Looking Back On Oslo One Last Time

Asharq Al-Awsat

3 days ago

Camp David II ended in utter failure in 2000. However, what concerns us most, here, is how extremists' campaigns undercut the talks and contributed to that failure. In addition to the fact that they were held during the last year of Clinton's term, both Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat were outdoing one another with their displays of weakness and haste to achieve, in one fell swoop, outcomes that suit one side but not the other. Obsessed with opinion polls according to frequent press reports, Barak behaved as though he were in a position to impose a take it or leave it ultimatum: either Arafat accepts Israel's terms for a permanent and final settlement or there would be no agreement. However, his governing coalition was falling apart, and things worsened after Barak's lengthy negotiations with Assad came to nothing.
To Arafat, the ideal 'solution' would neither kill the peace process nor lead to a settlement. Fearing the one-upmanship of his rivals, Arafat was determined not to offer anything that could leave him embroiled in a quagmire, especially since Israel's negotiations with Assad had marginalized him further.
It is true that Ehud Barak went further than any Israeli prime minister had been willing to go at the time, but his offer did not come close to meeting terms Yasser Arafat felt he could accept, especially with regard to the status of Jerusalem. While he received no explicit outside encouragement to accept Barak's proposal, Arafat seemed obligated to take Muslim governments' positions and reactions into account. As for granting the Palestinians an absolute right of return, this was a demand that no Israeli who worries about the demographics of the 'Jewish' state could accept, especially since there was nothing appealing about the state of inter-religious, sectarian, and ethnic relations in neighboring Arab countries.
Soon after the summit collapsed, Ariel Sharon made his visit to the Temple Mount and the Noble Sanctuary, and the Second Intifada erupted. The man who had been deemed 'unelectable' was thus elected, and security became synonymous with politics. Under the pretext of ensuring security, Sharon began building the apartheid wall; talk of a 'two-state solution' came to be seen as nonsensical, and most Israelis became convinced that peace was anathema to security.
Terrorist operations resumed with the Second Intifada, with dozens of attacks launched in major cities, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades emerged from the ranks of Fatah. More than 1,200 people were killed and many more wounded as a result of these attacks, while Israeli forces stormed Palestinian cities in Area A, violating the Oslo Accords.
As this intifada raged on and the Israeli crackdown continued with it, New York was rocked by the attacks of 9/11, strengthening the tendency of those who oppose Palestinian rights to conflate the Palestinian struggle with Islamist terrorism. Their task was made easier by the scenes, in some Palestinian camps, of gunshots fired in celebration of al-Qaeda's attack. However, it was with the Karine A Affair of 2002- when the Israelis intercepted a ship carrying an arms shipment that they alleged had been bound for the Palestinian Authority- that relations were completely and irreparably severed.
With the Arab Peace Initiative proposed by Saudi Arabia during the 2002 Beirut Summit, the Arab states offered recognition in exchange for peace. However, the Syrian regime, as well as the Lebanese regime under its thumb at the time, prevented Arafat from taking part in the deliberations. Worse than that, on the opening day of the Summit, which coincided with the Jewish holiday of Passover, Hamas carried out what had been the largest ever attack of its kind, killing over thirty Israeli civilians and injuring 140 others in Netanya. As a result, rather than feeling compelled to engage with the nascent peace plan, or at least finding themselves on the defensive, Israel and the Sharon government ignored the summit entirely. Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield and besieged Arafat in his compound, with no regard for its obligations under the Oslo Accords. As his health deteriorated, Arafat passed away shortly afterward amid rumors that he had been poisoned.
True, Gaza remained under occupation even after Israel's unilateral withdrawal in 2005, since Israel retained full control over all entry and exit points. However, this state of affairs was not inevitably bound to endure. Any progress in the peace process would have surely left an impact, though it is likely that change would have come gradually or unevenly. However, the exact opposite happened: Israel imposed a blockade and suffocated the Gaza Strip following Hamas's victory in the 2006 elections, and that was before Tel Aviv tightened its grip further after Hamas took control of the Strip through a bloody coup in 2007. With its takeover of the Strip, the Islamist movement withdrew Gaza from the contractual commitments of the Oslo Accords and the responsibilities that came with it. While Israel has always been ready to renege on its commitments, Hamas had now offered the Jewish state the pretext of facing a party that does not recognize its right to exist in the first place, opposes peace, and whose 1988 charter insists that 'Jihad is the only solution for the Palestinian cause.'
Oslo has essentially ended, and only lukewarm attempts have been made to revive the peace process. In 2007, President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were brought together at the Annapolis Summit for talks overseen by President George W. Bush. However, Iran and Hamas called for a boycott of the summit and 'popular action' to delegitimize the talks, while Israeli radicals waged their own political and media war against it, and the talks failed to pave a practical path forward. Later, in 2013, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry tried to resume negotiations, but these talks collapsed after just a few months.
Foiling the Oslo process would not have demanded all of this effort if one of the parties had been unequivocally opposed to any peace agreement from the outset.