The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After

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Ever since it began secretly in Oslo and was signed on the White House lawn in September 1993, the Middle East "peace process" has seemed to me not only inevitable in its course but certain in its conclusion. Despite various apparent setbacks -- from the 1994 Hebron massacre, to Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in 1995, to the various Palestinian suicide bombings and subsequent closures of territory, to, most recently, the destructive Benjamin Netanyahu period 1996-9 -- the sheer disparity in power between the United States and Israel, on the one hand, and the Palestinians as well as the Arab states on the other, has dictated that inevitability and its conclusions: the Oslo agreements would end in apparent success. As Avi Shlaim, the Israeli revisionist historian, puts it in a new book The Iron Wall, it "was the assessment of the IDF director of military intelligence that Arafat's dire situation [in 1992], and possible imminent collapse, [that] made him the most convenient interlocutor for Israel . . ." With Ehud Barak's assumption of power in May 1999 things have certainly speeded up, so much so that a comprehensive peace between Israel, the Palestinians, Syria, and Lebanon will very likely be signed, if not completely implemented, within a year or so. All the parties seem to want it. The Arab states, Egypt and Jordan chief among them, have declared themselves willing partners, and what Israel wants it most certainly will get, including the additional military aid and support from the United States that Clinton gave Barak in July 1999. Yasir Arafat and his small coterie of supporters can furnish little resistance to the Israeli-American juggernaut, even though of course real Palestinian self-determination, in the sense that the Palestinian people will enjoy genuine freedom, will be postponed yet again. A "permanent interim agreement" -- minus any resolution to the problems of refugee, the status of Jerusalem, exact borders, settlements, and water -- is the likely result for the year 2000.

The essays in this book provide a personal attempt to chronicle the final official chapter of the Oslo peace process, to lay bare its assumptions, to detail its accomplishments and, much more, its failures, and above all, to show how despite the tremendous media and governmental attention lavished on it, it can neither lead to a real peace nor likely provide for one in the future. Written mostly for the Arab and European press these essays, I believe, provide a detailed point of view rarely to be found in the U.S. press. My assumption throughout is that as a Palestinian I believe that neither the Arabs nor the Israelis have a real military option, and that the only hope for the future is a decent and fair coexistence between the two peoples based upon equality and self-determination. Already the Middle East accounts for 60 percent of the world's arms sales. Far too much of Arab as well as Israeli society is militarized even while democratic freedoms are abrogated, education and agriculture have declined, and the situation of the average citizen with regard to citizenship itself is worse than it was in 1948. The era of partitions and separations since 1948, the date of the Palestinian nakba, or disaster, as well as the date of Israel's establishment, has not produced wonderful results, to say the least, and can indeed be seen to have failed. The separation of peoples into supposedly homogenous states has imposed burdens on "outsiders" that are intolerable, both in Israel and in countries like Lebanon, whose fifteen-year-old civil war was based on sectarian exclusivism, and produced nothing except a more sectarianized country. Israel's non-Jewish, i.e., Palestinian, citizens constitute 20 percent of the state, so that even the Jewish state is not "just" a Jewish one. The Oslo agreements have built on, rather than modified, these unsound foundations. Insecurity breeds more insecurity so long as a whole nation or people feels deprived and manifestly treated as inferior on the basis of ethnicity or religion defined in advance as "other" or "alien."

These essays have been written as testimony to an alternative view, another way of looking not just at the present and past, but at the future as well. I maintain here that only by seriously trying to take account of one's own history -- whether Israeli or Palestinian -- as well as that of the other can one really plan to live with the other. In both instances, however, I find this historical awareness sadly lacking. The current Palestinian leadership has, in a cowardly and slavish way, tried to forget its own people's tragic history in order to accommodate their American and Israeli mentors. Consider the most recent instance, the cancellation by the PLO of a meeting to be held July 15, 1999, in Geneva by the High Contracting parties to the Geneva Conventions on war, a meeting originally asked for by the PLO and accepted by the United Nations as a way of protecting the Palestinian populations of the West Bank and Gaza from further Israeli violations (torture, land expropriation, house demolition, imprisonment, etc.) of the Conventions. Instead of going through with the meeting on July 15, the PLO summarily cancelled it as a sign of good will toward Ehud Barak after only one hour's convening of the group. And this before negotiating with a leader whose long history of enmity toward Palestinians is well known, and whose meager announcements have made it clear that he is not prepared to dismantle most of the illegal Israeli settlements established on Palestinian land since 1967. It is worth noting that there are 13,000 settlement units now under construction, and that no less than 42 hilltop settlements have been established in the West Bank since last year (1998-9). Along with the already existing 144 settlements and, including the population of annexed Jerusalem, there are about 350,000 Israeli Jewish settlers on Palestinian land. With leaders who refuse ever to deal with this major problem, it is this sort of tampering with and manipulating the Palestinian tragedy by our own leaders that these essays strenuously oppose, committed as I am in them to the facts of our history and not to fictions created at will by oppressive dictators.

As for Israeli history, one of the reasons I salute the New or Revisionist Israeli historians is that through their work they have exposed the myths and propaganda narratives that have attempted to deny Israel's responsibility in 1948 and thereafter for producing, in effect, the Palestinian catastrophe. I contend that unless this historical responsibility is officially borne by Israeli leaders and faced honestly by Israeli society and its supporters in the West, no paper arrangement, such as the one being projected now, can be transformed into peace. There are too many refugees still left homeless (four million at least), too many claims unsettled, too many apartheid policies still in place that discriminate explicitly against Palestinians on ethnic and religious grounds for us to accept such tinkerings as the Oslo peace process. It cannot succeed for long. Particularly after the NATO war on behalf of the Kosovo refugees, it seems ludicrously unjust not to apply the same criteria of right of return to people who were made deliberately homeless by ethnic cleansing over fifty years ago. But once again, I want it clearly understood here that I am totally in favor of peace by coexistence, self-determination, and equality between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples on the land of historical Palestine, and I am therefore exactly the opposite of an opponent of peace. The current Oslo "peace process" is an expedient and, in my opinion, foolish gamble that has already done far more harm than good. The facts must be faced, and in this book I try to face them. Peace requires sterner measures than Arafat, Clinton, and company have, or are ever likely to have, taken. And so some of us must try to make the effort that our leaders will not make.

Yet what the United States wants, the Arabs are prepared to give. More explicitly, as concerns the Oslo-Wye agreements it is absolutely clear that whether or not these agreements have actually helped or hindered Palestinian self-determination, no leader is prepared in any way to forego, modify, or renege on them. The Oslo agreements signed at the White House were first, two letters of "mutual recognition" exchanged between Israel and the PLO (though Israel only recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people) and second, a Declaration of Principles that laid out the interim arrangements for redeployment rather than withdrawal of the Israeli army from unspecified, areas of the West Bank except for parts of Gaza and Jericho. The agreements postponed the really complicated issues -- Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, borders, and sovereignty -- to final-status negotiations that were to have commenced in 1996. Subsequent agreements at Cairo and Taba, and later concerning Hebron, were designed to set up the Palestine Authority that was to administer Palestinian life under Arafat but retained security, border control, water, and most of the land for Israel. Settlements were allowed to continue. Far from ending, the Israeli occupation was simply repackaged, and what emerged in the West Bank was about seven discontinuous Palestinian islands amounting to 3 percent of the land surrounded and punctuated by Israeli controlled territory. Even in Gaza, Israeli settlers held 40 percent of the land.

The Wye River agreement signed in October 1998, which was to give Palestinians about 10 percent more land, was never implemented by Netanyahu; he tried to modify or nullify all these agreements but in May 1999 was voted out of office. Ehud Barak has been greeted as the peace candidate, but given his background and what he has said and done so far I am certain that his ideas are not different enough from Netanyahu's to warrant great optimism. For Barak, Jerusalem remains basically unnegotiable (except for giving Palestinians authority over a few sacred places in the old city and allowing Abu Dis to become their new Jerusalem); the settlements for the most part will stay, as will the bypass roads that now crisscross the territories; sovereignty, borders, overall security, water and air rights will be Israel's; millions of refugees will have to look elsewhere for help and remain where they are. Other than that, there can be a small Palestinian state and the Authority can continue its, at best, flawed rule. These things are implied in the agreement concluded in September 1999.

The real problem is that Barak does not seem inclined to visions of coexistence or of equality between Palestinians and Israeli Jews. He has clearly said that separation is what he wants, not integration. Perhaps he actually is a different sort of leader than Netanyahu and is capable of some tremendous about-face, but very little points that way, except the official optimism and hopefulness of the U.S. administration, its European allies, and liberal Zionists, Israeli and non-Israeli alike. The disproportion in power between Israel and the Arabs is so great that there is no room for optimistic speculation of the kind that will suddenly make everyone happy. Barak is a cautious man who seems actively to be seeking an unambitious Israeli consensus which, almost by definition, has a very low tolerance for real Palestinian independence and real self-determination. What he is being promised for his basically cost-free cooperation in return by the Arabs is full normalization, full peace, full opening of markets. He'd have to be a fool not to accept and go along with Wye and even a defanged little Palestinian statelet. If the last five years have taught Israelis, anything, it is that Arafat can be trusted to do the job of policing and demoralizing his people far better than the Israeli Civil Administration could ever do it, so why stop short of letting him call his skimpy areas, 60 percent of Gaza included, a Palestinian state? If Clinton can force himself to do it, so can Barak and the rest.

None of this makes for pleasant days ahead. But failing a credible Palestinian opposition -- which may slowly be forming -- the main matter before those of us who wish for peace and true reconciliation is what sort of strategy and tactics to follow. In the first place, I see no way of stopping Arafat and his people from continuing pretty much the same way in business dealings, civil rights, and peace negotiations. They have no real choice, either because none is offered them by their weakness vis-à-vis Israel, the other Arabs, and the United States, or because constitutively and structurally they are incapable of anything else. Habits are habits and in addition, they are there doing what they do because it suits their "peace partners" perfectly. Corruption, police brutality, and undemocratic life will therefore remain. Arafat refuses to sign either a constitution or even a basic law of the land. The real question is how much damage this does to the long-term interests of the Palestinian people, insofar as there is still a strong desire for true self-determination. I myself think there is that desire: fifty-one years of oppression and bad, not to say disastrous, leadership haven't dimmed its flame, even though it seems occasionally abated by the sheer number of enemies, difficult obstacles, and detours. There is of course the strong possibility that Palestinians will be Red Indianized forever, but demography and the sheer counterproductiveness and stupidity of Israel's official arrogance are likely (though not certain) to prevent that. People tend to resist efforts to marginalize and dehumanize them the more these efforts are made. Palestinians are no different, especially given the fact that by the year 2010 Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews will be equal in number on the land of historical Palestine. Yet caution enjoins us to add that we cannot absolutely guarantee success: history, alas, is a cruel arbiter of the fate of small, disproportionately weak peoples, so the role of will and purpose assume greater significance for us.

One of the calculations made by proponents of the Oslo peace process is that sheer persistence and the longevity of the process itself will wear down resistance to it. This is true, even though for the most part a majority of Palestinians in the working class and rural sectors have actually seen their conditions worsen (and their dissatisfaction increase) since Oslo. Unemployment since 1993 has risen dramatically; GDP has been almost halved; movement from one part of Palestine to the other is extremely difficult; Jerusalem is completely off limits; as yet there is no passage between the West Bank and Gaza even though the Oslo documents specified that there should be. It is the land of disadvantaged Palestinians that is being taken, their jobs lost, their standard of living reduced dramatically. They are the dissatisfied ones. They are the majority. A small number of businessmen and speculators have prospered, however, are written about in the international press, and are organizers of conferences with the Israelis and the Americans to further business and investment opportunities in the area.

All that is well known, as are the monopolies and scams that still bedevil life under the Authority, its stooges and hangers-on. What is less well-known is that professionals, members of the better-off middle class, and many in positions of leadership have if not prospered then made an accommodation with the status quo. Let me say at the outset that it's easy to be critical if one doesn't have to worry about the future of one's family, job, all-over livelihood. So I can perfectly well understand the need felt by Palestinian doctors, engineers, academics, and economists living through the tribulations, punishments, and anxieties of years and years of occupation and uncertainty and desperation to make the best of a bad situation. And it really is a bad situation, with Israel on one side and the coarse rule of the Authority on the other. Very little reporting has been done on the day-to-day problems of Palestinians, so one has the impression that everyone manages. The question is how, and in what context.

Without at all wishing to underestimate the difficulties faced, I'd like to suggest that the professional class in particular -- the class, that is, which supplies Palestinian life with its officers, teachers, physicians, architects, lawyers, engineers, journalists, and economists -- has in effect made its peace with the present situation. The readiness of funders like members of the European Union, the Ford Foundation, and countless others like them have made ample money available to establish a large number of research institutes, study centers, women's and professional groups, all of which are extremely productive and do important work as (mostly) NGO's (nongovernmental organizations). The sad fact is that the Palestine Authority and its various spokepersons have made no secret of their animosity toward these NGOs, which they see correctly as rivals both in patronage and influence; over the past four years various attempts have been made by the Authority to try to close them down, acquire or at least siphon off their budgets, and generally make their life difficult. Still, the NGOs go on so long as the funding and the will and determination of their members do not waver. That is a positive development.

Yet the question I raise here concerns the long-range strategy of these groups and the kind of thing they do. Put very simply, are they a substitute for a political movement, and can they ever become one? I don't think so since each operates in a bilateral relationship with the funders, each of whom makes it clear that money for work on democracy, health care, education -- all important things -- is forthcoming only within the overall framework of the current peace process. At least that is the implicit assumption. And these NGOs, necessary though they are to keep Palestinian life going, themselves become the goal instead of, for instance, liberation, or ending the occupation, or changing Palestinian society. The leadership vacuum, the absence of a political vision of the future, the general quiescence of Palestinian life, with everyone more or less fending for his/herself, have placed such secondary tasks as assuring oneself of funding, keeping the office staff at work, setting up meetings in Europe and elsewhere, ahead of the main task facing us as a people, which can be nothing less than liberating ourselves from our legacy of occupation, dispossession, and undemocratic rule.

This substitution of a short-range nationalism for a longer-range social movement is one of the intended effects of Oslo, in effect, to depoliticize Palestinian society and set it squarely within the main current of American-style globalization, where the market is king, everything else irrelevant or marginal. Just to have a Palestinian institute of folklore research or a Palestinian university or a Palestinian medical association is therefore not enough, any more than nationalism is enough. Frantz Fanon was right when he said to Algerians in 1960 that just to substitute an Algerian policeman for a French one is not the goal of liberation: a change in consciousness is. And the likelihood of that change is slowly being eroded in the current vogue for seminars, funding missions, and project reports. We need to concentrate our collective efforts on the collective destiny of the Palestinian people, however utopian and irrelevant such efforts may now seem. Unless the group spirit remains fixed on the attainment of real liberation and real self-determination -- which themselves need to be clarified -- we can quite easily drown in the global market with our flag proudly flying over us.

The second problem of the present impasse is consequent on the first. Being or remaining Palestinian is scarcely an end in itself. It is perfectly in keeping with the colonial spirit of the peace process that Israel and the United States are at bottom delighted to give us symbols of sovereignty, such as a flag, while witholding real sovereignty, the right of return for all refugees, economic self-sufficiency, and relative independence. I have always felt that the meaning of Palestine is something more substantial than that. The struggle for Palestinian rights is first and above all a modern secular struggle to be a full, participating member in the modern world of nations from which we have long been excluded. It is not about returning to the past, or establishing a parochial little entity whose main purpose is to give the world another airline or bureaucracy or a handsome set of colored postage stamps.

Because the struggle against the repressive aspects of Jewish nationalism is so complex and difficult, I have also always felt that what we contribute toward Palestine is synonymous with a new sense of modernity, that is, a mission for getting beyond the horrors of the past into a new relationship with the whole world, not just with Israel and the Arabs, but with India, China, Japan, Africa, Latin America, and of course with Europe and North America. For this we require more, not less sophistication and knowledge, and especially an expansive, inquiring attitude toward other peoples and other histories. Only this can enable Palestinians to transcend themselves as a small people and to enter the ranks of the human vanguard along with the modern South Africans, who did so with such effect because they linked their struggle for justice to the entire world. For all sorts of reasons, we have for the time being lost that sense of confidence and worldliness, partly because we have had incapable, small leaders, and partly because we have become content with mere survival and the symbolic achievements I mentioned above. Our only hope is to be found among my children's generation, young people lucky enough to be crippled neither by the limitations imposed by the nakba nor by the dreadful lack of freedom and enlightenment prevailing in the Arab world today. Otherwise we might as well say that we already have a Palestinian state (declared, one ought to remember, in Algiers, November 1988), and so why bother.

Thus the next phase, with Ehud Barak and the others negotiating away busily, will go forward as planned. There's no point in being too enthusiastic about its narrow results, which are already clearly mapped out and are certain to be celebrated by the media and the White House. Beyond that, the process is considerably slower and longer-range. As I have tried to characterize it, it is where emphasis needs to be placed as much in terms of awareness as in terms of concrete steps. What needs more reflecting on is the relationship between this process in its Palestinian form and similar democratic and secular currents in other parts of the world, where once again the longer-term view is far more important and hopeful than anything the next political phase might succeed in fulfilling.