leadership has largely given away the essence of a Palestinian position that had acquired international legitimacy over the preceding 25 years. On three of the crucial components of that position -- settlements, refugees and the international protection of Palestinians in the occupied territories -- it is now the Israeli rather than the Palestinian interpretation that prevails, both in the occupied territories where it had the power of military force and, internationally, where it did not. By agreeing to defer the issues of settlements and Jerusalem until the Oslo final status talks, and by trusting Yitzhak Rabin's purely verbal pledge to "freeze" new settlements in the occupied territories, the PLO has helped to conceal an actual Israeli settlement expansion that, according to Israeli monitors, has proceeded at three times the pace of settlement construction under the Shamir government of 1988-92. Under the Rabin/Peres coalition, the settler population in the occupied territories (excluding East Jerusalem) swelled from around 100,000 in 1992 to 160,000 in 1996. Under the present Likud coalition, there are 8,000 new settlement units now under construction in the West Bank and Gaza, excluding the 6,500 units that will eventually be built for the new Har Homa settlement at Jebel Abu Ghneim. Both Labour and Likud have targetted the expansion of settlements in the so-called "Greater Jerusalem" area and along the old Green Line, in effect shifting Israel's pre-1967 borders eastwards. Both either started or continued the construction of a 400km network of settler "by-pass" roads that will, for "security" purposes, be off-limits to Palestinians. The eventual territorial dispensation this augurs for any future Palestinian entity has been chillingly sketched by the Israeli analyst, Meron Benvenisti. "These decisions," he said, "have already disconnected the West Bank into two separate cantons ... and will turn a huge expanse, about 10 per cent of the entire West Bank, into a region in which it will be impossible to implement any final arrangement except by annexation to Israel." The fate of the 4 million or so Palestinian refugees who reside inside and outside the occupied territories has also taken a turn for the worse since Oslo. In confining the negotiations to those Palestinians "displaced" in the 1967 war, PLO negotiators have become mired in debates with Israel over the numbers and modalities of their return but have forsaken the principle that all refugees, by virtue of being refugees, are legally entitled to return and/or be compensated. The refugee question has thus ceased to be a matter of international law, but rather a subject for negotiations between Israel, the PLO and the refugees' host countries. This is a long sought-after Israeli objective, massively bolstered by the US decision, taken first at the 1993 UN General Assembly, to vote against all resolutions pertaining to the Palestinian refugees because "such resolutions prejudge the outcome of the ongoing peace process and should be solved by direct negotiations." Direct negotiations, should they ever be conducted and given the pressure Israel and the US can bring to bear, are likely to remove the basis of the refugees' case, especially those expelled in 1948. At best they will gain offers of permanent resettlement in their host countries; at worst, further dispersal. But the most crucial shortcoming is that since OsloIsrael has succeeded in imposing -- and getting -- PLO and international covenant for a definition of "peace" that rests on unconditional security for Israel but extremely conditional security for Palestinians, both under occupation and in the diaspora. By the spring of 1996, all movement in the Oslo process -- be it further Israeli redeployments, the final status talks or even relaxation of collective punishments like Israel's closure of the West Bank and Gaza -- hinged, in Shimon Peres' famous dictum, on "Arafat taking care of terror". This precept was consecrated under Binyamin Netanyahu in the notion of "reciprocity", in which each phase of a 13.1 per cent West Bank redeployment now becomes contingent on the PA suppressing Hamas, changing the PLO Charter and banning "incitement". According to PLO official Hani Al-Hassan, it is a formula that "must, and is intended to, fail". It would be easy to lay the blame for this state of affairs at the door of Yasser Arafat. Yet no matter how integral the personality and leadership of Arafat remains to Palestinian nationalism, the cause of the political defeat that Oslo now signifies cannot be so easily fixed. It is the bitter fruit of the structure of politics for which the PLO leadership and virtually all factions, including the opposition factions, bear a historic responsibility. Thus the challenges that face the Palestinians on Oslo's fifth anniversary go far beyond whether the negotiations with a Likud government should be suspended or whether it is wise to unilaterally declare a state at the formal end of Oslo's tenure in May 1999. The challenges are now whether the national goals of self-determination and return can any longer be realised in the formula of two states for two peoples and, more immediately, whether such claims can be waged through the PA as it is presently constituted or with Arafat exclusively at the helm. Given the symbiosis that up till now has reigned between Arafat, the PLO and nationalism, such thoughts may appear unthinkable. But, as Palestinian analyst Azmi Bishara has counselled, the time has come for them to be thought. "Having lost the goal of national liberation," he said in 1994, "the legitimacy of the present Palestinian leadership does not derive from this goal, that is the future, but from history, that is the past."
