Date: Tue, 4 Jun 2013 00:14:36 +0200
The Oslo Illusion: The Historical Accords between Palestine and Israel
By <http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/adam-hanieh> Adam Hanieh
Global Research, June 03, 2013
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords
between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Israeli
government. Officially known as the Declaration of Principles on Interim
Self-Government Arrangements, the Oslo Accords were firmly ensconced in the
framework of the two-state solution, heralding "an end to decades of
confrontation and conflict," the recognition of "mutual legitimate and
political rights," and the aim of achieving "peaceful coexistence and mutual
dignity and security and . a just, lasting and comprehensive peace
settlement.
Its supporters claimed that under Oslo, Israel would gradually relinquish
control over territory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with the newly
established Palestinian Authority (PA) eventually forming an independent
state there. The negotiations process, and subsequent agreements between the
PLO and Israel, instead paved the way for the current situation in the West
Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Authority, which now rules over an estimated
2.6 million Palestinians in the West Bank, has become the key architect of
Palestinian political strategy. Its institutions draw international
legitimacy from Oslo, and its avowed goal of "building an independent
Palestinian state" remains grounded in the same framework. The incessant
calls for a return to negotiations - made by U.S. and European leaders on an
almost daily basis - harken back to the principles laid down in September
1993.
Stated Goals vs the Real Aims
Two decades on, it is now common to hear Oslo described as a "failure" due
to the ongoing reality of Israeli occupation. The problem with this
assessment is that it confuses the stated goals of Oslo with its real aims.
From the perspective of the Israeli government, the aim of Oslo was not to
end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or to address the
substantive issues of Palestinian dispossession, but something much more
functional. By creating the perception that negotiations would lead to some
kind of "peace," Israel was able to portray its intentions as those of a
partner rather than an enemy of Palestinian sovereignty.
Based on this perception, the Israeli government used Oslo as a fig leaf to
cover its consolidated and deepened control over Palestinian life, employing
the same strategic mechanisms wielded since the onset of the occupation in
1967. Settlement construction, restrictions on Palestinian movement, the
incarceration of thousands, and command over borders and economic life: all
came together to form a complex system of control. A Palestinian face may
preside over the day-to-day administration of Palestinian affairs, but
ultimate power remains in the hands of Israel. This structure has reached
its apex in the Gaza Strip - where over 1.7 million people are penned into a
tiny enclave with entry and exit of goods and people largely determined by
Israeli dictat.
Oslo also had a pernicious political effect. By reducing the Palestinian
struggle to the process of bartering over slivers of land in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip, Oslo ideologically disarmed the not-insignificant parts of
the Palestinian political movement that advocated continued resistance to
Israeli colonialism and sought the genuine fulfillment of Palestinian
aspirations. The most important of these aspirations was the demand that
Palestinian refugees have the right to return to the homes and lands from
which they had been expelled in 1947 and 1948. Oslo made talk of these goals
seem fanciful and unrealistic, normalizing a delusive pragmatism rather than
tackling the foundational roots of Palestinian exile. Outside of Palestine,
Oslo fatally undermined the widespread solidarity and sympathy with the
Palestinian struggle built during the years of the first Intifada, replacing
an orientation toward grassroots collective support with a faith in
negotiations steered by Western governments. It would take over a decade for
solidarity movements to rebuild themselves.
As it weakened the Palestinian movement, Oslo helped to strengthen Israel's
regional position. The illusory perception that Oslo would lead toward peace
permitted Arab governments, led by Jordan and Egypt, to embrace economic and
political ties with Israel under American and European auspices. Israel was
thus able to free itself from Arab boycotts, estimated to have cost it a
cumulative $40-billion from 1948 to 1994. Even more significantly, once
Israel was brought in from the cold, international firms could invest in the
Israeli economy without fear of attracting secondary boycotts from Arab
trading partners. In all these ways, Oslo presented itself as the ideal tool
to fortify Israel's control over Palestinians and simultaneously strengthen
its position within the broader Middle East. There was no contradiction
between support for the "peace process" and deepening colonization - the
former consistently worked to enable the latter.
It is worth remembering that amid the clamor of international cheerleading
for Oslo - capped by the Nobel Peace Prize awarded jointly to Israeli Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and PLO
leader Yasser Arafat in 1994 - a handful of perceptive voices forecast the
situation we face today. Noteworthy among them was Edward Said, who wrote
powerfully against Oslo, commenting that its signing displayed "the
degrading spectacle of Yasser Arafat thanking everyone for the suspension of
most of his people's rights, and the fatuous solemnity of Bill Clinton's
performance, like a twentieth-century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal
kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance." Describing the
agreement as "an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian
Versailles," Said noted that the PLO would become "Israel's enforcer,"
helping Israel to deepen its economic and political domination of
Palestinian areas and consolidating a "state of permanent dependency." While
analyses like Said's are important to recall simply for their remarkable
prescience and as a counterpoint to the constant mythologizing of the
historical record, they are particularly significant today as virtually all
world leaders continue to swear allegiance to a chimerical "peace process."
One question that often goes unaddressed in analyses of Oslo and the
two-state strategy is why the Palestinian leadership headquartered in the
West Bank has been so willingly complicit with this disastrous project. Too
often, the explanation is essentially tautological - something akin to "the
Palestinian leadership has made bad decisions because they are poor
leaders." The finger is often pointed at corruption, or at the difficulties
of the international context that limit available political options.
What is missing from this type of explanation is a blunt fact: some
Palestinians have a great stake in seeing the continuation of the status
quo. Over the last two decades, the evolution of Israeli rule has produced
profound changes in the nature of Palestinian society. These changes have
been concentrated in the West Bank, cultivating a social base that supports
the political trajectory of the Palestinian leadership in its eagerness to
relinquish Palestinian rights in return for being incorporated into the
structures of Israeli settler-colonialism. It is this process of
socioeconomic transformation that explains the Palestinian leadership's
submission to Oslo, and it points to the need for a radical break from the
two-state strategy.
The Social Base of Oslo and the Two-State Strategy
The unfolding of the Oslo process was ultimately shaped by the structures of
occupation laid down by Israel in the preceding decades. During this period,
the Israeli government launched a systematic campaign to confiscate
Palestinian land and construct settlements in the areas from which
Palestinians had been driven out during the 1967 war. The logic of this
settlement construction was embodied in two major strategic plans, the Allon
Plan (1967) and the Sharon Plan (1981). Both these plans envisaged Israeli
settlements placed between major Palestinian population centers and on top
of water aquifers and fertile agricultural land. An Israeli-only road
network would eventually connect these settlements to each other and also to
Israeli cities outside of the West Bank. In this way, Israel could seize
land and resources, divide Palestinian areas from each other, and avoid
direct responsibility for the Palestinian population as much as possible.
The asymmetry of Israeli and Palestinian control over land, resources, and
economy meant that the contours of Palestinian state-formation were
completely dependent on Israeli design.
Combined with military-enforced restrictions on the movement of Palestinian
farmers and their access to water and other resources, the massive waves of
land confiscation and settlement-building during the first two decades of
the occupation transformed Palestinian landownership and modes of social
reproduction. From 1967 to 1974, the amount of cultivated Palestinian land
in the West Bank fell by about one third. The expropriation of land in the
Jordan Valley by Israeli settlers meant that 87% of all irrigated land in
the West Bank was removed from Palestinian hands. Military orders forbade
the drilling of new wells for agricultural purposes and restricted overall
water use by Palestinians, while Israeli settlers were encouraged to use as
much water as needed.
With this deliberate destruction of the agricultural sector, poorer
Palestinians - particularly youth - were displaced from rural areas and
gravitated toward work in the construction and agriculture sectors inside
Israel. In 1970, the agricultural sector included over 40% of the
Palestinian labour force working in the West Bank. By 1987, this figure was
down to only 26%. Palestinian agriculture's share of GDP fell from 35% to
16% between 1970 and 1991.
Under the framework established by the Oslo Accords, Israel seamlessly
incorporated these changes to the West Bank into a comprehensive system of
control. Palestinian land was gradually transformed into a patchwork of
isolated enclaves, with the three main clusters in the north, center, and
south of the West Bank divided from one another by settlement blocs. The
Palestinian Authority was granted limited autonomy in the areas where most
Palestinians lived (the so-called Areas A and B), but travel between these
areas could be shut down at any time by the Israeli military. All movement
to and from Areas A and B, as well as the determination of residency rights
in these areas, was under Israeli authority. Israel also controlled the vast
majority of water aquifers, all underground resources, and all airspace in
the West Bank. Palestinians thus relied on Israeli discretion for their
water and energy supplies.
Israel's complete control over all external borders, codified in the 1994
Paris Protocol on Economic Relations between the PA and Israel, meant that
it was impossible for the Palestinian economy to develop meaningful trade
relations with a third country. The Paris Protocol gave Israel the final say
on what the PA was allowed to import and export. The West Bank and Gaza
Strip thus became highly dependent on imported goods, with total imports
ranging between 70% and 80% of GDP. By 2005, the Palestinian Central Bureau
of Statistics estimated that 74% of all imports to the West Bank and Gaza
Strip originated in Israel while 88% of all exports from those areas were
destined for Israel.
With no real economic base, the PA was completely reliant on external
capital flows of aid and loans, which were again under Israeli control.
Between 1995 and 2000, 60% of the total PA revenue came from indirect taxes
collected by the Israeli government on goods imported from abroad and
destined for the occupied territories. These taxes were collected by the
Israeli government and then transferred to the PA each month according to a
process outlined in the Paris Protocol. The other main source of PA income
came from aid and foreign disbursements by the United States, Europe, and
Arab governments. Indeed, figures for aid measured as a percentage of Gross
National Income indicated that the West Bank and Gaza Strip were among the
most aid-dependent of all regions in the world.
Changing Labour Structure
This system of control engendered two major changes in the socioeconomic
structure of Palestinian society. The first of these related to the nature
of Palestinian labour, which increasingly became a tap that could be turned
on or off according to the economic and political situation and the needs of
Israeli capital. Beginning in 1993, Israel consciously moved to substitute
the Palestinian labour force that commuted daily from the West Bank with
foreign workers from Asia and Eastern Europe. This substitution was partly
enabled by the declining importance of construction and agriculture as
Israel's economy shifted away from those sectors toward high-tech industries
and exports of finance capital in the 1990s.
Between 1992 and 1996, Palestinian employment in Israel declined from
116,000 workers (33% of the Palestinian labour force) to 28,100 (6% of the
Palestinian labour force). Earnings from work in Israel collapsed from 25%
of Palestinian GNP in 1992 to 6% in 1996. Between 1997 and 1999, an upturn
in the Israeli economy saw the absolute numbers of Palestinian workers
increase to approximately pre-1993 levels, but the proportion of the
Palestinian labour force working inside Israel was nonetheless almost half
of what it had been a decade earlier.
Instead of working inside Israel, Palestinians became increasingly dependent
on public-sector employment within the PA or on transfer payments made by
the PA to families of prisoners, martyrs, or the needy. Public-sector
employment made up nearly a quarter of total employment in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip by 2000, a level that had almost doubled since 1996. More than
half of the PA's expenditures went to wages for these public-sector workers.
The private sector also provided substantial employment, particularly in the
area of services. These were overwhelmingly dominated by small family-owned
businesses - over 90% of Palestinian private-sector businesses employ fewer
than ten people - as a result of decades of Israeli de-development policies.
Capital and the Palestinian Authority
Alongside the increasing dependence of Palestinian families on either
employment or payments from the Palestinian Authority, the second major
feature of the socioeconomic transformation of the West Bank was related to
the nature of the Palestinian capitalist class. In a situation of weak local
production and extremely high dependence on imports and flows of foreign
capital, the economic power of the Palestinian capitalist class in the West
Bank did not stem from local industry, but rather proximity to the PA as the
main conduit of external capital inflows. Through the Oslo years, this class
came together through the fusion of three distinct social groups: "returnee"
capitalists, mostly from a Palestinian bourgeoisie that had emerged in the
Gulf Arab states and held strong ties to the nascent Palestinian Authority;
families and individuals who had historically dominated Palestinian society,
often large landowners from the pre-1967 period, particularly in the
Northern areas of the West Bank; and those who had managed to accumulate
wealth through their position as interlocutors within the occupation since
1967.
While the memberships of these three groups overlapped considerably, the
first was particularly significant to the nature of state and class
formation in the West Bank. Gulf-based financial flows had long played a
major role in tempering the radical edge of Palestinian nationalism; but
their conjoining with the Oslo state-building process radically deepened the
tendencies of statization and bureaucratization within the Palestinian
national project itself.
This new three-sided configuration of the capitalist class tended to draw
its wealth from a privileged relationship with the Palestinian Authority,
which assisted its growth by granting monopolies for goods like cement,
petroleum, flour, steel, and cigarettes; issuing exclusive import permits
and customs exemptions; giving sole rights to distribute goods in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip; and distributing government-owned land below its value.
In addition to these state-assisted forms of accumulation, much of the
investment that came into the West Bank from foreign donors through the Oslo
years - infrastructure construction, new building projects, agricultural and
tourist developments - were also typically connected to this new capitalist
class in some way.
In the context of the PA's fully subordinated position, the ability to
accumulate was always tied to Israeli consent and thus came with a political
price - one designed to buy compliance with ongoing colonization and
enforced surrender. It also meant that the key components of the Palestinian
elite - the wealthiest businessmen, the PA's state bureaucracy and the
remnants of the PLO itself - came to share a common interest in Israel's
political project. The rampant spread of patronage and corruption were the
logical byproducts of this system, as individual survival depended on
personal relationships with the Palestinian Authority. The systemic
corruption of the PA that Israel and Western governments regularly decried
throughout the 1990s and 2000s, was, in other words, a necessary and
inevitable consequence of the very system that these powers had themselves
established.
The Neoliberal Turn
These two major features of the Palestinian class structure - a labour force
dependent on employment by the Palestinian Authority, and a capitalist class
imbricated with Israeli rule through the institutions of the PA itself -
continued to characterize Palestinian society in the West Bank through the
first decade of the 2000s. The division of the West Bank and Gaza Strip
between Fatah and Hamas in 2007 strengthened this structure [Ed.: see
<http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet013.html> Bullet No. 13], with
the West Bank subject to ever more complex movement restrictions and
economic control. Simultaneously, Gaza developed in a different trajectory,
with Hamas rule reliant on profits drawn from the tunnel trade and aid from
states like Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
In recent years, however, there has been an important shift in the economic
trajectory of the Palestinian Authority, encapsulated in a harsh neoliberal
program premised on public-sector austerity and a development model aimed at
further integrating Palestinian and Israeli capital in export-oriented
industrial zones. This economic strategy only acts to further tie the
interests of Palestinian capital with those of Israel, building culpability
for Israeli colonialism into the very structures of the Palestinian economy.
It has produced increasing poverty levels and a growing polarization of
wealth. In the West Bank, real per-capita GDP increased from just over
$1,400 in 2007 to around $1,900 in 2010, the fastest growth in a decade. At
the same time, the unemployment rate remained essentially constant at around
20%, among the highest in the world. One of the consequences was a profound
level of poverty: around 20% of Palestinians in the West Bank were living on
less than $1.67 a day for a family of five in 2009 and 2010. Despite these
poverty levels, the consumption of the richest 10% increased to 22.5% of the
total in 2010.
In these circumstances, growth has been based on prodigious increases in
debt-based spending on services and real estate. According to the United
Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the hotel and
restaurant sector grew by 46% in 2010 while construction increased by 36%.
At the same time, manufacturing decreased by 6%. The massive levels of
consumer-based debt levels are indicated in figures from the Palestinian
Monetary Authority, which show that the amount of bank credit almost doubled
between 2008 and 2010. Much of this involved consumer-based spending on
residential real estate, automobile purchases, or credit cards; the amount
of credit extended for these three sectors increased by a remarkable 245%
between 2008 and 2011. These forms of individual consumer and household debt
potentially carry deep implications for how people view their capacities for
social struggle and their relation to society. Increasingly caught in a web
of financial relationships, individuals seek to satisfy their needs through
the market, usually by borrowing money, rather than through collective
struggle for social rights. The growth of these financial and debt-based
relations thus individualizes Palestinian society. It has had a
conservatizing influence over the latter half of the 2000s, with much of the
population concerned with "stability" and the ability to pay off debt rather
than the possibility of popular resistance.
Beyond the Impasse?
"The current cul-de-sac of Palestinian political strategy is inseparable
from the question of class. "
The current cul-de-sac of Palestinian political strategy is inseparable from
the question of class. The two-state strategy embodied in Oslo has produced
a social class that draws significant benefits from its position atop the
negotiation process and its linkages with the structures of occupation. This
is the ultimate reason for the PA's supine political stance, and it means
that a central aspect of rebuilding Palestinian resistance must necessarily
confront the position of these elites. Over the last few years, there have
been some encouraging signs on this front, with the emergence of protest
movements that have taken up the deteriorating economic conditions in the
West Bank and explicitly targeted the PA's role in contributing to them. But
as long as the major Palestinian political parties continue to subordinate
questions of class to the supposed need for national unity, it will be
difficult for these movements to find deeper traction.
Moreover, the history of the last two decades shows that the "hawks and
doves" model of Israeli politics, so popular in the perfunctory coverage of
the corporate media and wholeheartedly shared by the Palestinian leadership
in the West Bank, is decidedly false. Force has been the essential midwife
of "peace negotiations." Indeed, the expansion of settlements, restrictions
on movement, and the permanence of military power have made possible the
codification of Israeli control through the Oslo Accords. This is not to
deny that substantive differences exist between various political forces
within Israel; but rather to argue that these differences exist along a
continuum rather than in sharp disjuncture. Violence and negotiations are
complementary and mutually reinforcing aspects of a common political
project, shared by all mainstream parties, and both act in tandem to deepen
Israeli control over Palestinian life. The last two decades have powerfully
confirmed this fact.
The reality of Israeli control today is the outcome of a single process that
has necessarily combined violence and the illusion of negotiations as a
peaceful alternative. The counterposing of right-wing extremists with a
so-called Israeli peace camp acts to obfuscate the centrality of force and
colonial control embodied in the political program of the latter.
The reason for this is the shared assumption of the Zionist left and right
wings that Palestinian rights can be reduced to the question of a state in
some part of historic Palestine. The reality is that the overriding project
of the last sixty-three years of colonization in Palestine has been the
attempt by successive Israeli governments to divide and fracture the
Palestinian people, attempting to destroy a cohesive national identity by
separating them from one another. This process is clearly illustrated by the
different categories of Palestinians: refugees, who remain scattered in
camps across the region; those who remained on their land in 1948 and later
became citizens of the Israeli state; those living in the isolated cantons
of the West Bank; and now those separated by the fragmenting of the West
Bank and Gaza Strip. All of these groups of people constitute the
Palestinian nation, but the denial of their unity has been the overriding
logic of colonization since before 1948. Both the Zionist left and right
agree with this logic, and have acted in unison to narrow the Palestinian
"question" to isolated fragments of the nation as a whole. This logic is
also one wholeheartedly accepted by the Palestinian Authority and is
embodied in its vision of a "two-state solution."
Oslo may be dead, but its putrid corpse is not one that any Palestinian
should hope to resuscitate. What is needed is a new political orientation
that rejects the fracturing of Palestinian identity into scattered
geographical zones. It is encouraging to see the mounting chorus of calls
for a reorientation of Palestinian strategy, based on a single state in all
of historic Palestine. Such an outcome will not be achieved solely through
Palestinian efforts. It requires a broader challenge to Israel's privileged
relationship with the U.S. and its position as a key pillar of U.S. power in
the Middle East. But a one-state strategy presents a vision for Palestine
that confirms the essential unity of all sectors of the Palestinian people
regardless of geography.
It also provides a path to reach out to the Israeli people that reject
Zionism and colonialism through the hope of a future society that does not
discriminate on the basis of national identity, and in which all may live
regardless of religion or ethnicity. It is this vision that provides a route
to achieving both peace and justice. .
Adam Hanieh is a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies
(SOAS), University of London and the author of Lineages of Revolt: Issues of
Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East, forthcoming from Haymarket
Press. This article first published on the <http://jacobinmag.com/> Jacobin
website.
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