President Bill Clinton (C) stands between PLO leader Yasser Arafat (R) and
Israeli prime minister Yitzahk Rabin (L) as they shake hands at the White
House in Washington D.C., September 13, 1993. (photo: David Ake/AFP/Getty
Images)
President Bill Clinton (C) stands between PLO leader Yasser Arafat (R) and
Israeli prime minister Yitzahk Rabin (L) as they shake hands at the White
House in Washington D.C., September 13, 1993. (photo: David Ake/AFP/Getty
Images)
From Peace to Armageddon: The Israel-Palestine Nightmare
By Sandy Tolan, TomDispatch
14 September 18
Honestly, what is it about Fridays, the Trump administration, and the
Palestinians? Each of the last three Fridays, "at the direction of the
president," State Department officials have unveiled new cuts to U.S. aid,
all aimed at Palestinian civilians (after the U.S. had already made "drastic
cuts to its contribution to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees" back
in January). Three Fridays ago, more than $200 million for humanitarian and
development assistance in the West Bank and Gaza was slashed. Two Fridays
ago, it was another $60 million, previously scheduled to go to the U.N.
agency running schools and health clinics there. Last Friday, the
administration went after six East Jerusalem hospitals, including "cutting
money to cover cancer treatments and other critical care." All told, it adds
up to more than $300 million in aid cuts aimed at the most vulnerable of
Palestinians.
This evidently passes for a negotiating tactic in the Trump era, as the
president made all too clear in a recent new year's call to American Jewish
community leaders and rabbis. In a world in which Donald Trump and
son-in-law Jared Kushner have already given copiously to the Israelis --
moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and backing Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu to the hilt -- this is apparently how the art of the deal applies
to the Middle East. ("If we don't make a deal, we're not paying," said the
president in that phone call. "And that's going to have a little impact.")
No one should be surprised by any of this. As its grim policy of separating
children and their parents on the U.S.-Mexico border demonstrated, Donald
Trump's administration has no hesitation about going after the weakest human
link in any chain. And sadly, while his is a particularly extreme version of
American policy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it remains more
culmination than break on this grim 25th anniversary of the Oslo Peace
Accords, as TomDispatch regular Sandy Tolan, author of Children of the
Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land, suggests today.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
When I first traveled to Israel-Palestine in 1994, during the heady early
days of the Oslo peace process, I was expecting to see more of the joyful
celebrations I'd watched on television at home. The emotional welcoming of
Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat back to
Palestine. The massive demonstrations for peace on the streets of Tel Aviv.
The spontaneous moment when Palestinians placed carnations in the gun
barrels of departing Israeli soldiers. And though the early euphoria had
already begun to ebb, clearly there was still hope.
It was the era of dialogue. Many Palestinians stood witness to Israeli
trauma rooted in the Holocaust. Groups of Israelis began to understand the
Nakba, or Catastrophe, when 750,000 Palestinians fled or were driven out of
their homes during the creation of Israel in 1948. In the wake of the Oslo
Declaration of Principles, signed on September 13, 1993 -- a quarter of a
century ago today -- polls showed that large majorities of Israelis and
Palestinians supported the agreement. Israelis, weary of a six-year
Palestinian intifada, wanted Oslo to lead to lasting peace; Palestinians
believed it would result in the creation of a free nation of their own, side
by side with Israel.
"People thought this was the beginning of a new era," says Salim Tamari,
Palestinian sociologist and editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly.
"It was miraculous," recalls Gershon Baskin, founder of the Israel Palestine
Center for Research and Information, "a high peak of optimism and hope."
Baskin, an American who emigrated to Israel nearly 40 years ago, remembers
the emotional power of "these two parties who refused to recognize each
other's right to exist coming into a room and breaking through that and
putting down a formula which, at the time, looked reasonable."
Euphoria Never Lasts
Even then, however, there were disturbing signs. During that first trip,
still in the glow of Oslo, I found myself in the heart of the West Bank,
driving down new, smooth-as-glass "bypass roads" built for Israeli settlers
and VIPs on my way from Bethlehem to Hebron. I was confused. Wasn't this the
territory-to-be of a future independent Palestinian state? Why, then, would
something like this be authorized? Similarly, the next year, when Israeli
forces undertook their much-heralded "withdrawal" from Ramallah, why did
they only redeploy to the edge of that town, while retaining full military
control of 72% of the West Bank?
Such stubborn facts on the ground stood in the way of the seemingly
overwhelming optimism generated by that "peace of the brave," symbolized by
a handshake between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in front
of President Clinton on the White House lawn. Was it possible we were
witnessing the beginning of the end of generations of bloodshed and trauma?
Already, however, there were dissenters. Mourid Barghouti, a Palestinian
poet who, like thousands of his brethren, returned from exile in the early
days of Oslo, was shocked to find former PLO liberation fighters reduced to
the status of petty bureaucrats lording it over ordinary citizens. Israel,
he wrote in his memoir, I Saw Ramallah, had "succeeded in tearing away the
sacred aspect of the Palestinian cause, turning it into what it is now -- a
series of 'procedures' and 'schedules' that are usually respected only by
the weaker party in the conflict... The others are still masters of the
place."
Another Oslo critic, Edward Said, the Palestinian intellectual and professor
of comparative literature at Columbia, refused a White House invitation to
attend the signing ceremony between Arafat and Rabin. Oslo, he wrote, should
be considered "an instrument of Palestinian surrender... a kingdom of
illusions, with Israel firmly in command. Clearly the PLO has transformed
itself from a national liberation movement into a kind of small-town
government... What Israel has gotten is official Palestinian consent to
continued occupation."
At the time, many Palestinians wrote off Said as someone intent on
obstructing real, if incremental, progress. Arafat himself said that, living
as he did in America, the famed professor "does not feel the suffering of
his people."
Or maybe he did. In my nearly 20 trips to the Holy Land over the
quarter-century since Oslo, I watched the West Bank settler population
quadruple, new settlements come to ring Jerusalem, and Israel keep full
military control over 60% of the West Bank (instead of the previous 72%).
All those settler "bypass" roads and limited troop redeployments turned out
to point not simply to obstacles on the road to the culmination of the
"peace process" but to fatal flaws baked into Oslo from the beginning.
Indeed, the Oslo Declaration of Principles, which mentioned security 12
times but never once independence, sovereignty, self-determination, freedom,
or Palestine, simply wasn't designed to stop such expansion. In fact, the
accords only seemed to facilitate it.
"It was designed to make sure there would never be a Palestinian state,"
says Diana Buttu, Palestinian analyst and former legal adviser to the PLO.
"They made it clear that they weren't going to include the phrases
'two-state solution,' 'Palestinian state,' or 'independence.' It was
completely designed to make sure the Palestinians wouldn't have their
freedom."
The Failure of Oslo
The question worth asking on this 25th anniversary of those accords, which
essentially drove policy in the U.S., Israel, the Palestinian occupied
territories, and European capitals for a quarter of a century, is this: Were
they doomed from the beginning? Billions of dollars and endless rounds of
failed negotiations later, did Oslo ever really have a chance to succeed?
"I think it's wrong to retroactively say that it was all a trick," says
Salim Tamari from the Jerusalem Quarterly's editorial offices, once located
in that holy city, now in Ramallah. The initial agreement was void of
specifics, leaving the major issues -- settlements, Jerusalem, control of
water, refugees and their right of return -- to "final status negotiations."
Israel, Tamari believes, unlike the Palestinians, achieved a major goal from
the outset. "The Israelis wanted above all to have a security arrangement."
In "Oslo II," implemented in 1995, Israel got its cherished security
cooperation, which meant that Palestinian police would control Palestinian
demonstrators and so keep them from directly confronting Israeli forces.
Those were, of course, the very confrontations that had helped fuel the
success of the First Intifada, creating the conditions for Oslo. Today,
that's a bitter irony for Palestinians who sacrificed family members or
limbs for what turned out to be such a weak agreement. But at the time, for
many, it seemed worth the price.
For Palestinians, Oslo remained a kind of tabula rasa of hopes and dreams
based on the formula of getting an agreement first and working out the
details later. "Arafat thought that if he was able to get into the
Palestinian territories, he would manage his relations with the Israelis,"
says Ghassan Khatib, former minister of labor and planning for the
Palestinian Authority (PA) as well as a prominent analyst and pollster. "And
he did not pay attention to the details in the written documents."
More important to Arafat was simply to return from exile in Tunisia and then
convince Israel to end its settlement policies, give Palestinians East
Jerusalem, share the region's water supplies, and come to an equitable
agreement on the right of return for Palestinian refugees dispossessed in
1948. Yet Arafat and his cadre of fellow PLO officials from the diaspora,
Khatib argues, "had no real understanding of or expertise in the Israeli way
of doing things, the Israeli mentality, etcetera, etcetera."
Just as bad, says Omar Shaban of the Gaza think tank Pal-Think, was the
ineptitude of Palestinian institutions in convincing Israelis that they
could govern competently. "We didn't do a very good job... We did not build
good institutions. We did not build real democracy. And we did not speak
enough to the Israeli public... [to] convince them that we are here to work
together, to build together," and that "peace is good for the Israeli
people."
For Gershon Baskin, however, the failure of Oslo had far less to do with any
cultural misunderstandings or bureaucratic mismanagement and far more to do
with an act of political violence: the assassination of Rabin by an Israeli
right-wing extremist in 1995. His death was "the major event that changed
the course of Oslo."
As Baskin, who served as an adviser to Rabin's intelligence team for the
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, recalls, "I know what kind of direction
Rabin was moving in when he agreed to Oslo." In the early Oslo years, the
prime minister's deputies were at work on secret negotiations with the
Palestinians -- the Geneva Accords and the Beilin-Abu Mazen agreement --
that would have made major territorial concessions and called for East
Jerusalem to be the future Palestinian capital. Some Palestinians were not
impressed; they noted that by approving of the Oslo accords, they had
already agreed to cede 78% of historic Palestine, settling for the 22% that
remained: the West Bank and Gaza. And they pointed out that some settlements
remained in both of these unofficial agreements and that neither included
any kind of Palestinian right of return -- considered by Israelis as a
potential death blow to their state and by countless Palestinians uprooted
in 1948 as a non-negotiable issue.
"There's so much revisionist history," Diana Buttu says. She points out that
when American settler Baruch Goldstein assassinated 29 Palestinians praying
in a mosque in Hebron in 1994, Rabin could have seized the moment to end the
settlements. Instead, she points out, he "entrenched the army, entrenched
the settlements. It's very cute for them to say it all related to the
assassination of Rabin. But it really relates to what he intended to do in
the first place."
The Soldiers Take Control
Yet Baskin believes that when Rabin, having just addressed 100,000 Israelis
at a peace rally in Tel Aviv, was gunned down, Israeli priorities changed
strikingly. "It was a peace process taken over by the military and the
security people who had a very different understanding of how to do it."
This "change of mentality," he adds, went "from cooperation and bridge
building to walls and fence building -- creating a system of separation, of
permits, of restriction of movement." The division of the West Bank into
Areas A, B, and C, or ostensibly full Palestinian control (18%), joint
control (22%), and full Israeli military control (60%), was supposed to be
temporary, but it has remained the status quo for a quarter of a century.
Whatever the motives and intentions of the Israeli architects of Oslo, they
were soon superseded by Israelis who saw the claim of Eretz Israel -- all
the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River -- as a prime
territorial goal. As a result, the endless expansion of settlements (and the
creation of new ones), as well as seizures of Palestinian lands in the West
Bank and even of individual Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem
neighborhoods, has become the endgame for successive Israeli governments,
abetted by their American counterparts. "The basic fact is that Israel has
their cake and they're eating it," says Tamari. "They have the territories.
They're not withdrawing. They're happy with the security of A, B, and C.
There's no pressure on them from the Americans. On the contrary."
In the Oslo era, American presidents and secretaries of state, at most,
issued mild diplomatic rebukes for settlement building, never threatening to
suspend U.S. aid if Israel didn't stop undermining the "peace process." The
last time that happened was when Secretary of State James Baker threatened
to suspend $10 billion in loan guarantees to Israel during the presidency of
George H.W. Bush in 1992.
And so, steadily, with every new visit to the Holy Land, I would witness the
latest evidence of an expanding occupation -- new or larger settlements and
military bases, more patrols by jeeps and armored vehicles, new surveillance
towers, additional earthen barriers, giant red and white warning signs, and
most of all, hundreds of military checkpoints, ever more ubiquitous, on
virtually every mile of the West Bank. Less visible were the night raids on
Palestinian refugee camps and the nearly 40% of Palestinian adult males who
have spent time in Israeli prisons, where the military court conviction rate
for them is 99.74%. Also on the increase was the Palestinian Authority's
expanding "security cooperation" with Israel. That, in turn, often pitted
Palestinians against each other, embittering villagers and city dwellers
alike against the governing PA.
As the system of control grew, draconian restrictions on movement only
increased. Adults and children alike were forced to wait hours to return
home from school or work or a visit to a hospital or relatives in Jordan.
Meanwhile, occupied Palestine was slowly being converted into an archipelago
of Israeli military control. Clearly, the "peace process" had made things
far worse for Palestinians.
"I remember the nice days where there was peace without agreement," says
Shaban of Pal-Think, his tongue only partly in cheek. "Now we have agreement
without peace."
When "Peace" Is a Dirty Word
And so, in the post-Oslo decades, even "peace" became a dirty word to many
Palestinians. "They thought that this agreement would lead into an
independent Palestinian state," says Ghassan Khatib, whose initial tracking
poll, shortly after the iconic handshake on the White House lawn, showed 70%
Palestinian support for Oslo. But when, he adds, "the public realized that
this agreement was not good enough to stop the expansion of settlements,
they realized it's good for nothing. Because the peace process for the
Palestinians is about ending the occupation. And settlement expansion is
actually the essence of occupation." Twenty-five years later, his polling
finds that support for the "peace process" among Palestinians is now at
about 24%.
On the ground, what now exists is not two states, but essentially a single
state that leaves Israel in de facto control of land, water, borders, and
freedom of movement. What connections existed between the West Bank, Gaza,
and Jerusalem have been splintered, with little prospect of any kind of
reunification any time soon.
Today, when you travel to the West Bank and drive through what was to be the
landscape of a free and independent Palestine, you find yourself surrounded
by a militarized colonial settler regime. The word "apartheid" inevitably
comes to mind, despite its unpopularity among the pro-Israel lobby and their
charges in Congress. Sometimes, I wonder whether "Jim Crow" doesn't best
describe the new Palestinian reality.
For me, each successive trip has revealed a political situation grimmer and
less hopeful than the time before. Israel's pursuit of land over peace and
the complicity of the American government essentially killed "the two-state
solution."
The final blow came this May when the Trump administration moved the U.S.
embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In the process, it became clear that
U.S. Mideast policy is now largely directed not only by the pro-settler
triumvirate of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Ambassador to Israel David
Friedman, and Middle East adviser Jason Greenblatt, but also by the
Armageddon lobby. Those evangelical Christians are spearheaded by John
Hagee's Christians United for Israel, which has surpassed the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee as the largest pro-Israel group in the U.S.
They believe that Israel must remain in control of the Holy Land so that
Jesus can return and mete out justice to sinners, after which believers will
rise to heaven in the rapture. Hagee, who has described such a moment in
detail from his pulpit, is a major contributor to the Israeli settlement of
Ariel (population 20,000). It was no happenstance that he was the minister
who gave the benediction at the U.S. embassy dedication ceremony in
Jerusalem in May, as Israeli forces were gunning down unarmed protesters in
Gaza.
Now, in an effort to end the long-standing right of return of Palestinian
refugees, the Trump administration is canceling funding to UNRWA, the U.N.
refugee agency that has provided food, shelter, education, and housing in
the Palestinian refugee camps for nearly seven decades. The move,
spearheaded by Kushner, is part of a broader "deal of the century" to
pressure Palestinians into a peace agreement on American and Israeli terms.
Clearly a bad deal for Palestinians, it is sure to sharply increase poverty
and hunger in the camps, especially in Gaza. Strategically, it appears to be
an attempt to force Gazans to give up their long-standing national rights,
while increasing their dependence on humanitarian aid.
There is another solution, says Buttu. Instead of approaching this as
primarily a humanitarian problem, the international community could "put
pressure on Israel to end the [economic] siege, and allow us to live in
freedom. If we were able to have a seaport, an airport," to import, export,
and travel freely, "we wouldn't need handouts." Yet most of the world, she
says, is "too terrified to confront Israel."
Failed peace, dashed hopes, hunger, apartheid, Armageddon. Not much to
celebrate, is there? And there may not be for quite a while. "The dream is
still there," insists Tamari, but he adds that, for the foreseeable future,
"I think we're going to continue to have the status quo. State of
repression, colonization for many, many years to come. Until the global
scene changes." Say, a major decline in U.S. influence (something not so
hard to imagine right now) or some other less predictable set of events. "Or
until the Palestinians undertake a massive civil insurrection. That may tip
the balance."
An Ode to Joy
Many Palestinians see the recent Gaza March of Return and the nonviolent
boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which advocates cultural
and economic boycotts of Israel, as examples of such civil insurrections.
BDS supporters recently celebrated a genuine victory, with the announcements
by Lana del Rey and 15 other artists that they were bowing out of the Meteor
concert festival in Israel. Yet taken together, BDS and the March of Return
don't come close to the First Intifada, a six-year uprising involving
virtually every sector of Palestinian society, which brought Israel to the
negotiating table -- ironically, for the failed Oslo Agreement.
Still, few are the Palestinians likely to tell you that the national dream
is dead. In late July, for instance, I spoke with Laila Salah, a 21-year-old
Palestinian cellist, then rehearsing to play Beethoven's 9th Symphony in
Jerusalem in an orchestra led by Palestinian violist Ramzi Aburedwan, the
founder of the Al Kamandjati music school. Many of Laila's fellow
Palestinian musicians, risking arrest, snuck into the holy city, in part to
play Beethoven but also to assert their right to be in their beloved
Jerusalem, which they still dream of as their capital. When I asked Laila if
she thought Palestine would have its own state one day, she compared her
people's freedom to the fourth movement, or Ode to Joy, in the 9th Symphony.
"The fourth movement embodies our freedom," she told me. "Or at least, being
able to go freely around Palestine. It's a wish to come true. I don't know
when. We might not be alive to see our fourth movement."
With the endless march of settlements, Israel's continued impunity, a
fractured Palestine divided between the West Bank and Gaza, and a Trump
administration empowering people who believe Armageddon is near, a solution
to the Israel-Palestine nightmare may seem impossible. But maybe, Laila, a
just peace is coming sooner than you think.
After all, who predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall or the end of apartheid
in South Africa?
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