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Oslo Accords

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aliasesOslo Agreement, Oslo process

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Summary

The peace process begun in September 1993 under Yitzhak Rabin. In Pappe’s account in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, its concept was a Zionist one from which the Nakba was totally absent: its architects were Israeli ‘peace camp’ intellectuals who had always evaded 1948, and it broke down in 2000 over the Right of Return it had excluded.

Details

  • At the centre of Rabin’s peace efforts stood the Oslo Accords that began rolling in September 1993; the Nakba was totally absent from the concept, and Peace Now architects had always evaded the 1948 issue and sidelined the refugee question (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.278).

  • The architects seemed to have found a Palestinian partner in Yasir Arafat for a peace that buried 1948 and its victims; the false hopes raised had dire consequences, in a vicious circle of suicide attacks and harsher Israeli retaliation (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.278).

  • Rabin had pushed for the 1994 Oslo B agreement that, in Pappe’s words, effectively caged the Palestinians in the West Bank into several Bantustans (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.277).

  • Oslo’s rationale promised the Palestinian leadership that after a waiting period of five to ten years, during which Israel would partially withdraw, the essentials of the conflict would be on the table in the final phase — which the Palestinians believed had come at Camp David in summer 2000 (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.278-279).

  • The Nakba had been so effectively kept off the agenda that when it appeared at Camp David the Israelis felt a Pandora’s box had been opened; after Oslo, reminding audiences that the conflict is at heart about the refugees cleansed in 1948 became a more formidable task (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.281).

  • Pappe argues that unless Israel acknowledges its role in the dispossession, attempts to solve the conflict are bound to fail, as became clear in 2000 when the Oslo initiative broke down over the Palestinians’ Right of Return (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.291).

  • Many Palestinians are not under occupation, Pappe writes in the Epilogue, but live in the lawless and authority-less areas in Gaza and the West Bank created by the disastrous Oslo accord in the 1990s (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.298).

  • In Makdisi, Oslo’s “fleeting moment of optimism in the early 1990s” drew thousands of Palestinians back to build a state (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.39-40), but despite “the nominal return of parts of the West Bank to Palestinian self-rule”, Israel retained the Population registry and family unification, borders, water, airspace and taxation (PDF p.40); the praise pages quote Yitzhak Laor that after nearly two decades of the Oslo “peace process” Palestinians “have in fact no independence, no authority, and no control over most aspects of their everyday lives” (PDF p.4-5), and the ICJ held the accords had not altered the territories’ occupied status (PDF p.60).

  • Makdisi, part 2, gives the fullest statement of his Oslo argument: the accords were a repackaging of the Allon Plan on four principles — Palestinians treated as not a single people; fragmentation of the territory into units separated by Israeli control; day-to-day administration transferred to a severely limited Palestinian Authority; and Israeli control of all external borders, airspace and territorial waters (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.128-129). The general closure barring West Bank and Gaza Palestinians from Jerusalem was announced as the negotiations began in 1993 and remains in effect (PDF p.129).

  • Under Oslo II the PA’s limited control peaked at Area A, under 18 percent of the West Bank in dozens of separate pieces; Area B (22 percent) was PA-administered for population but physically under Israeli army control; Area C (about 60 percent) remained under direct Israeli rule, where by the process’s breakdown 80 percent of the West Bank’s water was devoted to Israeli use and the settler population had doubled since 1993 (PDF p.132).

  • Israel retained the Population registry and family unification, tax collection and a veto over Palestinian legislation; the ICJ’s 2004 Advisory Opinion reaffirmed Israel’s status as occupying power despite the accords (PDF p.130-132).

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Right of Return, Peace Now, Yasir Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak

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