Thread by @MouinRabbani

THREAD (Part V, Section 1): The 2000-2004 Al-Aqsa Uprising, more commonly known as the Second Intifada, was neither a war nor an armed conflict in the conventional sense.

But it represents an important chapter in Israeli-Palestinian relations and played a crucial role in forming the context for subsequent developments, including those of the past year.

The Second Intifada was in many respects the outcome of the 1993 Oslo Accords and their implementation during 1994-2000. In this regard there is a widespread misconception that in Oslo,

Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) concluded a framework agreement to achieve a two-state settlement. Oslo did no such thing. The agreement, formally known as the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements,

is all of 3-4 pages long, largely written in plain English, and should be read by everyone interested in the Question of Palestine. Its text makes no mention of “occupation”, “self-determination”, “Palestinian state”, or for that matter “1967 boundaries/borders”.

The 1987-1993 Palestinian uprising had persuaded Israel’s rulers that the status quo enforced by Israel since 1967 had become untenable.

Additionally, the end of the Cold War and subsequent inauguration of Arab-Israeli diplomatic negotiations under US (formally US-Soviet) auspices in Madrid in October 1991,

produced fears in Israel that if it did not produce an initiative of its own to safeguard its strategic interests, one might be imposed on it.

On the Palestinian side of the equation the PLO was experiencing a severe decline in its fortunes. In the occupied territories the uprising was stagnating under the combined weight of years of violent Israeli repression and the rise of militias supplanting popular participation.

Then, in the wake of the 1990-1991 Kuwait Crisis, during which the PLO ultimately aligned with Iraq, it was isolated politically coupled with an unprecedented financial crisis as Gulf states ceased funding it or shifted their support to its increasingly influential rival, Hamas.

In the negotiations that commenced in Madrid in October 1991 and then moved to Washington, PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat reluctantly accepted the US-Israeli diktat that the PLO would be formally excluded from participation in negotiations,

that only unaffiliated Palestinians from the occupied territories (excluding East Jerusalem) would be involved in the talks, and that they would do so as part of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation rather than independently.

These strictures notwithstanding the late Haidar Abdel-Shafi, an independent from Gaza City considered close to the Palestine Communist Party, and one of the foremost Palestinian leaders in the occupied territories after 1967,

delivered a powerful address to the Madrid Conference that more than any other caught the imagination of those following the proceedings.

(That said, Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa holding up a “Wanted” poster issued by the British Mandate government during the 1940s for “Stern Gang terrorist” and Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir,

then still using his actual and decidedly non-Semitic surname Yezernitsky, provided the most memorably photo-op). In the ensuing media battles, Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi routinely got the better of a blustering Israeli spokesman named Binyamin Netanyahu.

The strictures placed on Palestinian participation in the subsequent negotiations were treated as something of a sham. Under Abdel-Shafi’s able leadership the Palestinians began negotiating with Israel as a separate delegation,

coordinated closely and increasingly openly with the PLO, and made it a point to be accompanied by prominent Jerusalemites such as Faisal Husseini.

At the insistence of the US and Israel, the purpose of these Israeli-Palestinian negotiations was not to achieve a resolution of the Question of Palestine, but rather an agreement on Palestinian autonomy in the occupied territories.

This had also been the ceiling on Palestinian aspirations incorporated into the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had initially hoped to lay the groundwork for a comprehensive Middle East peace, but the Israel made clear he could not recover the occupied Sinai Peninsula unless he abandoned the Palestinians.

The Washington negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians failed to produce an autonomy agreement primarily because, under Abdel-Shafi’s leadership,

the Palestinian delegation refused to consider any Israeli proposal that did not include a comprehensive freeze of all settlement activity for the duration of any interim agreement.

With Israel similarly dismissive of Palestinian proposals that incorporated a moratorium on settlement expansion, deadlock ensued.

Israel and its US sponsor had insisted on excluding the PLO from the Madrid-Washington negotiations because they were convinced that negotiators from the occupied territories would be more open to Israeli demands and easier to manipulate than the PLO leadership in exile.

Their encounters with Abdel-Shafi and his delegation should have disabused them of this illusion, but didn’t. In Israel’s version of the subsequent history, the problem was not the principled positions being taken by the Palestinian negotiators,

but rather that they were being prevented from endorsing Israel’s agenda by Arafat because he wanted a formal role for the PLO and himself in any agreement.

The actual reason Israel began negotiating directly with the PLO is that it came to the realization that a PLO in crisis would prove more amenable to its agenda – particularly on settlement expansion – than were the Palestinians it had been negotiating with.

Indeed, in Oslo the PLO capitulated on not only the issue of settlement construction, but much else. Edward W. Said rightly denounced Oslo as a “Palestinian Versailles” which provided the Palestinians with neither an end to occupation, nor a state, nor a pathway to either,

but rather municipal authority under Israeli rule.

Rather than put the onus on Israel to relinquish its occupation, Oslo was structured to put the onus on the PLO, and the Palestinian Authority it established in 1994, to provide security for Israel, including its soldiers enforcing the occupation

and its settlers whose role it is to transform occupation into permanent annexation. To the extent the Palestinians succeeded as security sub-contractors for Israel, they would acquire greater municipal authorities.

At the same time, negotiations over a “permanent status” agreement that would address the core issues shunted aside by the Oslo accords were due to commence by 1996 and conclude by 1999.

In addition to the agreement, Israel and the PLO exchanged letters of recognition. In his letter to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Arafat stated that “The PLO recognizes the right of the state of Israel to exist in peace and security”,

“accepts United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338”, “renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence”, and “affirms” that those articles of the Palestinian National Charter which either “deny Israel’s right to exist” or are otherwise “inconsistent with”

Palestinian Oslo commitments “are now inoperative and no longer valid”. For his part Rabin stated that “the Government of Israel has decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and commence negotiations with the PLO

within the Middle East peace process”. Full stop. No recognition of any Palestinian rights, and certainly no renunciation of any Israeli claims or practices.

Crucially, Oslo was designed as a bilateral rather than international process. It had no agreed terms of reference (Israel does not accept the international consensus regarding its obligations pursuant to UNSC 242 and 338).

The arbitration of disputes, as well as the mechanism for doing so, required the consent of both parties, providing Israel with a veto over the fulfilment of its own commitments.

Additionally, the process was in practice implemented under the exclusive auspices of Israel’s chief sponsor and strategic ally, the United States. Its role, as senior State Department Aaron David Miller would later admit, was to function as "Israel's lawyer".

This was of course reformulated as “honest broker”.

Oslo not only put occupied and occupier on an equal footing, it redefined the territories conquered by Israel in 1967 as disputed areas, in which Palestinian rights were reduced to claims with those of Israel considered equally valid.

Some Palestinian leaders, like Mahmoud Abbas, were fully committed to Oslo from the outset and thought it was a wonderful development that needed to be preserved at all costs.

Arafat of course bears full responsibility for this terrible agreement, but his attitude towards it was rather different. He appears to have entered the process believing that Israel may have finally seen the light,

and that if this proved not to be the case its Western sponsors, and particularly the US, would consider Oslo too important to fail, and sufficiently vital to ensuring stability in a post-Cold War Middle East to ensure it resulted in a two-state settlement.

This fundamental miscalculation forms one half of the explanation for the Second Intifada. END (To be continued...)