Thread by @battleforeurope

🧵 We need to talk about Oslo.

Thirty years ago 🇮🇱 and 🇵🇸 signed a “historic peace deal” that was supposed to end the conflict. It failed. The reasons are still hotly debated, with most blaming the Palestinians. So let’s settle the issue once and for all.
unherd.com/2023/10/why-pe…

1/ In 1987 the First Intifada broke out, as a reaction against Israeli repression including “beatings, shootings, killings, house demolitions, uprooting of trees, deportations, extended imprisonments, and detentions without trial”.
jstor.org/stable/2537242

2/ The uprising coincided with the appearance of a new political force on the scene: Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which opposed the PLO’s recognition of Israel and its pursuit of a two-state solution. Hamas proved to be a two-edged sword for Israel.

3/ On the one hand Hamas posed a serious military threat but on the other it allowed Israel to brand the Palestinian struggle as part of a global anti-Western Islamic jihad. This explains why Israel played an important role in propping up the organisation.
theintercept.com/2018/02/19/ham…

4/ Israel’s reaction to the First Intifada was ruthless, leading — according to Israeli historian Ilan Pappé — to the transformation of the open-air prison model which had been in place since 1967 into an even harsher maximum security prison, through, e.g., the checkpoint system.

5/ Nonetheless, the First Intifada gave impetus to the first real round of diplomatic talks between Israel and Arafat’s PLO — which by then had given up liberating “all Palestinian soil”, had accepted the existence of the state of Israel and was committed to a two-state solution.

6/ In September 1993 Israel’s PM Rabin and Arafat unveiled a “historic peace deal” on the White House lawn in the presence of Bill Clinton — the first of the so-called Oslo Accords. Under the deal, Israel would withdraw its military from Palestinian territory, and Palestinians...

7/ ... would obtain self-governance over parts of the West Bank (excluding the illegal settlements) and the Gaza Strip — not an actual state but rather an “entity”, as Rabin put it. Israel would maintain exclusive control of Gaza’s borders, airspace and territorial waters.

8/ Specific issues — Israeli settlements, Jerusalem’s status, Israel’s control over security, and the Palestinian right of return — would be settled in future discussions. A transitional five-year period was established for the implementation of the agreement.

9/ There were several problems with this deal. Not only did it not foresee the creation an actual Palestinian state, but only limited self-governance. Even more crucially, the aggressive policy of settler colonisation and Judaisation of the West Bank underway since 1967 meant...

10/ ... that Palestinian “autonomy” — let alone statehood — over the West Bank had already become virtually impossible. By the mid-1990s there were already 100,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and countless settlement and outpost scattered throughout the Occupied Territories.

11/ Anyway, whatever hopes there were of working out a better deal down the road were dashed when Rabin (who at least was committed to peace, even if on Israel’s terms) was assassinated, in 1995. On November 4, Rabin led a massive demo in support of the peace deal in Tel Aviv.

12/ As he left the venue an Israeli ultranationalist shot him twice. Ever since the negotiations had started Rabin had become the target of Israeli extremists. Some right-wing rabbis even proclaimed a din rodef — an authorisation to kill in traditional Jewish law — against him.

13/ Rallies organised by Likud, by then led by Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as other right-wing groups featured depictions of Rabin in a Nazi SS uniform or in the crosshairs of a gun. Protestors chanted “Rabin is a murderer” and “Rabin is a traitor”.

14/ Netanyahu himself was often present at these rallies. In July 1995, a few months before Rabin’s murder, he led a mock funeral procession featuring a coffin and hangman’s noose at a rally during which protesters chanted “Death to Rabin”. Over the years, Netanyahu has often...

15/ ... been accused of encouraging incitement that led to Rabin’s killing, or at the very least of contributing to the incendiary political climate that led to the murder.
timesofisrael.com/labor-chief-mi…

16/ After Rabin’s death, new elections were scheduled. It seemed like a mere formality: Shimon Peres, who had taken Rabin’s place, was way ahead of Netanyahu in the polls. Then, in the weeks leading up to the elections, Hamas, which was also committed to derailing...

17/ ... the peace talks, committed a series of terrorist attacks that dramatically shifted public opinion towards Netanyahu and his ultranationalist Likud. Six months after the assassination, he won the election. The new PM’s objection to the Accords meant they ground to a halt.

18/ Meanwhile, the reality on the ground for Palestinians had already started to get worse — as a direct result of the Oslo Accords. Under the 1995 Oslo II Accord, the West Bank was divided into Areas A, B and C, with Israel controlling any movement between, and within, them.

19/ The idea was that the Palestinian Authority would get some limited authority over Areas A and B — basically a series of enclaves scattered throughout the bank — with Area C (the rest of the West Bank) to be gradually transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction by 1997.

20/ The result was something resembling a Swiss cheese — and the beginning of an even more hellish daily life for Palestinians in the West Bank. The reality is that Oslo effectively formalised the “bantustanisation” of the West Bank. Meanwhile, Netanyahu continued...

21/ ... construction within existing Israeli settlements. The peace process only started moving again when the Labor Party, under Ehud Barak, returned to power in 1999. Barak was determined to land a final agreement, and he enjoyed the full support of the Clinton administration.

22/ This led to the 2000 Camp David summit. On that occasion, Israel official proposed a two-state solution for the first time: a small Palestinian state, with a capital in a village near Jerusalem, Abu Dis, comprising Gaza and parts of the West Bank.

23/ There would be no significant dismantling of the settlements, and several aspects of the future Palestinian state — security and the management of certain resources — would remain under Israeli control. The offer also included a categorical rejection of the right of return.

24/ Arafat rejected Barak’s “generous offer” — and a few months later another major Palestinian uprising, the Second Intifada, broke out. Which party (parties) should be blamed for the summit’s failure remains hotly debated. The Israelis and the Americans...

25/ ... have always blamed Arafat for his unwillingness to compromise on territory and, even more importantly, to give up on the right of return. Others, however, including Shlomo Ben-Ami, then-Israel’s Minister of Foreign Relations, have challenged this view, arguing that...

26/ ... the real problem was Israeli, not Palestinian, intransigence. According to a member of the US delegation the terms of the deal proposed by Israel were impossible for Arafat to uphold: Palestinians would have opposed them regardless of what he said.
nytimes.com/2001/07/08/opi…

27/ Israel’s “best offer” was a state comprising portions of the remaining 20% of the Palestinian land occupied in 1967, whose economic/foreign policy would have largely remained under Israeli control. It’s easy to see why many Palestinians thought such a deal was unacceptable.

28/ Moreover, Palestinians had lost faith in the peace process in general: as said, life in the territories had worsened since the start of the Oslo Accords. This is why, as the US State Department’s Hussein Agha and Robert Malley recount in their report of the summit...

29/ ... Arafat came to the negotiating table demanding an end to the daily brutalisation of normal Palestinian life as a way to restore faith in the benefits of the peace process. But the Israelis refused to budge.
nybooks.com/articles/2001/…

30/ To place all the blame on the 🇮🇱 government, however, would be too simplistic. At this point, a majority of Israelis thought the government had already compromised too much. So what was not enough for most Palestinians was too much for most Israelis.
web.archive.org/web/2011060912…

31/ No wonder the two parties failed to find any middle ground. The growing anger and frustration of Palestinians eventually led to the outburst of a second, even more violent, intifada, in late 2000, which Israel used as an excuse to block any further negotiations — and...

32/ ... to justify a brutal crackdown in the West Bank in 2002. This quelled the revolt, but also sowed the seeds of future violence. From that moment onwards, the goal of peace has moved further and further away into the distance.
amnesty.org/en/wp-content/…

33/ To all intents and purposes, the Oslo Accords are, today, dead buried. Indeed, peace in the region has never been more elusive, as events in Gaza makes dramatically clear.

34/ I like to think that maybe, in some alternative timeline — in which Rabin survived, Netanyahu didn’t win the elections, the secular nationalists won over Hamas, etc. — a lasting peace deal was eventually reached. But in our timeline, the Oslo Accords never had a chance.

If you enjoyed this thread, check out the article it’s based on for a much, much deeper dive: unherd.com/2023/10/why-pe…