Last
month, Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, announced
before the United Nations General Assembly that the twenty-year effort to
establish a Palestinian state through the Oslo process had failed. This
declaration was long overdue. The Oslo Accords, which were signed by Israel and
the Palestine Liberation Organization and brokered by the United States, have
been a disaster for Palestinians and a boon to those who wish to maintain
Israel’s nearly half-century-old occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem,
and Gaza. Their bitter fruits can be seen in the current upsurge in violence against
Palestinians and settlers in the occupied territories.
Oslo
was not designed to lead to Palestinian statehood or self-determination, in
spite of what the P.L.O.’s leaders at the time appear to have believed. Rather,
it was intended by Israel to streamline its occupation, with the Palestinian
Authority acting as a subcontractor. In Oslo and subsequent accords, the
Israelis were careful to exclude provisions that might lead to a Palestinian
political entity with actual sovereignty. Palestinian statehood and
self-determination are never mentioned in the text, nor were the Palestinians
allowed jurisdiction over the entirety of the occupied territories. Israel’s
intention is even more clearly visible in the expansion of illegal Jewish
settlements in the occupied territories, which followed the start of the Oslo
process. There were fewer than two hundred thousand Israeli colonists in the
occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem when negotiations began. Now, according
to the Times, there are about six hundred and fifty thousand of
them.
The
P.L.O. leadership, for its part, played a weak hand poorly. It failed to
capitalize on the expertise that its delegation had accrued in Madrid and
Washington in the two years prior, sending to Oslo inexperienced negotiators
with little knowledge of the situation in the occupied territories or international
law. As a result, Oslo reinforced rather than evened out the political
imbalance between Israel, an undeclared nuclear power supported by the world’s
sole superpower, and the Palestinians, a stateless people living under
occupation or in exile. With the weight of the United States tipping the scales
heavily in its favor—diplomatically, militarily, and through pressure on the
Arab states—Israel was able to impose its will, entrenching an apartheid system
in which millions of Palestinians live under military rule, with no rights or
security, while Israel appropriates their land, water, and other resources. The
only part of Oslo that was faithfully implemented, in fact, is the protection
that the P.A. provides to Israel by policing its own people.
In
his U.N. speech, Abbas, one of Oslo’s architects, declared that he would no
longer abide by its terms unless Israel stopped running roughshod over them.
This declaration won’t mean much unless it’s translated into concrete action,
like dissolving the P.A. or halting cooperation between the P.A.’s paramilitary
police and the Israeli army. There is no indication of either of these things
happening anytime soon.
It is
long past time to end the farce of a never-ending peace process that only
increases Palestinian suffering. What is needed instead is a totally new
paradigm, one based on a respect for international law, human rights, and
equality for both peoples. As the Obama Administration has demonstrated
with Cuba and the Iranian nuclear deal, taking a new and more just
approach to long-standing, seemingly intractable problems can yield results.
The same should be done with U.S. policy toward Israel-Palestine, despite the
political pressure that is sure to be exerted by the Israel lobby to prevent
any change to the status quo.
The
American people are far ahead of their cowed politicians in this regard. A
growing number of them—particularly young people, people of color, and
progressives—oppose unconditional U.S. support for Israel. Last December, a
poll conducted by Shibley Telhami, a professor at the University of Maryland,
College Park, found that thirty-nine per cent of Americans support
imposing sanctions or “more serious action” on Israel over its refusal to stop
settlement construction. And according to a Gallup poll from February, although sixty-two
per cent of all Americans would support Israel over Palestine if asked to
choose sides, that figure has dropped ten points among Democrats since 2014.
Senior officials in the party would do well to take heed.
The
United States and the international community arm, financially underwrite, and
diplomatically support the military regime that Israel has imposed on
Palestinians. This external support, without which Israel’s occupation and
settlement regime could not continue, needs to end if a just and lasting peace
is to be achieved. Instead of delivering increased military aid to Israel—the
country already receives the astronomical sum of three billion dollars a year,
and President Obama promised more as consolation for the passage of the Iranian
nuclear deal, which Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, vociferously
opposed—the United States could begin by making the aid conditional on respect
for domestic and international law. This was recently called for in a letter to
the State Department by Representative Betty McCollum, a Democrat from
Minnesota.
It
is time for American politicians and policymakers to stop hiding behind the
fictions of Oslo. If they really wish to avoid more of the same, they must
abandon bankrupt strategies and meaningless platitudes and act vigorously to
end a system of military occupation and colonization that would crumble without
their support.
Rashid Khalidi is the
Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and the editor of
the Journal of Palestine Studies, and was an adviser to the Palestinian
delegation at the Madrid-Washington Palestinian-Israeli negotiations of
1991-93. His most recent book is “Brokers of Deceit.”
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