The Oslo Process: War by Other Means

Marwan Bishara teaches at the American University in Paris and is the author of Palestine/Israel: Peace or Apartheid: Prospects for Resolving the Conflict (Zed Books, 2001).

The Oslo accords were signed by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel on the White House lawn amid much fanfare in September 1993 after secret talks in the Norwegian capital. The process set in motion by the Oslo deal must, first and foremost, be understood in its historic and geostrategic contexts. It came about only after a series of fruitless Israeli attempts to defuse the Palestine question without resolving it. Four decades of ethnic cleansing, massacre and war failed to have the desired effect for Israel. The first intifada of 1987, like the Soweto uprising in South Africa’s townships a decade earlier, came as a rude awakening to the world that racism could not continue indefinitely. The uprising persisted for six years, in spite of officially sanctioned brutality, and was able to disrupt the daily life of occupation. It was only after those six years that Israel utilised the window of opportunity that presented itself with the end of the Cold War and the defeat of Iraq, coupled with a divided Arab world, in order to reach a deal with the Palestinians. With Washington’s help, it physically and demographically divided up the West Bank and Gaza into islands of poverty, or bantustans, while maintaining economic domination and direct control over Palestinian land and natural resources.

An Inequitable Agreement

The Oslo process obliged the Palestinians to make peace with their Israeli occupiers while that occupation persisted. The PLO leadership accepted this at Oslo and has signed seven interim agreements since then underlining its intention to live peacefully side by side with the Israeli state. The Palestinian Authority (PA) invested in major efforts to subdue the Islamist Hamas movement following a wave of suicide attacks in 1995 and 1996; these had been triggered by the massacre in Hebron of twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers carried out by an Israeli religious fundamentalist. According to Israeli reports, the PA crackdown eliminated almost the entire military arm of Hamas. Extremist Muslim activists were imprisoned, and the PA seriously weakened the organisational infrastructure of the Islamist movements. However, instead of returning the occupied territories to the Palestinians, Israel stepped up its illegal control of the West Bank by encircling the Palestinian population with a settlement network reinforced with bypass roads on newly confiscated land—roads that only Israelis could use and that cut through the territories from all directions. After seven years, Israel had surrendered only 18 per cent of the West Bank.

 

The diplomatic impasse was particularly damaging to the prospects for peace. For seven years, the Oslo process continued to fail spectacularly as one ambiguous agreement after another was changed in order to keep the process alive and deepen Israeli domination in the occupied/autonomous territories. But such perseverance in the diplomatic process was possible only through the inflexible, aggressive and coercive diplomacy of the one and only superpower, the United States. The Clinton administration, which oversaw the entire seven-year process, holds primary responsibility for its utter failure. Washington manipulated and coerced the Palestinians to follow Israeli dictates throughout the process by taking the side of its ally, Israel, against its junior peace partner, the Palestinians.

 

Meanwhile, and in order to contain Palestinian discontent and obtain the conformity of the Palestinian leadership, Washington ensured the flow of international aid to the PA, which amounted to around $3 billion over the seven years. However, as the World Bank has testified, the economic situation has anything but improved for the Palestinians. In fact, it has deteriorated badly because of Israel’s imposed closures on the newly formed cantons in the occupied territories. The world, so intoxicated by the diplomatic celebrations and alleged successes of Oslo, has paid little if any attention to the ongoing suffering under the apartheid system that resulted from the accords. On the other hand, Israel profited enormously from its impunity and from the new international economic relations it enjoyed after the accords were signed and the Arab boycott was lifted. This was well planned through the transforming of Israel’s pre-Oslo colonial relations in the territories into relations of Palestinian dependency vis-à-vis Israel.

 

The most obvious example of this disfiguration of the peace process has been Israel’s obsession with security and its continued colonisation and settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza. The integrity of those territories was meant to have been kept intact until Israel eventually evacuated its forces. However, Israel’s policy of physical or demographic separation from the Palestinians, coupled with further Israeli settlement and economic expansion on the ground, has transformed a thirty-five-year occupation into a system of apartheid.

 

Ultimately, the continuous occupation and oppression led to the radicalisation and theologisation of Israeli society, which fell under the sway of the extremist settlers. For secular Israeli liberals, the settler movement with its religious fervour has been anathema to democracy. Settler leaders have called for leftists to be jailed. Threats were made against what Israel’s new right termed “the Oslo criminals”, with fascist wall slogans warning, “No Leftists, No Casualties”, “No Arabs, No Casualties”, even though the Peace Now leadership and the liberal Meretz party went out of their way to declare that refusing Israeli army service in the occupied territories was “undemocratic”. By April 2002, over four hundred Israelis had registered their refusal to serve in the territories, thirty-five receiving jail sentences. This incipient revolt was the most promising development since the beginning of the second intifada, the al-Aqsa intifada, in September 2000.

 

Wide disparities between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians in terms of living standards, employment, healthcare and access to education persisted throughout the Oslo process and even increased. Palestinian employment in Israel dwindled as unemployment among Palestinians reached 40 per cent in Gaza and the standard of living plummeted by 25 per cent—symptoms of inequality and discrimination familiar from South African apartheid.

Camp David Masquerade

When Oslo’s “interim process” was no longer useful for Israel, failing to nourish confidence and stability, the Israeli government moved to secure “final-status” negotiations before it would surrender any more land or power to the PA. Two issues dominated the agenda of the final-status talks at the Camp David summit in July 2000: Jerusalem was ostensibly the thorniest question in the negotiations, and that of the Palestinian refugees was, covertly, the most complicated and difficult to resolve. The refugees constitute the majority of the Palestinian people, numbering more than 3.7 million displaced persons, but at Israel’s behest their plight had remained taboo during the preceding years of the “interim process”. It is not surprising that such a mockery of peace talks could go on with little comment in the West if, according to Palestinian scholar Edward Said, 92 per cent of the Western electorate still do not know that there is a Law of Return for Jews only, and that Israel was built on the ruins of Palestinian society.

 

When the curtains finally closed on the theatrics of the peace process at Camp David, Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Barak, claimed that he had done all he could to reach out for peace, but that the Palestinians had rejected his “generous” offer. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Robert Malley, a member of the US peace team at Camp David, later commented, the Palestinians understandably viewed the offer “as neither generous, nor Israeli, nor, indeed, as an offer”.¹ US president Bill Clinton did all the bargaining because Barak refused to commit himself or give Clinton sufficient space for manoeuvre. When the ordeal of the refugees finally entered the agenda at Camp David, Israel refused to admit any moral, legal or political responsibility for their displacement, and failed to commit itself to any compensation or repatriation. Instead, on 1 January 2001, the Israeli Knesset (parliament) introduced two new landmark decisions supported by all of its Jewish members. The first vehemently opposed the Palestinians’ right of return, even though this is an inalienable right, and the second approved the privatisation of state lands, which legally belong to those 3.7 million Palestinian refugees who continue to languish in the occupied territories and neighbouring states.

 

Here they were, all the upbeat Zionist members of parliament, looking energised by the biggest loot of the century. As in times gone by, the greedy conquerors divided up the spoils among themselves, leaving their victims to the misery of the refugee camps. But that wasn’t all. Jerusalem was the other key issue at the Camp David summit. And although Israel broke its taboo on Jerusalem by agreeing to grant the Palestinians effective sovereignty in certain neighbourhoods, it nonetheless insisted on annexing all the illegal Jewish settlements in the city built after the occupation of its eastern half in 1967. It also demanded that the Palestinians accept a barter agreement, one that swapped Israeli compromises on East Jerusalem for Palestinian renunciation of the right of return.

 

This self-serving US/Israeli manoeuvre was referred to as “the peace process”. It turned out to be apartheid. Oslo was based on naked balance of power considerations, not on international legality and fairness. After years of rejecting the involvement of the international community or any notion of an international conference to resolve the conflict, Israel in the Oslo accords persuaded a politically and financially bankrupt PLO to engage in a direct bilateral relation that gave Israel the upper hand. Indeed, the discrepancy between the weak and occupied Palestinians vis-à-vis US-supported Israel was the primary cause of the failure of their bilateral agreements. What Israel considered a dream come true in Oslo turned into the Palestinians’ nightmare under Israeli dictates. And the Clinton administration, instead of being a fair arbitrator in the talks by making up for the imbalance of power, supported its strategic ally Israel on all issues, while excluding the international community.

A New Form of Apartheid

Ironically, the same week that apartheid was being dismantled in South Africa with the country’s first free, multiracial elections in the spring of 1994, Israel began to erect a new system of apartheid in Palestine with the signing of the Gaza–Jericho First agreement. Unlike in South Africa, where the evil old ways of separation and racist land-ownership policies had to stop immediately peace negotiations began, in Palestine they intensified. In stark contrast with F. W. de Klerk’s white government, which ceased land acquisition during the three-year negotiations with Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, the Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin allowed Jewish settlement-building on the West Bank and elsewhere to continue, as if the Oslo agreement had never been signed.

 

The apartheid government in South Africa had driven people off their farms, forced them to live in “homelands”, and then given the land to whites. Successive Israeli governments, Labour and Likud, have applied these same policies of ethnic cleansing in historical Palestine, and the Knesset has enshrined in law Israel’s system of land exclusion, “transfer” (expulsions), racism and apartheid. During the seven long years of the peace process, two laws prevailed in Palestine: one for Jews and another for Palestinians. Israelis had the freedom to move about, build and expand, while the Palestinians were cooped up in encircled bantustans. Israelis had access to the land and expropriated more of it, while Palestinian access only diminished. Needless to say, Israel maintained a firm segregation between Jewish settlers in the occupied territories, who live under Israeli law and protection, and Palestinians, who live under shameful Palestinian legal and security structures. As in South Africa, where homeland chiefs were granted meaningless titles of sovereignty, so Israel was willing to give the PA appurtenances of sovereignty it could in no way exercise. Just as the apartheid regime in South Africa dominated and controlled the black homelands, so Israel has retained ultimate authority, control and sovereignty over the “autonomous” Palestinian enclaves. It also controls land, water, natural resources and the movement of persons in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as the flow of goods into and out of the Palestinian bantustans. Again, as in South Africa, the movement of workers is allowed only when the Israeli business community insists upon it.

 

Of course, it was not merely material interest that spurred Israeli policies. Like the Afrikaners, Israelis have in many ways proved to be irredeemably imprisoned in a siege mentality. Seven years on from the start of the Oslo process, the Palestinians, like all colonised nations, demanded that peace be conditional on an end to occupation and apartheid. They also rejected a final framework agreement modelled on the vague and inadequate Oslo accords. Hence the outbreak of the second intifada.

The Outbreak of the Intifada

The collapse of the Oslo process began when the Israeli government and the Palestinians realised they could not attain their goals through diplomacy. The Palestinians perceived Oslo as a decolonisation process that, following the historical pattern, should lead to self-determination and an independent state alongside Israel in the territories occupied in 1967.

 

When the al-Aqsa intifada exploded in September 2000, the Israeli army was ready with elaborate plans to deal with it. For a number of years, Israel had been working on military means to control the Palestinian population and curb the internal violence that might stem from the Oslo process. The Barak government engaged the Palestinians on two different fronts: on the ground, in the West Bank and Gaza, it used collective punishment, excessive force and political assassination; on the international front, it waged a disinformation campaign against the Palestinians in order to win the indispensable media war in the West, allowing it to recover its most precious title, that of “victim”. This was a difficult task in light of the recurring media images of a mighty Israeli Goliath armed to the teeth fighting a stone-throwing Palestinian David. But Israel was not interested in winning the ground battles if it meant losing the war over international public opinion. Hence the campaign to discredit the Palestinian leadership and dehumanise the indigenous population of Palestine. The Israeli army killed some one hundred Palestinian children in six months, but its chief of staff still went out of his way to accuse the PA of being a terrorist entity.

 

Barak’s Israel utilised Oslo to transform its direct military control into indirect domination over the Palestinians in the occupied territories by reserving for itself the right to determine the nature and borders of the Palestinian entity within the constraints of the security imperatives of its own illegal settlements. When the diplomatic process failed to produce the desired results, Barak used the military to restore “order”, eliminate Palestinian gains by crushing the intifada, and break the will of those who poured into the streets demanding freedom from occupation and their right to independence.

 

The same policy was carried out on the other side of the Green Line dividing Israel from the occupied territories. Not until thirteen Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel had been shot to death and hundreds injured at the hands of Israeli security forces in the first week of October 2000 did the world pay attention to the fact that there were also one million Palestinians inside Israel who lived as second-class citizens under a quasi-apartheid system. An informal, state-sponsored neo-apartheid has separated Israeli Jews from Palestinians since the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948. Over the years, these forgotten Palestinians, frequently referred to as a cancer and treated as a fifth column, have suffered enormously at the hands of Israel.

 

The Jewish state has continuously undermined the relationship of its Palestinian minority to the land, a basic characteristic of apartheid. When Israeli Palestinians demonstrated in solidarity with their brethren across the border, the government immediately changed its buffer zone from the West Bank to the predominantly Palestinian areas of the Galilee and Triangle in the heart of Israel. The security orders to keep the peace at any price were applied inside Israel in the same manner as in the occupied territories.

 

Israeli claims that the PA had instigated the al-Aqsa intifada were scotched by the Mitchell commission in May 2001. The report released by the US-appointed international investigative team led by former US senator, George Mitchell, described the intifada as originating in a series of spontaneous confrontations between mostly unarmed Palestinians and heavily armed Israeli troops whose excessive and disproportionate use of force led to sixty Palestinians being killed and a thousand injured in the first week, as compared to five Israeli fatalities. Barak knew the outcome if the Palestinians did not accept his humiliating dictates. He said that unless a full agreement was reached, there would be a full-scale confrontation. This politically criminal approach led directly to the escalation. Israel’s response was typical, reckoning that military force was a safer bet than the alternative of political channels.

 

When force failed to achieve its desired objectives, Israel applied more force. Unfortunately, Israel’s inability to translate its military victories into political gains through a peace agreement has led to the present deterioration of its security. Each successive Israeli leader did his bit in trampling on the peace process: Shamir stalled it, Rabin militarised it, Netanyahu undermined it, and Barak undid it. Since the outset of the overall Arab–Israeli peace process in Madrid in 1991, not one of these Israeli leaders finished his term of office as they could not make peace while maintaining the occupation and settlements. Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres promised peace. The first was assassinated and the second was voted out. Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak promised “peace and security”, and were also voted out.

 

Despite the rapidly escalating violence on both sides as the al-Aqsa intifada progressed, Washington remained adamant that its peace process was the only game in town. It persisted in trying to keep some semblance of life in the Oslo agreement. In order to achieve calm and a return to the negotiating table, US special envoy George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, forwarded his own plan in June 2001, ostensibly in furtherance of the Mitchell recommendations. But Tenet made no mention of the Mitchell report’s call for an Israeli settlement freeze, and he effectively de-politicised Mitchell by reducing the status of Palestinians and Israelis from two political entities to two security bodies. After a cooling-off period of some seven weeks, the Israeli forces were to withdraw to their positions prior to the outbreak of the intifada in September 2000. That was all the return the Palestinians were to expect for ending their resistance to the Israeli occupation.

 

When Tenet’s plan failed to secure a halt to the fighting, the Bush administration sent retired Marine general, Anthony Zinni, to Israel/Palestine in November 2001. Zinni’s plan, presented in March 2002, again made Palestinian security subservient to Israeli security, hence departing completely from the Mitchell commission’s recommendations. Zinni even endorsed Israeli attacks on PA buildings, including prisons, provided they were carried out “in self-defence” against an “imminent terrorist attack”. The Palestinians understandably rejected this carte blanche for Israel to bomb PA facilities at will.

 

The intifada and the Israeli crackdown continued, but the death knell of the peace process had been sounded many months prior to the Tenet and Zinni missions, with the election of Ariel Sharon as Israeli prime minister in February 2001.

The Advent of Sharon

Within a year of his election victory, Sharon had turned back the clock on efforts to reach a historic reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians and underlined the inescapable fact that Israel, not Palestine, was the source of instability and conflict in the region.

 

During the election campaign, a colonial Israel had offered its voters two generals, one (Sharon) notorious for his war crimes since the 1950s, the other (Barak) an arrogant soldier who had been responsible for bombing Palestinian towns with F-16s fighter planes and Apache helicopters. The Israelis chose, in the words of then–acting foreign minister, Shlomo Ben Ami, a new Israeli Milosevic. Indeed, under international law, Sharon’s bloody record, which includes the systematic and wilful killing of civilians, merits his indictment for crimes against humanity.² To Israeli voters, once Barak had declared that Israel had no peace partner after Camp David, General Sharon appeared to be a fitting alternative. Contrary to US claims that it was the actions of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat that had led to the election of Sharon, the latter’s victory came essentially as a culmination of the failure of Israeli governments to exploit the window of opportunity presented at Oslo, and of three decades’ radicalisation of Israeli society since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.

 

Israel has slowly but consistently moved to the right under the influence of radical nationalist and religious fanatics who have ruled it for a quarter of a century. The sole exception was the ill-fated period of the Rabin/Peres governments, made possible only after then–US secretary of state, James Baker, threatened Israel with economic sanctions in 1991. The Barak government, for its part, can hardly be seen as moderate, authorising more settlement-building than even the preceding Likud administration of Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

Despite Sharon’s declared electoral war-platform and his long, bloody record, Israel’s friends in the West went on promoting the possibility of a Sharon peace—a contradiction in terms. This proved to be not only wishful thinking, but highly dangerous. Unrelenting, Washington’s marketing of a “transformed” Sharon as someone willing and able to effect withdrawal from occupied Palestinian land has been cynically misleading. Sharon believes illegal Israeli settlements and peace are not incompatible. He actually insists that settlements are good for peace.

 

In reality, Sharon’s war on peace has been a crusade to protect the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, leaving all Israelis under an even worse security threat. He has made it clear that only after bludgeoning the Palestinians into submission would he sign an agreement with them. He seeks the peace of the dead. During the worst Israeli military escalation against the Palestinians, during the spring of 2002, President George W. Bush, with a straight face, told journalists in the White House that Sharon was a “man of peace”. Sharon’s sole diplomatic contribution has been his delaying tactics to disrupt a return to the negotiating table, tactics characterised thus by Aluf Ben, leading diplomatic correspondent of the Israeli daily Haaretz:

 

First came the seven days of quiet that he demanded of the Palestinians. Then there were the six demands from Syria and the five fundamentals of the “100 percent effort” against terrorism, not to mention the four essentials for reform in the Palestinian Autonomy, the two conditions for beginning diplomatic negotiations and the one prime minister who wants to stay in power.

And when you add it all up, you arrive at a result of zero diplomatic progress.³

 

In the process, Sharon slammed the door on a landmark Arab initiative that offered Israel regional guarantees for its wellbeing in the Middle East within secure and recognised borders, in return for its withdrawal from the occupied territories. The Arab summit that convened in Beirut in late March 2002 unanimously adopted a Saudi initiative that envisioned a one-time deal of total withdrawal for total peace. It reiterated the international consensus, namely, implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, considered the basis of the peace process. Three-fifths of the Israeli public and most of the world supported the Arab initiative. Sharon did not. He rejects the notion of Israeli withdrawal and refuses to dismantle a single settlement. Worse, he responded to the Arab initiative by ordering the invasion of the autonomous Palestinian territories and the blockade of Arafat’s headquarters.

 

It was déjà vu all over again. Two decades earlier, in 1981, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia had proposed a peace initiative that was later adopted by an Arab summit in Fez, Morocco, in 1982. In response, and in line with the Arab overtures, then–US president Ronald Reagan came out with his own plan that included a freeze on Jewish settlements. The Israeli government of Menachem Begin rejected all these proposals out of hand and warned Washington not to co-ordinate with the Saudis. In 1982, Begin gave Sharon, Israel’s defence minister at the time, the green light to invade Lebanon in pursuit of the PLO. Beirut was bombed and Arafat effectively incarcerated in the besieged Lebanese capital.

 

Besides the Reagan plan, other US peace initiatives rejected by Israel include the 1969 Rogers plan, the 1977 Carter ideas, the 1988 Shultz plan, and the Baker ideas of 1991. According to Clinton special assistant Robert Malley, Barak also repeatedly rejected the US president’s ideas at Camp David and afterwards. Israel, to borrow a famous phrase of Abba Eban’s, has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace.

 

Sharon portrayed his spring 2002 offensive against the Palestinians as an extension of Israel’s 1948 “war of independence”. This was a flagrant manipulation of Israeli feelings of insecurity; Sharon’s offensive has clearly been a war of choice, not so different from his 1982 invasion of Lebanon. As he had promised, Sharon went on to undo years of process and ruined a decade of Palestinian institution-building. He tried to achieve what his mentor Yitzhak Shamir had insisted on: security without peace. In the space of a single year, Sharon reversed all that had been agreed upon between Israelis and Palestinians and destroyed much of the international community’s economic and political investments in Palestine.

Israel’s Spring Offensive

By the spring of 2002, the Israeli military had wreaked its wrath on dozens of Palestinian towns, refugee camps and villages, inflicting record levels of devastation in Palestine. From Hebron to Jenin through Ramallah and Bethlehem, military vandalism and destruction were witnessed everywhere. By late June, the casualties since September 2000 had climbed to over 1,650 Palestinians and 550 Israelis killed, in addition to tens of thousands of injured, the vast majority Palestinians, many crippled for life.

 

The Israeli military’s wanton destruction of the PA’s very infrastructure amounted to “politicide”, the deliberate paralysing of Palestinian institutional political life through assaults on elected leaders and vandalism of ministries and other official buildings. Israeli soldiers broke into private and public offices—including those of the Bureau of Statistics, universities and other embryonic institutions of a Palestinian state—smashed them up and stole the hard disks of their computer systems. Israel assassinated dozens of leaders, mostly from the secular Fatah faction, whose head, Marwan Barghouti, was among thousands of Palestinians arrested. One of the most popular politicians in Palestine, Barghouti is an elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and is committed to coexistence with Israel. He alleges that his Israeli captors have tortured him and interrogated him after subjecting him to enforced sleep deprivation.

 

Israel is also responsible for the total destruction of the Palestinian economy, the ruin of Palestinian urban centres and the defacing of the Palestinian landscape with Jewish settlements and their bypass roads. As the New York Times reported on 10 April 2002, “It’s safe to say that the infrastructure of life itself and of any future Palestinian state—roads, schools, electricity pylons, water pipes, telephone lines—has been devastated.”

 

Sharon’s spring invasion inflicted immediate losses of about half a billion dollars on the Palestinians, and eight times that amount once the wider effect on the Palestinian economy was factored in. All of this was in addition to a 25 per cent reduction in the Palestinian gross domestic product over the course of the seven years of the peace process. In a May 2002 speech in the Norwegian capital, Terje Larsen, one of the architects of the Oslo accords, stated: “The Oslo process has collapsed; the institutions it created have been destroyed.” In the space of a year, Sharon had wrecked all that was left of the Oslo process by bombardment from the air and the ground, having blockaded Palestinian towns and villages for months. Yet he had totally failed on his promise to deliver peace and security to the Israeli public, which was gripped by the fear of suicide bombers.

 

Jenin refugee camp in northern Palestine, home to some twelve thousand Palestinian refugees, was a notable victim of the Israeli assault. During the invasion of the camp, the Israeli army carried out war crimes against civilians as it razed and destroyed hundreds of homes and killed and injured hundreds of Palestinians, many being left to bleed to death. A few days after the initial attack, Israeli forces returned to the camp, bringing on it yet more destruction in order to prove that its aggression was unstoppable, regardless of UN Security Council resolutions condemning the invasion. Sharon refused to allow a special UN team of experts to investigate events in the camp, where human rights organisations testified that war crimes had been committed.

 

The story was repeated in Bethlehem. Only a few days after Israel had lifted its blockade on the Church of the Nativity, it re-entered the city and installed its soldiers near the holy site. Other Palestinian towns and camps faced similar destruction and vandalism and repeated bloody incursions.

Sealing off the West Bank

After its brutal invasion and tornado-like destruction of the autonomous Palestinian areas, the Israeli army in May 2002 closed off all of the West Bank and paved the way for a new order. This new order was based on the infliction of higher economic and social costs on Palestinian society. Israel banned all Palestinian travel between towns without a special permit issued by the Israeli military command centres in the West Bank settlements. Movement of Palestinians to Israel and East Jerusalem was prohibited. The movement of goods between Palestinian cities within the West Bank, as well as from Israel to the West Bank, was subjected to a “back-to-back” system whereby goods had to be offloaded from the incoming trucks and then reloaded onto local trucks.

 

A total of eight locations from which to enforce the post-invasion system marked another partition of the autonomous Palestinian territories into eight separate bantustans. Movement into Gaza was allowed only for humanitarian goods. Materials for donor-funded projects were allowed in on a case-by-case basis and only if co-ordinated in advance. Israel violated the Oslo-defined borders between itself and the autonomous Palestinian areas, making them contingent on its alleged security needs. It unilaterally transformed its supposedly temporary encirclement of the Palestinian areas into their permanent bantustanisation via so-called security zones, barbed wire fences, a permit system, and pass regulations for the circulation of Palestinian goods and people. Israeli military incursions into Palestinian areas under the guise of fighting terrorism became a frequently exercised prerogative. Israel’s measures undermined international aid and the attempts of Palestinians to piece back together their shattered lives and reform their institutions.

 

From the outset, these measures brought about large-scale downsizing or even total cessation of production in the Palestinian areas. They raised unemployment, already over 50 per cent in the towns and over 70 per cent in the refugee camps, and increased poverty, already above 50 per cent, with most families living on as little as $2 a day. According to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the most devastating economic damage was inflicted by the imposition of curfews and closures on whole localities. Arafat fattened his bureaucracy by 120,000 salaries in order to reduce the unemployment caused by these closures. The closures stifled competition and strengthened the monopolies of Arafat’s cronies over basic products. Further economic decline led to increased despair and radicalisation within Palestinian society. As was to be expected, Israel’s de facto apartheid system in the occupied West Bank and Gaza only engendered further violence. The ability of the Palestinian security forces to contain this violence was eroded by Israel’s destruction of their installations and attacks on their personnel.

The Call for Palestinian Reform

The US-led international community shied away from recognising Israeli crimes in the Palestinian territories. Instead, it alleged the need for the political and security reform of the PA as a way out of the impasse. By the end of August 2002, the international quartet of the United Nations, the European Union, Russia and the United States met to discuss the humanitarian disaster in Palestine. But it refused to acknowledge or deal with the elephant in the middle of the room—thirty-five years of Israeli military occupation.

 

Needless to say, Palestinians see reform differently from Americans and Israelis. Palestinian society is hoping for reform that can bring it freedom and accountable government, that can improve access to employment, education and healthcare. The Israeli-driven US approach, however, foresees a security and political reform that privileges Israeli settlements and interests in occupied Palestine. The badly needed improvement of Palestinian living conditions is an impossibility under Sharon’s bantustan system. As long as Israel brands all Palestinian political parties as terrorist, attempting to establish a political process in Palestine would be farcical. Palestinian political leaders have either been assassinated or imprisoned by Israel and the PA. Many are on the run, in hiding for their lives.

 

Convening elections under such circumstances would be a mockery of the democratic process. Moreover, a constitution, independent judiciary and the other democratic institutions recommended by international commissions and Palestinian civil society activists can hardly be introduced in the absence of a functioning legislative council. For two years, Israel has banned Palestinian legislators from assembling, while targeting and imprisoning council members. Ironically, Sharon made negotiations contingent on “Palestinian reform”, even as his military siege ensured that no political or economic reform could be implemented. In truth, by “reform” Sharon means making the Palestinian security services more responsive and effective tools to carry out Israel’s bidding in the occupied territories. Israel has long encouraged or facilitated corruption and nepotism among Palestinian officials and businessmen, or simply looked the other way as Israeli businessmen and ex-security officials worked out shadowy deals with their Palestinian counterparts. This gave those Palestinian VIPs the incentive to collaborate further with Israel as the latter tightened its grip on the occupied territories.

 

Sharon’s attempt to deflect international pressure over his tactics against the intifada included a campaign to discredit the PA and demonise its elected leader, Arafat. Israeli historian Avi Shlaim of Oxford University pointed to Sharon’s motives in choosing these targets:

 

[T]he PA consists of a group of moderate members who joined Arafat in renouncing terror and in opting for the political path to progress. It is a government in the making, with an annual budget of $1 billion, charged with providing essential services to the 3.3 million inhabitants of the territories.

Among the authority’s 150,000 employees are not just police and security officers but civil servants, school teachers, welfare officers, doctors and hospital workers. Dismantling the authority would lead to chaos, instability and endemic violence. This would not serve the interests of Israeli security but it may provide the pretext that Sharon is looking for in order to reoccupy the West Bank, to continue the process of creeping annexation and to “transfer” some of its inhabitants to neighboring Arab countries.⁴

 

Indeed, the real goal of Sharon’s influential security cabinet of settlers, religious fundamentalists and diehard generals is to undo past peace processes and deter future peace initiatives that might block the expansion of the illegal Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories.

Resistance and Suicide Bombings

In the face of this warmongering and in light of the failure of the Oslo agreements, the Palestinians have been left with only one option: to resist their occupiers while leaving the door open for a political process and international intervention that can bring reconciliation between the two peoples. Even before the unfortunate Palestinian suicide bombings and attacks inside Israel, Palestinian resistance within the occupied territories themselves had been branded terrorism by Barak, whose outrageous and excessive response set a precedent for Sharon’s state terrorism. This response by Sharon seemed to gain legitimacy, especially in the United States and Israel, after 11 September in the context of the US “war on terrorism”.

 

The Palestinian response to Israeli military aggression has been legitimate resistance against foreign occupation. Suicide bombings are not a legitimate form of resistance, nor do such actions constitute an effective strategy. Suicide bombings are, in fact, the direct result of the continuing occupation and the international community’s abandonment of the Palestinians. Israel has a vast military superiority relative to poorly armed Palestinian militants, who fought the Israeli army without the support of the Palestinian security forces. This translated into a low-intensity conflict, or what has come to be known as “asymmetrical warfare”. At the very time that the Israelis were bombarding Palestinian towns and assassinating political leaders, they were also demanding that the Palestinians hand over the officials accused of smuggling arms on board the ship Karine A and those presumed responsible for the assassination of an Israeli minister. Arafat finally succumbed to pressure and, under Western security supervision, imprisoned both sets of suspects without a fair trial. As the Israeli aggression continued, Palestinians increasingly asked why there were not more Karine A–type attempts to smuggle arms to Palestine for their self-defence. In short, a culture of Israeli impunity has nurtured a culture of suicide bombings in Palestine.

 

Again, while the Israeli army continued its assault on Palestinian cities and refugee camps in the spring of 2002, the Palestinian leadership was asked to commit itself to protecting Israeli civilians, settlers and soldiers if the Israeli siege of Arafat’s headquarters and the autonomous Palestinian areas was to be lifted. The victims of occupation and aggression were asked to protect their occupiers and oppressors, a logic that defies common sense and human decency. Nonetheless, Arafat’s acceptance of Washington’s humiliating conditions was brushed aside as another ploy until he produced “100 per cent effort” and “100 per cent results” in the “fight against terrorism”. Sharon had no interest in any accommodation with the Palestinians until they were on their knees begging for mercy. He went on to humiliate and incarcerate the Palestinians and their leaders, holding Arafat and the Palestinian people hostage to his occupation. As even Shimon Peres told Sharon, Israel was “needlessly humiliating” the Palestinians.

 

In order that this logic of confrontation and war continue, the US war on terrorism became Israel’s alibi for the violence to come. Israel was defining its colonial war in the occupied territories as one between democracy and terrorism, associating it with President Bush’s “crusade” against Osama bin Laden and other malefactors. By its oppression and occupation, Israel had actually forged the enemy it claimed to be fighting, the suicide bombers. Sharon had been elected on a promise to the Israelis of security, but a year later the result of his actions was unprecedented Israeli insecurity. His military policies failed on all levels—deterrence, prevention and force. When Israeli assassinations of Palestinian leaders, F-16 bombardments, and invasions of Palestinian cities totally failed to deter the Palestinians, Sharon’s narrow logic of force was transformed into pure violence, which engendered further violence.

One State or Two?

At the end of the day, there are only two options for Israelis and Palestinians: they can live either in two separate states, or in one state with a constitution able to accommodate both peoples (examples are Canada, Switzerland and Belgium). No other realistic alternative exists in the medium term. Apartheid and ethnic cleansing are not options in Palestine. For further information, Israel can check with de Klerk and former Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevic. But whatever the arrangement might be, there should be fewer walls erected and more openings encouraged.

 

At the beginning of the new century, the entire Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza lives at a maximum distance of six miles from Israeli-controlled areas. In the overall territory of Palestine/Israel there are, according to Palestinian statistics, almost 4.5 million Palestinians and 4.5 million Jews. Hence, there are two durable ways for Palestinians to coexist with Israelis in peace: either they are granted the right to self-determination in their own sovereign state in the territories occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem, or they are naturalised in the state of Israel/Palestine, alongside the one million Palestinian Israeli citizens, in a binational, democratic state with “one person, one vote”.

 

In short, Israelis have a choice: either they address the long-evaded dilemma of their state’s existence (i.e., the establishment of Israel through the dispossession of another nation), or polarisation and discrimination will deepen the antagonism flowing from the apartheid system already in place.

 

Israeli and American (and Arab) cynics are already lined up with their future perspectives about a region that, according to their analysis, has a limited choice between “peace with violence” or outright war involving, as mounting numbers of Israeli officials claim, another “transfer” of Palestinians from their homeland. Israel’s use of force has lost its logic in the absence of more territories to conquer and with the refusal of the Palestinians to give up their liberty. Israel must begin to evolve into a normal state, one willing to live in equitable peace and justice with the Palestinians. So why not begin now?

Endnotes

1. Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors”, New York Review of Books, 9 August 2001.

 

2. For a review of Sharon’s past, see “Key Figures: Ariel Sharon” [http://electronicintifada.net/forreference/keyfigures/sharon.html].

 

3. Aluf Ben, “Sharon’s Numerical Doctrine”, Haaretz, 23 May 2002.

 

4. Avi Shlaim, “A Career of Terror: Sharon’s Dangerous Designs”, International Herald Tribune, 5 April 2002.