This September marks the twentieth anniversary of that sun-drenched day on the White House lawn, when a beaming President Bill Clinton brought together a reluctant Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, with an exuberant Palestine Liberation Organization chair, Yasser Arafat, for an historic handshake.
The two leaders had just signed the Oslo Accord, ushering in what was supposed to have been a five-year period in which direct Israeli-PLO negotiations would lead to Israeli military redeployments in (but not withdrawals from) the occupied Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip; the establishment of a Palestinian governing institution to manage civil and police functions in areas from which the Israeli military had redeployed; and the resolution of all outstanding permanent status issues—borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, water—culminating in a peace treaty terminating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Two decades and countless rounds of negotiations later, with the Obama administration having just succeeded in dragging the parties back to the table yet again, it is worth considering why the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has delivered an interminable process but no peace, and what must change if further negotiations are to succeed. To help answer these questions, it is useful to deconstruct some commonly held misperceptions about the peace process and the role of the United States in shepherding it.
Myth #1: The Oslo Accords Committed Israel to Stop Colonizing Palestinian Land
The Oslo Accords gave the interim governing Palestinian body, the Palestinian Authority (PA), no jurisdiction over the illegal settlements established by Israel in occupied Palestinian territories. In fact, under Oslo, Israel retained sole discretion to expropriate additional Palestinian land for settlements and other purposes such as military firing ranges.
Under the cover of on-again, off-again negotiations, Israel actually engaged in an unprecedented drive to widen and deepen its colonization of Palestinian territory. The number of Israeli settlements has increased from about 280,000 in 1993 to nearly 550,000 today. Although this colonization of Palestinian land may have violated the spirit of the peace process, it most certainly did not contradict its letter, underscoring how the Oslo Accords were designed to entrench Israel’s occupation and colonization of Palestinian land, rather than end it.
At no point during the apex of peace process negotiations, conducted under the aegis of the Clinton administration, did the United States insist on Israel publicly committing to stop colonizing Palestinian land. Only after the calamitous breakdown of the peace process after the botched 2000 Camp David summit did the United States insist— in the Mitchell Report (2001), the Road Map (2003) and the Annapolis Peace Conference (2007)—that Israel halt settlement construction to get the peace process back on track. Yet despite the lip service paid to this principle by the Bush and Obama administrations, the United States has consistently stood idly by as Israeli colonization continued. Since the United States reconvened negotiations in July, Israel has approved thousands of new settlement units.
Myth #2: The Oslo Accords Heralded the Establishment of a Palestinian State
U.S. officials today seize every opportunity to declare that Israeli-Palestinian negotiations should and will lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state, which might lead one to imagine that this was the intended outcome of the Oslo process. However, one searches in vain for any mention of Palestinian statehood in the Oslo Accords. In fact, Rabin strenuously opposed a Palestinian state until his dying day.
Rather than promise eventual statehood, Israel designed the Oslo Accords to afford Palestinians in the occupied territories a severely circumscribed form of autonomy exercised under the heavy hand of perpetual Israeli dominance. In essence, the Oslo Accords were a neat repackaging of the stale and rejected plans for Palestinian autonomy outlined in the 1978 Egyptian-Israeli Camp David Accords. That former scheme came to naught after Israel failed to identify any representative Palestinians willing to implement it; in the 1990s, however, the PLO obliged.
So heretical was the notion of Palestinian statehood during the height of the peace process, that when then-First Lady Hillary Clinton expressed her support for the idea in 1998, her statement was disowned by the Clinton administration after a furious, bipartisan uproar in Congress. By the end of the Clinton administration, the president was willing to express tepid public support for Palestinian statehood, marking a transformation in official discourse that led eventually to the idea becoming de rigueur among U.S. policymakers during the Bush and Obama eras.
This development represented, however, a change in terminology rather than substance. What Israel offered to the PLO at Camp David and in every permanent status negotiation thereafter was a ‘statehood’ devoid of sovereignty; permanent subjugation dressed up as independence. Such a ‘state’ would be territorially discontiguous, hemmed in by annexed Israeli settlements and military bases, with no control over its borders, water, airspace, electromagnetic fields, or ability to conduct an independent foreign policy or raise an army. In short, a Palestinian ‘state’ that could issue its own stamps and write its own textbooks, but little else, would be acceptable to Israel and therefore to U.S. policymakers. This definition of ‘statehood’ falls far short of internationally-accepted notions of independence, not to mention Palestinian self-determination.
Myth #3: The Oslo Accords Levelled the Playing Field by Creating a Palestinian Government
As noted above, one of Oslo’s chief goals was to establish an interim Palestinian authority to administer the limited autonomy given to Palestinians in those areas of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip from which Israel redeployed (eventually totalling 42 percent of the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip following Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in 2005). This step was accomplished in May 1994, when Israel and PLO established the Palestinian Authority. The PA was endowed with the trappings of governmental power, including ministries, and presidential and parliamentary elections, but was never meant to be a permanent governing structure exercising sovereignty. In fact its lost its legal standing after the five-year interim period ended in 1999, before Israel and the PLO even began permanent status negotiations aimed at resolving the conflict.
Since that time all the relevant players, with a wink and nod, have found it convenient for different reasons to perpetuate the notion that the PA still has legal relevance. Undoubtedly Israel stands to gain the most from the continued existence of the PA. First, as long as the PA functions, Israel can neglect its Fourth Geneva Convention obligations to take care of the needs of the civilian population living under its military occupation and fob this responsibility off to an international community that is willing to foot the bill instead.
Second, the existence of the PA allows Israel to subcontract out some of the security responsibilities it would prefer an indigenous force to handle. In recent years, the United States has funded the professionalization of Palestinian security forces, garnering great admiration from Israel. During Israel’s assault on Gaza in December 2008-January 2009, which killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, PA security forces were so effective in quelling popular discontent in the West Bank that Israel was able to shift some of its West Bank forces to Gaza, to participate in the attack.
Third, and most relevant for this topic, the existence of the PA creates the illusion of a permanent Palestinian government, which, to the casual observer, might signify that when Israelis and Palestinians sit down to negotiate, they are doing so as equals. Nothing could be further from the truth, notwithstanding the fact that it is the PLO and not the PA which conducts negotiations in any case. While a Palestinian governing authority exercises a degree of autonomy in parts of occupied Palestinian territory, the underlying dynamic remains the same: when Israel and the PLO negotiate, it is from their relative positions as colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed. This power imbalance is skewed further by the superpower’s pattern of weighing in on behalf of Israel.
Myth #4: The United States Is an “Honest Broker” in Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations
The notion that the United States acts an impartial arbiter between Israel and the Palestinians has been largely discredited, but the United States continues to insist otherwise as it keeps a firm grasp on its self-appointed, exclusive role as convener of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. From the outset of the Oslo process, however, it was transparently clear that the United States was coordinating its positions with Israel and then teaming up against the Palestinian negotiating team to try to impose agreements on Israel’s terms.
Aaron David Miller, a key figure in the peace process in the Clinton and Bush administrations,confessed that “[f]or far too long, many American officials involved in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, myself included, have acted as Israel’s attorney, catering and coordinating with the Israelis at the expense of successful peace negotiations.” His boss at the State Department, Dennis Ross, was even more forthright in his description of how the United States rigged the peace process game in Israel’s favour. In his memoir, The Missing Peace, Ross admitted that “[w]e would take Israeli ideas or ideas that the Israelis could live with and work them over—trying to increase their attractiveness to the Arabs while trying to get the Arabs to scale back their expectations.”
When the Palestinian negotiating team refused to accept these combined U.S. and Israeli pressures to accede to a permanent status peace treaty that would result in a Palestinian “state” devoid of sovereignty and the negation of Palestinian refugees’ right of return, as happened at Camp David in 2000, the United States turned on the Palestinians with a vengeance. Beforehand, Arafat had warned Clinton that the ground had not been adequately prepared for a summit meeting to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, receiving in return from Clinton a solemn pledge that Arafat would not be blamed if negotiations did not succeed. Literally minutes after negotiations broke down, Clinton publicly laid the blame solely on Arafat’s shoulders.
Myth #5: The Obama Administration Is Fundamentally Different than Its Predecessors
President Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009 with a more nuanced understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and more empathy for the plight of the Palestinian people than any of his predecessors. And, at the outset of his administration, it even appeared that the United States was entering into a more even-handed phase of its attempts to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Obama jettisoned the U.S. tradition of placing an individual with obvious pro-Israel sympathies at the head of his peace process team, instead appointing former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as his Special Envoy for Middle East Peace. Both Mitchell’s appointment and Obama’s early insistence that Israel abide by its previous obligations to freeze settlement expansion clearly riled the Israel lobby and indicated a potential shift in U.S. policy.
However, this apparent change in approach was illusory and short-lived. Obama did not have the stomach to go to the mat with the Israel lobby and by mid-2009 his firm calls for Israel to abandon its colonization of Palestinian land vanished and Mitchell was bureaucratically outmanoeuvred by the aforementioned Ross, who proceeded to bring a chastised Obama back in line with failed peace process approaches from the past. The United States then spent the next year pressuring the Palestinians to return to the negotiating table for yet another doomed round of talks as Israel continued to nakedly colonize land supposedly meant for a future Palestinian state. All the while, the Obama administration worked diligently to scuttle international attempts to hold Israel accountable for war crimes documented by the UN Human Rights Council and, later, Palestine’s bid to join the UN.
Following Secretary of State John Kerry’s intensive shuttle diplomacy at the outset of Obama’s second term, the United States succeeded in restarting direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in July 2013. To date, these talks have centred on procedural matters such as setting timetables, work plans and agendas. Israel’s standard modus operandi for negotiations continues; namely, exploiting their existence to deflect international pressure from its drive to illegally colonize additional Palestinian land.
This time, however, the Obama administration has dropped even the pretence of seeking an Israeli settlement freeze and has openly acknowledged that Israel, with its blessing, will continue to expand settlements as this sham process unfolds. To make matters worse and to underline the futility of these talks, Obama has returned to the wrongheaded U.S. policy of appointing pro-Israel officials to oversee the peace process in naming Ambassador Martin Indyk, a former employee of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC, America’s leading pro-Israel lobby group) and its spin-off “think tank” the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as new U.S. Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations.
Conclusion
Twenty years after the signing of the Oslo Accord, it is evident that the peace process it launched has served to perpetuate Israeli military occupation and strengthen its colonization of Palestinian land, rather than end it as a step towards a just and lasting peace. In these circumstances, peace process negotiations cannot and will not lead to a treaty between the parties, especially while the United States, acting in collusion with Israel, assumes the mantle of mediator.
Rather than invest yet more misplaced faith in a doomed political process, individuals and organizations that support Palestinian self-determination and a just and lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace should take the initiative by engaging in campaigns of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) called for by a broad section of Palestinian civil society groups in 2005. By costing corporations that profit from Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians billions of dollars in lost contracts and by convincing major international cultural icons not to perform in Israel, these Palestinian-led, international campaigns have arguably had more of an impact than twenty years of fruitless negotiations.
Eventually, Israelis and Palestinians will have to negotiate an end of the conflict. For these negotiations to be successful, they cannot be held in the context of continued Israeli colonization and military occupation, but on the basis of human rights and international law. Such an agreement must include not only an end to Israel’s colonization and occupation of Palestinian land seized in 1967, but the recognition and implementation of Palestinian refugees’ right of return and lead to legal and social equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel as well. Until Israel is prepared to accept these principles as bases for an enduring peace, there is no reason to believe that even twenty more years of faux negotiations will lead to a different result.
Josh Ruebner is the author of Shattered Hopes: Obama’s Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace and National Advocacy Director of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation