Three years of the "peace" process
ISTE
* Palestine/Israel Israeli Premier Netanyahu has not burried the peace process. He is the symbol of the whole, stillborn process. Michel Warshawsky READING THE OSLO DECLARATION OF Principles three years ago, one could not help seeing the document's serious limitations and the booby-traps it contained. Above all, the relationship of forces (completely in Israel's favour) made it possible to preserve a situation of flagrant injustice, despite the formulas about reconciliation and opening a new chapter in Israeli-Palestinian relations. But in spite of these limitations many of us, while remaining fully aware of how unfavourable the relationship of forces was to the Palestinian cause as well as the cause of justice, hoped that the accords could serve as a point of departure for the creation of a more favourable relationship of forces, and thus for a possible substantial improvement in the agreement's terms.
Doing this would have required a mass Palestinian mobilisation, supported by an Israeli peace movement worthy of the name. Together they would have been capable, if not of pushing beyond the accords content, at least of imposing a scrupulous respect for all the Declaration of Principles' provisions. In particular, they could have made sure that Israel kept to the very tight calendar that was the basis of the document's whole internal logic-like some Swiss cheeses, the agreement had more holes than substance.
Looking back, it is clear that these hopes did not reflect the reality: Palestinian defeat, the depth of popular demobilisation, and the disarray of left forces that would have been needed to create a progressive dynamic. In other words, when we analysed the relationship of forces, we should also have taken account of how difficult it was to create a dynamic that could improve this relationship of forces. "Peace" at any price
As for the Israeli peace movement, except for a minority led by ex-MP Uri Avneri (whose moral integrity should be honoured), it showed once more that it is very rarely motivated by a desire for justice, or even for respecting commitments made by its own government. All it wants is to get rid of the Palestinians as easily as possible: and how nice, thanks to Oslo, there are no more Palestinians messing up our lives. Who cares about children reduced to begging in Gaza, when "peace" takes the form of a blockade that gets rid of Israel's Palestinian workers? And who cares about human rights when it's 4 International Viewpoint not our army doing the dirty work (even if it is still our army which is giving the orders)?
If the negotiations had taken place under the pressure of mass mobilisation, if the Israeli peace movement had been up to its tasks, if international public opinion had remained vigilant, if Rabin had been De Gaulle and Arafat had been General Giap with all these ifs, perhaps Oslo might have been, in Churchill's words, if not the beginning of the end, at least the end of the Blocade blackmail
In reality, Yitzhak Rabin unilaterally decided to disregard the calendar, which he thought was too tight (*there are no sacred dates"), and the Palestinian leadership was unable to force him to abide by the Declaration of Principles. This was the beginning of an uninterrupted sequence of violations of the agreement. Little by little, the violations emptied the accords of any content that would have still merited the name of peace, or even of negotiations.
Using blockades as a permanent means of blackmail, the Israeli government quickly stopped negotiating. From the Washington talks that led to the Cairo accords, to the Taba accords, to the re-negotiation for the of the agreement on Israeli withdrawal from Hebron, what was going on was no longer negotiation but Israel laying down the law. This held true even for purely internal Palestinian issues (the elections in particular). By its very nature, Israel's laying down the law could never lead to Palestinian sovereignty, even on a limited territory.
True, the Israeli negotiators in Oslo did think themselvesand said so many times that the negotiations process would ultimately lead to a partition of historic Palestine into two sovereign, albeit unequal, states. They even drafted a Declaration of Principles which spoke of the territorial continuity of the Palestinian entity and of a redeployment in three stages by the Israeli army that would remove it from the West Bank and Gaza, except for the settlements and a few military bases. Did Dr. Yossi Beilin, Professor Yair Hirshfeld or Ron Pundak deliberately lie to public opinion and the international community? Were they counting (rightly, as recent history has just shown again) on the international community's short memory? Did they sign the document knowing perfectly well that their government would never carry it out? Competing Zionist visions
That explanation would be a little too simple. The truth is that the Oslo accords were an object of dispute among the different conceptions that divide the Israeli ruling class. For the bourgeoisie's modernist fractions, the New American Order in the region demands a substantial change in Israeli-Arab relations and a relative demilitarisation of Israeli society and politics. In their eyes the future belongs to a Middle Eastern Common Market (the New Middle East of Shimon Peres' dreams), whose emergence is blocked by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israeli military withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and the dismantling of the bulk of the settlements do not count for much compared with the billions of dollars that the New Middle East promises them. Beilin and company are the spokespeople for this fraction of the Israeli bourgeoisie; the Oslo Declaration of Principles is their credo.
The military establishment, grown fat over the course of the last twenty years, and the military-industrial complex still hesitate to accept this challenge to the framework that best reflects their interests, at least in the short term, and their worldview. Yitzhak Rabin, due to his personal history and close ties to this fraction of the Israeli ruling class. did not share Peres' pupils' modernist pacifism. From October 1993 on, Rabin lett it to the generals to negotiate the implementation of the Declaration of Principles, effectively showing the Oslo negotiators the door. The Oslo negotiators waited their turn,
convinced that they had gotten the maximum possible concessions from the PLO. Total surrender
Apparently even the Oslo negotiators had under-estimated the gravity of the PLO's crisis. It quickly became clear that the Oslo concessions led to still more concessions in Cairo; then the process of negotiation gave way to a more and more humiliating process of swallowing Israel's dictates.
Israel fails to abide even by the agreements it imposes itself. This was true well before Binyamin Netanyahu came to power. To take only the most flagrant examples, without even mentioning the calendar:
• Free passage between Gaza and the West Bank was supposed to be possible from 1994 on, giving the Palestinians freedom of movement in the territories administered by the Palestinian authority. Two and a half every three weeks.
But personal safety is accompanied by an unprecedented deterioration of the majority's living conditions. While a minority is getting rich quick and displaying its new wealth with irresponsible arrogance, the majority is experiencing an unemployment rate above 40 percent and falling living standards that are difficult to imagine. Even worse are the countless barricades which fragment Palestinians' lives and restrict their freedom of movement as never before.
occupation, except in periods of curfew, Palestinians were able to move freely through the territories and even through Israeli territory
Palestine/Israel * major annexations of Palestinian territory (under the optimistic assumption that there will be a sovereign Palestine) and recognition of the settlements' legitimacy. It means admitting that the strategy of settling Israelis all
Oslo hypocrites: Peres, Clinton, Mubarak (Egypt), Yeltsin, Arafat, Hassan years after the agreed-on date, there is no free (Morocco), Chirac (France). Back:Fahd (Saudi), Butrus Ghali (UN) passage. Even Yasser Arafat has to ask Israeli permission to visit the territories he supposedly runs.
• The second phase of redeployment out of the West Bank is supposed to have been finished by now. In fact not even the first phase has been finished (Hebron), despite the fact that Hebron has been negotiated three times. This means that the Palestinians have paid cash down three times for a purchase who value has been diminished each time.
• According to the Oslo accords, the refugees from the 1967 war (including their families, 600,000 people) have the right to return. This subject has not even made it onto
• The great majority of Palestinian political prisoners are supposed to have been freed. There are still 5000 of them in jail.
• Security in Zone B is supposed to be managed in common. Since March 1996 the Israelis have unilaterally decided to ignore the Palestinians and to act the same way in Zone B as in Zone C, i.e. as if the Declaration of Principles had never been signed (destroying houses, arresting political activists, making sudden raids, etc.). From the frying pan...
Far from managing a territory where Palestinian sovereignty is steadily widening, the Palestinian Authority has less autonomous maneuvering room today than the PLO and the Intifada's Unified Leadership had in 1989.
As for the Palestinian population, its living conditions have gotten worse in many respects during the last four years. True, for the urban population, the withdrawal of the occupying army has meant a definite improvement in personal safety. Except for nationalist and Islamist opposition activists, who are still being arrested by the Palestinian police (by order of the Israeli authorities), the men and women in Jenin, Gaza, Ramallah and Rafah are free. Their children come home from school safe and in one piece from wretched schools, admittedly, but at least from schools that aren't closed down
Today East Jerusalem is forbidden to Palestinians. They need special permits to go from Gaza to Ramallah. And when the already-they can close off each of the 150 enclaves that constitute autonomous Palestinian territory and prevent any movement from one enclave to another.
The tragic economic consequences of the politics of blockade are well-known. But there are also social and human consequences: lack of access to hospitals, universities, cultural centres, social and administrative institutions. Even Palestinian passports (printed and approved by the sraelis) often confer fewer rights than the old occupation passes. Certain basic rights, like the right to leave the country or to family reunification, are even more hollowed out. Before one could sometimes appeal to the Israeli courts, whereas now the Israelis are accountable to no one, including their own courts: after all, everything is done by agreement with the Palestinians. As Yitzhak Rabin said a few weeks after Oslo, it will be just like before, minus Betselem (a well-known Israeli human rights organization) and the High Court. No one believes in peace any more
One can understand that the Labour government, once able to impose such a situation, slid backwards even on issues that once distinguished it from Likud, like for example the settlements. Most Labour supporters thought, without necessarily saying so out loud, that the settlements policy was a major obstacle to peace with the Palestinians. They were clearly prepared in the course of final-status negotiations to give up many of the settlements—in exchange for major Palestinian concessions, for instance on Jerusalem or refugees' right of return. Today, though, even the Yossi Beilins and Yossef Sarids, who never hid their objections to the settlements and their opinion that the great majority of them would have to be dismantled, say that a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should allow 90 percent of the settlers to be annexed into sovereign Israeli territory. This means both over the place, which the right defended for a quarter of a century, was justified all along
Asked about this political turnabout, Beilin answered recently: I used not to believe that the Palestinians could accept a proposal like that. Now I know they will. Negotiating with Yasser Arafat allowed the Israelis to discover his extreme weakness, as well as (at least in the middle term) the weakness of any Palestinian resistance to the policy of total surrender. Today we know that if the Palestinian Authority had held firm on the issue, the Israeli government would have expelled the settlers from the Hebron city centre after the massacre in the mosque. The Palestinian leaders' capitulation not only conNetworking The Interuniversity Consortium for Arab Studies (Montreal) provides two internet-based information resources on the Palestinian issue: • Palestine Refugee ResearchNet (PRRN) is a website on the Palestinian refugee issue, featuring documents, research papers, and details of ongoing research/dialogue projects. Its associated email discussion list FOFOGNET, facilitates communication and networking among activists, experts and policy-makers. PRRN can be found at http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/MEPP/PRRN/prfront.html • Palestine Development InfoNet (PDIN) offers resources on Palestinian economic development, while its associated email list facilitates networking and information sharing PRRN can be found at http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/MEPP/PDIN/pdfront.html • For more information, contact Rex Brynen, Department of Political Science, McGill University. E-mail <cyr6@musica.mcgill.cas
November 1996#282 5
* Palestine/Israel firmed the Israelis in their policy of laying down the law; it made possible implementation of a whole series of supplementary repressive measures directed not at those responsible for the massacre, but at its victims (closing down the Hebron market and university, tightening the blockade of the whole West Bank). One can hardly believe it happened.
Given this background, it is not hard to understand the wave of attacks that not only shook the peace process but closed off any possibility of reconciliation. Peace is dead in Palestinians' hearts. Even if disappointment and humiliation led for many of them to resignation rather than revolt, that does not change the fact that the hope with which many greeted the PLO leadership's return home has been transformed into cynicism. Support for Yasser Arafat and his policies has given way to cynicısm or even contempt. This is the reason for Labour's defeat in the last election, particularly if one compares it to the massive support the government had two years earlier.
In order to overcome many ordinary Israelis' rejection of Labour-which has very little to do with Labour's policies towards the Palestinians, and much more to do with problems inside Israeli society-the Rabin and Peres governments would have had to granted them by earlier agreements. Netanyahu can always cite the previous government's actions. There is no crime against peace that the Peres-Rabin team did not commit, from failure to carry out their commitments, to massive settlement construction, to military intervention in terauthority, to murderous war in Lebanon.
But it would be mistaken to think that Oslo is dead and buried. Peace and the "peace process" are two completely different things. Even if Israeli-Palestinian peace is not on the agenda, the Oslo process will go on. It is the expression of globalisation in the Middle East, and reflects the new strategic and political facts in the region: realignment of the Arab states in the imperialist orbit, end of the Cold War, restructuring of markets and frontiers. This is a long-term process, not an event whose duration can be written on a calendar; a business of decades, not years.
Sooner or later Israel will have to adapt to this reality. It will have to transform itself from a frontier post in the Cold War to a frontier post for multinationals in the Arab world.