Unfortunately Not

Ten Years since the Oslo Accords

Tamim Al-Barghouti

This Saturday the 13^th of September exactly ten years will have passed since the “Declaration of Principles” between the state of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, usually referred to as the Oslo agreement. The dramatic scene of the ‘historical handshake’ between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in the White House Garden has since become a frequent clip on TV screens. To many in America and Europe, especially those who work in the media, the scene was sanctified. The scene actually easily lent itself to medieval imagery; a tall white young Christian leader by the name of William was stretching his hands like a falcon bringing together two shorter figures; a Jew and an Arab, like a father presenting a bride to a bride groom. What the three figures wore was also significant; Rabin and Clinton wore western suits. Their grey hair was open to the air declaring their age and wisdom, while Arafat’s Koufiyya emphasized the exoticism, concealment, danger and potential hostility of the sons of Ismail. The scene fitted well into the colonial, racist, Crusader-like world view. It was a trinity, coming out of the White House, the Olympus of international politics.

Today Israel is threatening to send Yasser Arafat into exile, to some the scenes now shown on TV are in sharp contrast with the White House scene. To others, however, they are a painfully expected outcome.

To people in the Middle East the White House scene was simply one of defeat. No one blamed the defeated for the defeat, yet no one was impressed with celebrating it. By that handshake the Palestinian leadership was giving up 78%  of the land of Palestine, and the right of more than four million Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and live under a government of their choice. Not only that, the handshake brought down a massive structure of discourses and arguments on top of which Arab ruling elites have been sitting for the past fifty years. Nothing worked, not the right-wing policies of Jordan, Morocco and Saudi Arabia, nor the socialism and nationalism of Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen. Peace with Israel also demoralized many Arab individuals. For, to everyone who does not believe in the Zionist interpretation of the Old Testament, ranging from Mahatma Gandhi to the youngest girl sitting in a Moroccan kindergarten, Israel was built on theft and murder; stealing a land and killing off and/or exiling its population. Peace with Israel meant peace with 1948. While the level of corruption of the Palestinian Authority surprised many supervisors, it did not surprise as much Arabs. One frequently used to hear a minister, faced with charges of corruption, say: “you made peace with Israel are you not going to make peace with me?! If you forgave them for stealing the country won’t you forgive me for stealing a Mercedes?!”

Judging the agreements reached since Oslo on less emotional and more technical terms, they are still a failure. The essence of the agreement was that Israel would eventually end its occupation of the Palestinians in return for the Palestinians to occupy themselves. With some simplification, the logic of the agreement was this: since Palestinians want independence and Israelis want security, a Palestinian independence whose main function would be to secure Israel should be designed. Economically, many firms with Palestinian names and Israeli shareholders were to be established, thus opening the markets of the Arab world to businesses that are Palestinian in name and Israeli in reality. Security wise, the Palestinians were not allowed to have an army, but an extremely strong police force was definitely a requirement, and politically, if the Palestinians accepted Israel, who else in the Arab world would dare not to. In every aspect The Palestinian Authority or even the independent state of Palestine was meant to be a marketing agent for Israel in the Arab world and even in the world at large.

The above understating was and still is common to many members of both Palestinian and Israeli ruling elites. Why then, the continuous stalemates and deadlocks in the way of peace? Both elites know that the above understating, while common to them, is not common to their peoples. Moreover, the above is acceptable to more Israelis than Palestinians, more than fifty percent of whom are 1948 refugees, totally left out in the whole arrangement. Therefore, the Israeli government does not trust that the Palestinian government, be it an authority or an independent state, could occupy its own people as efficiently as the Israeli army. The transitional period which was first meant to take five years, took double that time because the Palestinian Authority was being tested and tried by Israel, and they have not passed the test yet!

Faced with this position the task of the Palestinian authority becomes an extremely delicate and contradictory one. It has to prove to the Israelis that the Israeli army cannot do the job well, and thus encourage resistance against occupation, yet at the same time, it has to prove that it, i.e. the Palestinian Authority, can do the job much better, and thus crack down on resistance. For its very survival the Palestinian Authority has to accomplish two totally contradictory tasks. It precisely has to have the cake and eat it.

This juggling between the national sentiment of the Palestinian people and the international obligations of Oslo has characterized the dilemma of the Palestinian Authority in the period between the two Intifadas. Of course the right wing Israeli governments further complicated the Authority’s task by committing every crime in the book, from calling the west bank Judea and Samaria to the massive killings, land confiscations and house demolitions, and from threatening to send a popular Palestinian leader into exile to supporting grey second-men who have almost no popular support at all.

So, is the Oslo agreement dead? Unfortunately not. One thing that was true about that handshake in the White House is the relatively enormous, nightmarishly imposing volume of the American President’s body. The contradictions between Palestinians and Zionists could not be reconciled by Oslo, yet the contradictions between a Palestinian elite and an Israeli elite could be, and this is what the United States can and will eventually achieve, with or without Yasser Arafat. The traditional colonial blindness however would lead many observers to mistake the reconciliation between two leaders as a real historical end to the catastrophe that took place in 1948.