The Oslo Process is Dead The Oslo peace process is dead. A new phase in the struggle for a genuine and meaningful Palestinian homeland has begun. This is not what Israel or the US government will admit. They would like to portray the current strife as the failure of Yasser Arafat to control the 'violent' elements within his jurisdiction which is supposed to have created a security crisis. Worse, the US and Israeli medias have sought to pin primary responsibility for the violence on the Palestinians although it is the latter who have suffered the overwhelming number of losses, almost entirely civilian, mostly youth, in a military confrontation where one side uses air strikes and has massive superiority in artillery while the other side uses mostly bricks and stones and sometimes small arms. What is extraordinary is not just the nature of a media coverage which claims that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is deliberately "sacrificing" the lives of children and teenagers to "embarrass" Israel but that such perversion of discourse and reality can be widely believed in Israel, the West and elsewhere. In reality what we have is not a security crisis but a political one. The deliberate ambiguities and obfuscations of the Oslo Accord or Declaration of Principles (DoP) in 1993 have finally exacted their price. Most governments including India's welcomed those accords. After all, the whole Palestinian issue had become terribly irksome and a barrier to Indian pursuit of better relations with Israel and the US. If the Palestinian issue could finally disappear behind some façade of a negotiated peace settlement so much the better. Besides, if Arafat was amenable to the sell-out why should other governments not welcome it. Only a few intransigent souls like Edward Said and the opposition to Arafat within the Palestinian Resistance (both inside and outside Al Fatah) understood the Oslo Accords for what they really were and placed their faith in the enduring determination and courage of the Palestinian masses when judging that it could not and would not work. Arafat accepted the DoP because after the comprehensive victory of the US in both the Gulf War and the Cold War he saw this as the only way to salvage his own position and retain some limited credibility. He bartered away not only diplomatic recognition of Israel but its permanent seizure of 78% of the territory originally mandated for Palestine in the 1947 UN Partition Plan in return for a much truncated Palestinian state whose actual powers and shape would still be uncertain and require further negotiations before being finalised. Even the "two-state solution" had a more just form. This was obedience to UN Resolutions 194 and 242 respectively calling for the right of return of, and compensation to, Palestinian refugees and declaring the inadmissibility of all territories acquired by Israel through the 1967 war and subsequent military advances, i.e. its full withdrawal from such acquired territories. The Oslo Accords which made the US the principal broker of the deal ignored the UN and these resolutions, that is, sought deliberately to legitimize Israel's territorial gains and at the same time refused to assure the Palestinians that they would ever get a fully sovereign or territorially contiguous state. The DoP left five vital issues unresolved and hostage to the future relationship of forces which it was safely assumed would favour Israel thus leading to greater concessions to it than for the desperate Arafat-led PLO. These were 1) the status of East Jerusalem; 2) the right to return of Palestinian refugees; 3) the disposition of Israeli settlements which far from winding down have systematically expanded since 1993; 4) the final borders between Israel and the new Palestinian state; 5) whether such a state would even enjoy full sovereign powers such as the right to have its own armed forces and complete freedom (independence from Israel) in its foreign and domestic policies. In the meantime the PA would have some municipal powers (but not even full control over its water sources) and act as the proxy police force to guard over Palestinians on behalf of the Israeli state. Jewish settlements would remain and the PA controlled territory would be criss-crossed by Israeli controlled areas and security forces. When the October 2000 deadline for declaring a Palestinian state neared not only did it prove impossible to resolve these issues in any way which would have been acceptable to the Palestinian people (despite Arafat's willingness to go a long way down the road with Israel) but there was the deliberate provocation of the Israeli rightwing not willing to accept even the shabby dynamic of the shameful Oslo deal. This took the shape of Ariel Sharon's visit to al-Haram-al- Sharif on September 28. Sharon it should be remembered was responsible for the 1971 repression in the Gaza Strip. As defence minister in 1982 he led the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon and was indicted by an Israeli tribunal for indirect responsibility for the Shabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinian refugees. As housing minister in the 1990s he promoted the aggressive construction drive of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. He is at the forefront of the current effort to maintain for as long as possible the effective colonization of the Palestinian people. Arafat today has no choice but to go along with the basic sentiment of the Palestinian people which will not accept the Bantustanization of their territory or so comprehensive a betrayal of their aspirations. Arafat does not control all of Al Fatah much of which will break from him completely if he tries to restore the Oslo Accords, and link more closely with the various Islamic groups who are part of the new Intifada but in even less control than Al Fatah of the general swell of spontaneous anger and resistance by young Palestinians mainly in the 15 to 25 age group who have been prepared to put their lives on the line in this remarkable struggle for a truly free Palestine. Even if some peace is brokered by the US or a temporary peace of battle fatigue eventually sets in on the Palestinian side, the Oslo deal is finished. Even on the Israeli side, public opinion has greatly hardened and swung to the right. A new election will probably see the strengthening of the likes of Sharon and his ilk. Given the tragic history of Jews in the last century, the enormity of the crime of the Holocaust, Israel's Jews more than anyone else should have been the most sensitive to the crime and injustice perpetrated on the Palestinians. They could not be because of the fundamental contradiction that has always lain at the heart of the formation of Zionist Israel. To try and rectify the historical injustice done to Jews through the creation of a Jewish homeland wresting territory away from a people not themselves responsible for that historical injustice has itself been a deep injustice and therefore no legitimate rectification at all. This, Israel's Jews and world Jewry (with rare exceptions) have never been able to acknowledge for how then could they see themselves as history's "oppressed" when they themselves have become "oppressors"! From that original blindness followed the inevitable moral slide. It became so easy for the Israeli government ever since 1948 to support Western imperialism, the apartheid regime, South Vietnam, and in fact any and every dictatorial regime that was prepared to accept its usurpation of Palestine and repression of its people. We have come a long way since 1948. The Palestinian Resistance moved from rejecting Israel to proposing a non-Zionist and shared democratic, secular Palestine-Israel with equal rights for Arabs and Jews 'solution' to proposing a reasonably just and fair "two-state solution". Israel, the US and a world comity of nations with very few exceptions (India and its 'national interest/national security' elite is not one of them) have been content to witness the erosion of all these efforts for any shabby compromise that would allow the issue to permanently fade away. Only by their heroism and integrity have ordinary Palestinians made sure that what has happened to them will not easily become another forgotten injustice of history. Copyright 2000 The Hindu |
