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Why the Oslo Process Doomed Peace
Article  in  Middle East Quarterly · October 2016
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MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY Fall 2016 Karsh: The Oslo Process / 1
Why the Oslo Process Doomed Peace
by Efraim Karsh
wenty-three years after its euphoric launch on the White House lawn, the
Oslo “peace process” between Israel and the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) stands out as one of the worst calamities to have
afflicted the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For Israel, it has been the starkest strategic
blunder in its history, establishing an ineradicable terror entity on its doorstep,
deepening its internal cleavages,
destabilizing its political system,
and weakening its international
standing. For the West Bank and
Gaza Palestinians, it has brought
subjugation to the corrupt and
repressive PLO and Hamas regimes,
which reversed the hesitant advent
of civil society in these territories,
shattered their socioeconomic
wellbeing, and made the prospects
of peace and reconciliation with
Israel ever more remote. This in
turn means that, even if the territories
were to be internationally recognized
as a fully-fledged Palestinian state
(with or without a formal peace
treaty with Israel), this will be a
failed entity in the worst tradition
of Arab dictatorships at permanent
war with both Israel and its own
subjects.
False Partner, Missed Partner
“We make peace with enemies,”
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin reassured a
concerned citizen shortly after the September
13, 1993 conclusion of the Israel-PLO
Declaration of Principles on Interim SelfGovernment
Arrangements (DOP, or Oslo I).
“I would like to remind you that the [March
1979] peace treaty with Egypt had many
T
In 1994, (left to right) PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, Israeli
prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, and foreign minister Shimon
Peres received the Nobel Peace Prize following the
signing of the 1993 Oslo accords. But twenty-three years
later, peace is still illusive. For Israel, the accords have
been the starkest strategic blunder, establishing an
ineradicable terror entity on its doorstep, deepening its
internal cleavages, and weakening its international
standing.
MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY Fall 2016 Karsh: The Oslo Process / 2
opponents, and this peace has held for 15
years now.”1 True enough. But peace can
only be made with enemies who have been
either comprehensively routed (e.g., postWorld
War II Germany and Japan) or
disillusioned with the use of violence—not
with those who remain wedded to conflict
and war. And while Egyptian president
Anwar Sadat was a “reformed enemy” eager
to extricate his country from its futile conflict
with Israel, Yasser Arafat and the PLO
leadership viewed the Oslo process not as a
springboard to peace but as a “Trojan Horse”
(in the words of prominent PLO official
Faisal Husseini) designed to promote the
organization’s strategic goal of “Palestine
from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean]
sea”—that is, a Palestine in place
of Israel.2
Arafat admitted as much five days
before signing the accords when he told an
Israeli journalist, “In the future, Israel and
Palestine will be one united state in which
Israelis and Palestinians will live
together”3—that is, Israel would cease to
exist. And even as he shook Rabin’s hand on
the White House lawn, the PLO chairman
was assuring the Palestinians in a prerecorded,
Arabic-language message that the
agreement was merely an implementation of
the organization’s “phased strategy” of June
1974. This stipulated that the Palestinians
would seize whatever territory Israel
surrendered to them, then use it as a
springboard for further territorial gains until
1 Roy Mandel, “‘Shalom osim im oivim: mikhtavim
shekatav lanu Rabin,” Ynet (Tel Aviv), Oct. 18,
2010.
2 Faisal Husseini, interview with al-Arabi (Cairo),
June 24, 2000.
3 Ha’olam Ha’ze (Tel Aviv), Sept. 8, 1993.
achieving the “complete liberation of
Palestine.”4
The next eleven years until Arafat’s
death on November 11, 2004, offered a
recapitulation, over and over again, of the
same story. In addressing Israeli or Western
audiences, the PLO chairman (and his
erstwhile henchmen) would laud the “peace”
signed with “my partner Yitzhak Rabin.” To
his Palestinian constituents, he depicted the
accords as transient arrangements required by
the needs of the moment. He made constant
allusion to the “phased strategy” and the
Treaty of Hudaibiya—signed by Muhammad
with the people of Mecca in 628, only to be
disavowed a couple of years later when the
situation shifted in the prophet’s favor—and
insisted on the “right of return,” the standard
Palestinian/Arab euphemism for Israel’s
destruction through demographic subversion.
As he told a skeptical associate shortly before
moving to Gaza in July 1994 to take control
of the newly established Palestinian
Authority (PA):
I know that you are opposed to
the Oslo accords, but you must
always remember what I’m
going to tell you. The day will
come when you will see
thousands of Jews fleeing
Palestine. I will not live to see
this, but you will definitely see it
in your lifetime. The Oslo
accords will help bring this
about.5
4 “Political Program for the Present Stage Drawn up
by the 12th
PNC, Cairo, June 9, 1974,” Journal
of Palestine Studies, Summer 1974, pp. 224-5.
5 Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), “Al-Quds alArabi
editor-in-chief: Arafat planned that Oslo
would chase away Israelis,” Sept. 3, 2015.
MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY Fall 2016 Karsh: The Oslo Process / 3
This perfidy was sustained by
Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, who
has had no qualms about reiterating the vilest
anti-Semitic calumnies: In his June 2016
address to the European Parliament, Abbas
accused Israeli rabbis of urging the poisoning
of Palestinian water.6 In his doctoral
dissertation, written at a Soviet university
and subsequently published in book form, he
argued that fewer than a million Jews had
been killed in the Holocaust, and that the
Zionist movement colluded in their
slaughter.7 He has vowed time and again
never to accept the idea of Jewish statehood,
most recently in March 2014, when he rallied
the Arab League behind his “absolute and
decisive rejection to recognizing Israel as a
Jewish state,”8 and in September 2015, when
6 Haaretz (Tel Aviv), June 23, 2016.
7 Mahmoud Abbas, al-Wajh al-Akhar: al-Alaqat asSirriya
bayna an-Naziya wa-l-Sihyuniya
(Amman: Dar Ibn Rushd, 1984).
8 Haaretz, Mar. 26, 2014.
he derided Israel in his U.N.
address as “a historic injustice …
inflicted upon a people … that had
lived peacefully in their land.”9
Back home in the PA, Abbas
was even more forthright, pledging
to prevent the Jews from “defiling
al-Aqsa with their filthy feet” and
stating that “every drop of blood that
has been spilled in Jerusalem is holy
blood as long as it was for Allah.”10
When this incitement culminated in
a sustained wave of violence that
killed scores of Israelis in a string
of stabbings, car rammings into
civilians, and shooting attacks,
Abbas applauded the bloodshed as a
“peaceful, popular uprising. … We
have been under occupation for 67
or 68 years [i.e., since Israel’s
establishment],” he told his subjects
in March 2016. “Others would have
sunk into despair and frustration. However,
we are determined to reach our goal because
our people stand behind us.”11
In other words, more than two
decades after the onset of the Oslo process,
Israel’s “peace partner” would not even
accept the Jewish state’s right to exist,
considering its creation an “illegal
occupation of Palestinian lands.”
What makes this state of affairs all
the more tragic is that, at the time of the Oslo
accords, the Rabin government had a
potentially far better peace partner in the
form of the West Bank and Gaza leadership.
To be sure, Israel’s hand-off policies
9 WAFA (PLO/PA official news agency), Sept. 30,
2015.
10 Al-Hayat al-Jadida (Ramallah, official PA daily),
Sept. 17, 2015, PMW.
11 “Mahmoud Abbas: Murdering Israelis is ‘peaceful
popular uprising,’” PMW, Dec. 1, 2015; “Abbas:
All of Israel Is Occupation,” official PA TV,
Mar. 11, 2016, PMW, Apr. 6, 2016.
An unreconstructed Holocaust denier, PA president Mahmoud
Abbas has voiced incessant anti-Semitic and anti-Israel
incitement. In his June 2016 address to the European
Parliament, Abbas accused Israeli rabbis of urging the
poisoning of Palestinian water. He has pledged to prevent the
Jews from “defiling al-Aqsa with their filthy feet” and has
vowed time and again never to accept the idea of Jewish
statehood.
MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY Fall 2016 Karsh: The Oslo Process / 4
during the two-and-a-half
decades from the June
1967 capture of the
territories to the onset of
the Oslo process enabled
the PLO to establish itself
as the predominant force there at the expense
of the more moderate local leadership. But
this meant no blind subservience to the
organization’s goals or means. Unlike the
PLO’s diaspora constituents (or the “outside”
in Palestinian parlance) who upheld the
extremist dream of returning to their 1948
dwellings at the cost of Israel’s destruction,
West Bankers and Gazans (the “inside”)
were amenable to peaceful coexistence that
would allow them to get on with their lives
and sustain the astounding economic boom
begun under Israel’s control. During the
1970s, for example, the West Bank and Gaza
were the fourth fastest-growing economy in
the world, ahead of such “wonders” as
Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea, making
socioeconomic conditions there far better
than in most neighboring Arab states. While
the “outside” diaspora had no direct
interaction with Israelis (and for that matter
with any other democratic system), Israel’s
prolonged rule had given the “inside”
Palestinians a far more realistic and less
extreme perspective: hence their perception
of Israel as more democratic than the major
Western nations;12 hence their overwhelming
support for the abolition of those clauses in
the Palestinian charter that called for Israel’s
destruction and their rejection of terror
attacks;13 and hence their indifference to the
12 “Results of Public Opinion Poll No. 25,” Center for
Policy Analysis on Palestine, Washington, D.C.,
Dec. 26-28, 1996, p. 14.
13 “Palestinian Public Opinion about the Peace Process,
1993-1999,” Center for Policy Analysis on
Palestine, Washington, D.C., 1999; “New
Beginning,” U.S. News & World Report, Sept.
13, 1993.
thorniest issue of the
Palestinian-Israeli dispute,
and the one central to the
PLO’s persistent effort to
destroy Israel, namely,
the “right of return.” As
late as March 1999, two months before the
lapse of the official deadline for the
completion of the Oslo final-status
negotiations, over 85 percent of respondents
did not consider the refugee question the
most important problem facing the
Palestinian people.14
Against this backdrop, the Rabin
government had a unique opportunity to steer
the Palestinian populace in the West Bank
and Gaza in the direction of peace and
statehood, possibly in collaboration with
Jordan’s King Hussein, who just a few years
earlier had thrown his hat in the ring only to
be rebuffed by Prime Minister Shamir. In a
Nablus public opinion poll shortly before the
DOP signing, 70 percent of respondents
preferred Hussein to the PLO as their
sovereign,15 not least since the PLO had been
totally ostracized by its Arab peers following
its support for Iraq’s brutal occupation of
Kuwait. At that point, its prestige in the
territories was at one of its lowest ebbs;
Hamas was at an early stage of development;
the radical Arab regimes were thoroughly
disorientated by the collapse of their
communist backers; and the West Bank and
Gaza leadership was bent on participating in
the U.S.-sponsored peace talks between Israel
and its neighbors, launched at the October
1991 Madrid Conference and sustained in
14 “Public Opinion Poll No. 31—Part I: On Palestinian
Attitudes towards Politics,” Jerusalem Media and
Communications Center, Mar. 1999, p. 3.
15 Mohamed Heikal, Secret Channels: The Inside
Story of Arab-Israeli Peace Negotiations
(London: Harper Collins, 1996), p. 450.
The PLO had been ostracized by its
Arab peers following its support for
Iraq’s brutal occupation of Kuwait.
MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY Fall 2016 Karsh: The Oslo Process / 5
Washington, against the PLO’s adamant
objection.16
But then, instead of seizing the
moment and opting for the obvious peace
partner that was far better attuned to the
needs and wishes of the local Palestinian
populace, and against his personal inclination
to strike a deal with the “moderate insiders”
rather than the “extremist Tunis people [i.e.,
PLO leadership],” Rabin was persuaded by
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and his
deputy Yossi Beilin (who reportedly
collaborated with the PLO in obstructing the
Washington talks) into surrendering the West
Bankers and Gazans to an unreconstructed
terror organization whose leader would not
hang up his ubiquitous battledress, not even
for the signing ceremonies of the various
Oslo accords or the receipt of the Nobel
Peace Prize, and who used peace as a
16 See, for example, Pinhas Inbari, Beharavot Shvurot
(Tel Aviv: Misrad Habitahon, 1994), chap. 18-
23.
strategic deception aimed at promoting the
eternal goal of Israel’s destruction.17
As a result, twenty-three years of 1)
incessant hate mongering by the PLO/PA
(not to mention Hamas, which exploited the
Oslo process to become the preeminent
military and political factor in the territories);
2) countless terror attacks (including a fullfledged
terror war, euphemistically named
“al-Aqsa Intifada” after the Jerusalem
mosque); 3) three protracted large scale
military encounters between Hamas and
Israel; and 4) economic collapse induced by
the PA’s and Hamas’s corrupt and inept rule
have thoroughly radicalized the West Bank
and Gaza populace with a new generation of
Palestinians brought up on vile anti-Jewish
(and anti-Israel) incitement unparalleled in
scope and intensity since Nazi Germany.
Tarnished Security
Apart from making the prospects
of peace and reconciliation ever more
remote, the Oslo process substantially
worsened Israel’s security position. At the
heart of the DOP lay the conviction that it
would end three decades of PLO violence
and transform the organization overnight
from one of the world’s most murderous
terror groups into a political actor and
state builder. As Oslo’s chief architect,
Yossi Beilin, confidently prophesied
shortly after the DOP signing, “The
greatest test of the accord will not be in
17 See, for example, Mamduh Nawfal, Qisat Ittifaq
Uslu: ar-Riwaya al-Haqiqiya al-Kamila,
(Amman: al-Ahliya, 1995), pp. 61-3; Efraim
Sneh, Nivut Beshetach Mesukan (Tel Aviv:
Yediot Ahronot, 2002), pp. 22-3; Adam Raz,
“Hazitot Mitnagshot: Haanatomia ‘Hamuzara’
shel Hakhraat Oslo shel Rabin,” Israelim,
Autumn 2012, pp. 107-9.
Israeli soldiers patrol Nablus during Operation
Defensive Shield. Following the signing of the Oslo
accords, the Palestinians have engaged Israel in a near
constant state of war and terror, including hundreds of
terror attacks in Israeli cities, a full-fledged terror war
(the “al-Aqsa intifada”), and three protracted large scale
military encounters between Hamas and Israel.
MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY Fall 2016 Karsh: The Oslo Process / 6
the intellectual sphere. Rather, it will be a
test of blood.”18
This chilling prediction was put to the
test in short order as terrorism in the
territories spiraled to its highest level since
Israel took control following the June 1967
Six-Day War. In the two-and-a-half years
from the signing of the DOP to the fall of the
Labor government in May 1996, 210 Israelis
were murdered—nearly three times the
average death toll of the previous twenty-six
years19 when only a small fraction of the
fatalities had been caused by West Bank- or
Gaza-originated attacks.20 Moreover, nearly
two thirds of the 1994-96 victims were
murdered in Israeli territory inside the
“Green Line”—nearly ten times the average
fatality toll in Israel in the preceding six
violent years of the Palestinian uprising
(intifada).21
In September 1996, Arafat escalated
the conflict and crossed another threshold
18 Beilin, interview with Maariv (Tel Aviv), Nov. 26,
1993.
19 “Fatal Terrorist Attacks in Israel, Sept. 1993-
1999,” Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA),
Jerusalem, Sept. 24, 2000; “Terrorism Deaths in
Israel—1920-1999,” idem, Jan. 1, 2000; Wm.
Robert Johnston, “Chronology of Terrorist
Attacks in Israel: Introduction,” Johnston’s
Archive, Jan. 8, 2016; “Global Terrorism
Database,” National Consortium for the Study of
Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism,
University of Maryland, College Park, Md.,
accessed July 6, 2016.
20 Thus, for example, the May 1972 Lod (now BenGurion)
airport massacre, in which 26 people
were murdered, was carried out by three
Japanese terrorists arriving from Rome while the
Maalot and Kiryat Shmona massacres two years
later, in which 43 people (including 30 children)
were killed, were perpetrated by terrorists
coming from Lebanon as was the coastal plain
massacre of March 1978, where 38 Israelis
(including 13 children) were murdered.
21 “Statistics: Fatalities in the First Intifada,” B’Tselem,
Jerusalem, accessed July 6, 2016.
when he reverted to direct violence by
exploiting the opening of a new exit to an
archaeological tunnel under the Western
Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, to unleash
widespread riots (labeled the “tunnel war”) in
which 17 Israelis and some 80 Palestinians
were killed. And while the PA quickly
dropped the tunnel issue from its agenda
once it had outlived its usefulness, Arafat
was to repeat this precedent on several
occasions, most notably by launching the
September 2000 terror war (al-Aqsa intifada)
a short time after being offered Palestinian
statehood by Israel’s prime minister Ehud
Barak.
By the time of Arafat’s death four
years later, his war—the bloodiest and most
destructive confrontation between Israelis
and Palestinians since 1948—had exacted
1,028 Israeli lives in some 5,760 attacks—
nine times the average death toll of the preOslo
era.22 Of these, about 450 people (or
43.8 percent of victims) were killed in
suicide bombings—a practically unheard of
tactic in the Palestinian-Israeli context prior
to Oslo. The only pre-Oslo suicide bombing,
in which one local Palestinian and the two
bombers were killed, took place in April
1993 in the desolate Jordan Valley, outside
the pre-1967 line.23 All in all, more than
1,600 Israelis have been murdered and
another 9,000 wounded since the signing of
the DOP—nearly four times the average
death toll of the preceding twenty-six years.24
22 “Analysis of Attacks in the Last Decade 2000-
2010,” Israel Security Agency (ISA), Jerusalem;
“Terrorism Deaths in Israel – 1920-1999,” MFA.
23 “Suicide and Other Bombing Attacks in Israel
since the Declaration of Principles,” MFA,
accessed July 6, 2016.
24 “Victims of Palestinian Violence and Terrorism
since September 2000,” MFA, accessed July 6,
2016.
MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY Fall 2016 Karsh: The Oslo Process / 7
But the story does
not end here. For underlying
this bloodletting
was the transformation of
the territories into unreconstructed
terror bastions
in line with Arafat’s vision of making
them a springboard of “a popular armed
revolution” that would “force the Zionists to
realize that it is impossible for them to live in
Israel.”25 Only it was Hamas, the Palestinian
branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which
made its debut during the 1987-93 intifada,
rather than the PLO, which was to bring
Arafat’s genocidal vision to fruition.
With its initial fears of repression by
the newly-installed PA quickly assuaged,
Hamas waged a sustained terror campaign
(with Arafat’s tacit approval) that exerted a
devastating impact on the nascent peace
process. Its March 1996 murder of 58 Israelis
in the span of one week, for example, was
instrumental in Benjamin Netanyahu’s
electoral defeat of Prime Minister Peres two
months later. But Hamas also reached an
agreement with the PLO/PA on the
continuation of these attacks provided they
did not emanate from territories under the
latter’s control.26 Collaboration between the
two organizations reached its zenith during
the “al-Aqsa intifada” when Hamas played
the leading role, especially in the field of
suicide bombings, carrying out the deadliest
and most horrific attacks inside Israel. And
while Israel managed to destroy the West
Bank’s terror infrastructure in a sustained
counterinsurgency effort, Hamas managed to
retain its Gaza base largely intact despite the
targeted killing of many of its top leaders,
25 Arafat, interview with al-Anwar (Beirut), Aug. 2
1968.
26 Al-Quds (Jerusalem), Dec. 22, 1995; Yigal
Carmon, “So Now We All Know,” The
Jerusalem Post, Jan. 5, 1996.
including founding
father Ahmad Yasin and
his immediate successor
Abdul Aziz Rantisi.
Moreover, by way
of compensating for its
dwindling capacity for suicide bombings—
which dropped from sixty in 2002 to five in
2006—the Islamist terror group reverted to
massive high trajectory attacks from Gaza. In
2004, 309 home-made Qassam rockets and
882 mortar shells were fired on Israeli
villages in the Strip and towns and villages
within Israel (compared to 105 and 514
respectively in 2003), and the following year
saw 401 and 854 respective attacks despite
Hamas’s acceptance of a temporary suspension
of fighting.27 This left little doubt
among Palestinians as to who spearheaded
the “armed struggle” against Israel, and
when, in the summer of 2005, the Israeli
government unilaterally vacated the dozen
odd villages in the south of the Strip with
their 8,000-strong population, the move was
widely considered a Hamas victory. A few
months later, on January 25, 2006, the
organization reaped the political fruits of its
military prowess when, in its first electoral
showing since the DOP (it boycotted the first
parliamentary elections in 1996), it scored a
landslide victory winning 74 of parliament’s
132 seats. As the PLO/PA would not accept
this reality, in 2007, relations between the
two groups deteriorated into violent clashes,
especially in Gaza, with scores of people
killed and many more wounded as Hamas
seized full control of the Strip.28
27 “2006 Summary—Palestinian Terror Data and Trends,”
ISA, accessed July 6, 2016; “Analysis of Attacks
in the Last Decade 2000-2010,” idem, accessed
July 6, 2016; “2004 Terrorism Data,” MFA, Jan.
5, 2015.
28 The New York Times, June 14, 2007.
It was Hamas, rather than the PLO,
which was to bring Arafat’s
genocidal vision for Israel to fruition.
MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY Fall 2016 Karsh: The Oslo Process / 8
Flushed with success and
encouraged by the withdrawal of
Israeli forces from the Philadelphi
patrol route along the Strip’s border
with Egypt, Hamas embarked on a
massive buildup of its terror
infrastructure with vast quantities of
weapons and war matériel smuggled
from Sinai through an extensive and
rapidly expanding underground tunnel
system. Within a year of Israel’s
unilateral withdrawal, there was a
fourfold increase in the number of
rockets and missiles fired from the
Strip (from 401 to 1,726); and while
this pace ebbed slightly in 2007 (to
1,276 attacks), it peaked to a
whopping 2,048 attacks in 2008 (in
addition to 1,668 mortar shells), or ten
attacks a day.29
In an attempt to stem this relentless
harassment of its civilian population, in
December 2008-January 2009, Israel
launched a large ground operation in Gaza
(codenamed Cast Lead). But while the
operation eroded Hamas’s military
capabilities and led to a vast decrease in the
firing of rockets and missiles,30 it failed to
curb the organization’s military might and
political ambitions. In the ensuing five years,
Israel was forced to fight two more inconclusive
wars against the Islamist group—Operation
Pillar of Defense (November 14-21, 2012) and
Operation Protective Edge (July 8-August 26,
2014). And to add insult to injury, it was
Israel, rather than Hamas, that came under
scathing international censure for its
supposed use of “disproportionate force,”
including two major U.N. fact-finding reports
and a string of indictments by humanitarian
29 “2006 Summary,” ISA; “Analysis of Attacks in the
Last Decade,” idem.
30 “Rocket Launching,” ISA, accessed July 6, 2016;
“Mortar shells launching attacks,” idem,
accessed July 6, 2016.
organizations. In December 2014—a mere
four months after Hamas had criminally
subjected millions of Israelis to sustained
rocket and missile attacks for seven full
weeks—the European Court of Justice
removed the group from the EU’s list of
terrorist organizations.31
The PLO’s Growing
International Stature
Since no theme has dominated the
discourse of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict
more than Israel’s “illegitimate occupation of
Palestinian lands,” it was believed by the
31 See, for example, “Human Rights in Palestine and
other Occupied Arab Territories. Report of the
United Nations Fact-finding Mission on the Gaza
Conflict,” (Goldstone Report), U.N. General
Assembly, Human Rights Council, Sept. 25,
2009; “Report of the independent commission of
inquiry established pursuant to Human Rights
Council resolution S-21/1,” idem, June 22, 2015;
“‘Black Friday’: Carnage in Rafah during 2014
Israel/Gaza Conflict,” Amnesty International,
July 29, 2015; The Independent (London), Dec.
17, 2014.
Smuggling tunnel in Rafah. Following the withdrawal of Israeli
forces from the Philadelphi patrol route along the Gaza Strip’s
border with Egypt, Hamas embarked on a massive buildup of its
terror infrastructure. By 2008, Hamas was launching ten rockets,
missiles, and mortar shells into Israel a day.
MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY Fall 2016 Karsh: The Oslo Process / 9
Oslo architects that by ceding control of the
territories’ population, Israel would be able
to quiet the chorus of criticism and to boost
its international standing.
Withdrawal from Gaza had been
completed by May 1994 apart from a small
stretch of territory in the south of the Strip
containing a few Israeli villages. By January
1996, Israel had also withdrawn its forces
from the West Bank’s populated areas with
the exception of Hebron where redeployment
was completed in early 1997, leaving 99
percent of the territories’ population under
PLO/PA rule. “As of today, there is a
Palestinian state,” gushed Arafat’s ArabIsraeli
advisor Ahmad Tibi after the January
1996 elections for the incipient Palestinian
parliament. This upbeat prognosis was
echoed by the Israeli minister of the
environment, Yossi Sarid, while Beilin
proclaimed the elections to have made the
political process irreversible, expressing
relief at the ending of Israel’s occupation of
Palestinian populated areas:
We have been freed of a heavy
burden. I never believed in the
possibility of an enlightened
occupation. It was necessary to
lift that burden so as to avoid
becoming a target for
organizations throughout the
world that viewed us as
oppressors.32
In fact, not only did Israel get no
credit whatsoever for its withdrawal from the
territories, but this move went virtually
unnoticed by the international community
while the PLO surged to unprecedented
international heights—without shedding its
genocidal commitment to Israel’s destruction,
surrendering its weapons, or abandoning its
terrorist ways. So much so that during Bill
Clinton’s eight years in office, Arafat was
welcomed to the White House more often than
any other world leader; he even happened to
be seated opposite the U.S. president when
he was first questioned about his affair with
Monica Lewinsky.33 Within five years from
the signing of the DOP, the PA had received
$2.5 billion of the pledged $3.6 billion in
international aid, apart from some $600
million contributed to activities in the
West Bank and Gaza through the U.N.
Relief and Works Agency for Palestine
Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA); by
2016, the United States alone had
committed more than $5 billion in bilateral
economic aid to the Palestinians.34
32 Davar Rishon (Tel Aviv), Jan. 21, 1996; Maariv,
Jan. 22, 1996.
33 Tony Karon, “Clinton Saves Last Dance for
Arafat,” Time, Jan. 2, 2001.
34 “The Promise, The Challenges and the Achievements:
Donor Investment in Palestinian Development
1994-1998,” World Bank and the U.N. Office of
the Special Coordinator in the Occupied
Territories, Jerusalem, 1999, p. 14; Jim Zanotti,
“U.S. Foreign Aid to the Palestinians,”
Congressional Research Service, Washington,
D.C., Mar. 18, 2016.
During Bill Clinton’s eight years in office, Arafat (left)
was welcomed to the White House more often than any
other world leader. The EU, for its part, stuck with the
PLO leader, disregarding PLO/PA excesses and
growing disillusionment in the West Bank and Gaza with
Arafat’s repressive and corrupt leadership.
MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY Fall 2016 Karsh: The Oslo Process / 10
But then, rather
than use their formidable
economic leverage to
pressure the PLO/PA to
abide by its peace obligations,
the donor states
turned a blind eye both to Arafat’s condoning
of proxy terrorism (by Hamas and the
Islamic Jihad) and to his direct use of
violence. Not only did his launch of a terror
war shortly after being offered statehood by
Barak fail to attract international criticism,
it boosted the PLO/PA’s standing and boxed
Israel into a corner. Media outlets, commentators,
and politicians throughout the
world blamed the premeditated Palestinian
violence on the supposed “provocation
carried out at al-Haram al-Sharif in
Jerusalem on 28 September 2000 [i.e., Ariel
Sharon’s visit to Temple Mount],” to use the
words of a special Security Council
resolution, which the United States failed to
veto.35 Even President Clinton, who two
months earlier had publicly chided Arafat for
failing to seize Barak’s generous offer of
statehood,36 swiftly changed tack and
pressured the Israeli government for further
concessions (which it made), only to be
rebuffed yet again by the Palestinian leader.
For its part, the European Union became
the PA’s foremost international backer as the
terror war escalated. Making no distinction
between terror attacks and counterinsurgency
measures aimed at their deflection, it blamed
both sides for the continuation of violence,
criticized Israel at every turn, and increased
financial aid to the Palestinians despite the
35 “Resolution 1322 (2000). Adopted by the Security
Council at its 4205th meeting on 7 Oct. 2000,”
U.N. Security Council, New York.
36 See, for example, Hussein Agha and Robert
Malley, “Camp David: the Tragedy of Errors,”
New York Review of Books, Aug. 9, 2001; The
Jerusalem Post, July 26, 30, 2000; The New York
Times, July 26, 2000.
incontrovertible evidence
that much of this aid was
being channeled to terror
activities: In 2001-04,
international disbursements
doubled from an annual
average of $500 million to over $1 billion as
Arafat’s terror war plunged the territories
into dire economic straits.37
Disregarding both the PLO/PA
excesses and the growing disillusionment in
the West Bank and Gaza with Arafat’s
repressive and corrupt leadership, the EU
stuck with the PLO leader to his dying day,
jeopardizing President George W. Bush’s
attempt to bring about “a new and different
Palestinian leadership … not compromised
by terror.”38 So did the International Court of
Justice, the principal judicial organ of the
United Nations, which condemned Israel’s
attempt to stem the tidal wave of suicide
bombings through the construction of a
security barrier between its territory and the
West Bank as “contrary to international
law.”39
The solemn pledge by Abbas to
persist in his predecessor’s (violent and
corrupt) path failed to impress the Palestinians’
international backers as evidenced
among other things by their indifference to
the disappearance of $3.1 billion worth of aid
between 2008 and 2012; to his abstention
from disarming the terror groups operating
under his jurisdiction as required by the Oslo
37 “The Palestinian war-torn economy: aid, development,
and state formation,” U.N. Conference on Trade
and Development (UNCTAD), New York and
Geneva, 2006, p. 37.
38 “President Bush Calls for New Palestinian Leadership,”
White House Press Office, Washington, D.C., June
24, 2002.
39 “Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall
in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,”
International Court of Justice, The Hague, The
Netherlands, July 9, 2004.
The European Union became
the PA’s foremost international
backer as the terror war
against Israel escalated.
MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY Fall 2016 Karsh: The Oslo Process / 11
accords; and to his
refusal to hold new
elections upon the expiry
of his presidency in
January 2009. Nor was
Abbas’s supposed interest
in peace questioned despite his categorical
rejection of the idea of Jewish statehood (the
root cause of the decades-long failure of the
two-state solution); his incessant anti-Semitic
and anti-Israel incitement; and his
abandonment of the bilateral peace talks in
search of an internationally imposed Palestinian
state—without a peace agreement.
On the contrary, with Barack Obama
determined to put the maximum “daylight”
between Washington and Jerusalem,40 the
U.S. administration not only snubbed the
Israeli government as a matter of course but
exploited blatant anti-Israel activities (e.g.,
the international chorus of condemnation
attending the May 2010 Mavi Marmara
incident) to tighten the political noose around
Jerusalem.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s attempt to break the stalemate
by agreeing in June 2009 to the creation of a
Palestinian state and imposing in November
2009 a 10-month freeze on Jewish construction
activities in the West Bank failed to
impress the Palestinians. Dismissing his
gestures out of hand, they walked away from
the negotiating table upon the expiry of the
construction moratorium and sought to
present Israel with a fait accompli by gaining
U.N. recognition of Palestinian statehood—
in flagrant violation of the Oslo accords that
envisaged the attainment of peace through
direct negotiations between the two parties.
Having failed to garner sufficient support at
the Security Council, in November 2012,
they obtained General Assembly recognition
of Palestine as a “non-member observer
40 Scott Wilson, “Obama Searches for Middle East
Peace,” The Washington Post, July 14, 2012.
state,” following which
the PA set out to join a
string of international
bodies and agencies, most
importantly the International
Criminal Court
(ICC). On January 2, 2015, the “State of
Palestine” acceded to the Rome statute, the
ICC’s founding treaty, and two weeks later,
the court opened a preliminary examination
into “the situation in Palestine,” having
received jurisdiction over alleged crimes
committed “in the occupied Palestinian
territory, including East Jerusalem, since
June 13, 2014.”41 Nine months later, on
September 30, fresh from yet another antiIsrael
diatribe, Abbas joined SecretaryGeneral
Ban Ki-moon for an official
ceremony in which the Palestinian flag was
raised for the first time outside the U.N.’s
headquarters in New York.
The significance of these developments
cannot be overstated. Twenty-four
years after its exclusion from the U.S.orchestrated
international peace talks in
Madrid and its wall-to-wall ostracism by its
Arab peers, the PLO had recast itself in the
eyes of the international community as the
legitimate, peaceable, and democraticallydisposed
ruler of the prospective Palestinian
state against all available evidence to the
contrary, painting Israel as the main obstacle
to peace despite its surrender of control of
the territories’ population and consistent
support for the two-state solution. In
addition, the former terrorist group had laid
the groundwork for Israel’s international
indictment for supposed “war crimes” and
“crimes against humanity.”42 And all this
transpired without the PLO/PA accepting the
41 “The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court,
Fatou Bensouda, opens a preliminary examination of
the situation in Palestine,” International Criminal
Court, Jan. 16, 2015.
42 U.N. Watch, Geneva, Nov. 25, 2015.
The PLO painted Israel as
the main obstacle to peace despite
Jerusalem’s consistent support
for the two-state solution.
MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY Fall 2016 Karsh: The Oslo Process / 12
Jewish state’s right to exist as
stipulated by the United Nations
sixty-eight years earlier and
while remaining committed to
Israel’s eventual demise.
Radicalizing
the Israeli Arabs
The Oslo process has
confronted Israel with the likely
creation of a revanchist Palestinian
state committed to its destruction
(whether tacitly as in the case of the
PLO/PA or overtly as with Hamas)
and imposed severe constraints on
Jerusalem’s international maneuverability
and capacity for selfdefense.
But the process has also
dealt a devastating blow to the
delicate edifice of Jewish-Arab relations
within Israel—not that the PLO had
previously refrained from meddling in the
affairs of the Israeli Arabs. Yet the Oslo
process raised this involvement to a
qualitatively different level for the simple
reason that by recognizing the PLO as “the
representative of the Palestinian people,” the
Rabin government effectively endorsed its
claim of authority over a substantial number
of Israeli citizens and gave it a carte blanche
to interfere in Israel’s domestic affairs. Such a
concession would be problematic even under
the most auspicious circumstances; made to an
irredentist party still officially committed to the
destruction of its “peace partner,” it proved
nothing short of catastrophic.
As the PLO seized its newly-gained
opportunity with alacrity, open identification of
Israeli Arab leaders with the country’s sworn
enemies became commonplace with many
visiting the neighboring Arab states—from
Syria, to Lebanon, to Libya, to Yemen—to
confer with various heads of the “resistance
movement” and to urge anti-Israel terror
activities.43
As the 1990s wore on, open calls for
Israel’s destruction substituted for the
euphemistic advocacy of this goal. Azmi
Bishara, founding leader of the
ultranationalist Balad party, predicated on the
demand for “a state of all its citizens”—the
standard euphemism for Israel’s
transformation into an Arab state in which
Jews would be reduced to a permanent
minority—began comparing the Jewish
state’s fate to that of the crusading states. He
fled the country in 2006 to avoid prosecution
for treason, having allegedly assisted
Hezbollah during its war with Israel in the
summer of that year. His successor, Jamal
Zahalka, preferred a more contemporary
metaphor, claiming that just as South
Africa’s apartheid had been emasculated, so
its Zionist counterpart had to be destroyed.44
43 See, for example, Haaretz, June 13-17, July 11,
Nov. 4, 2001, Feb. 26, 2002, Jan. 12, 2009; Ynet
News, Apr. 25, 2010, Feb. 25, 2011.
44 Haaretz, June 5, 2008, Jan. 22, 2009.
Decades of incitement and radicalization following Oslo have
had a palpable effect on Arab-Jewish relations in Israel. Arab
Israeli leaders have openly identified with Israel’s sworn
enemies, and Israeli Arabs have rioted often in reaction to
Israeli attempts to stop Palestinian terrorism.
MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY Fall 2016 Karsh: The Oslo Process / 13
And Sheikh Raed Salah,
leader of the northern
branch of the Islamic
Movement in Israel, who
never tired of crying wolf
over Israel’s supposed
designs on the al-Aqsa
mosque, prophesied the Jewish state’s
demise within two decades should it not
change its attitude to the Arab minority.45
Even the “national committee of the heads of
local Arab municipalities in Israel,” the
effective leadership of the Israeli Arabs,
issued a lengthy document outlining its
“Future Vision for the Palestinian Arabs in
Israel,” which derided Israel as “a product of
colonialist action initiated by the JewishZionist
elites in Europe and the West”;
rejected Israel’s continued existence as a
Jewish state, and demanded its replacement
by a system that would ensure Arab “national,
historic and civil rights at both the
individual and collective levels.”46
It is true that most Arabs would rather
remain Israeli citizens, knowing full well that
life in a civil, democratic, and pluralistic
society, albeit a Jewish one, is preferable to
what will be on offer in the prospective
Palestinian state.47 Yet the Oslo decades of
incitement and radicalization have had a
palpable effect on Arab-Jewish relations in
Israel. When, in February 1994, a Jewish
fanatic murdered twenty-nine Muslims at
45 The Marker (Tel Aviv), Feb. 16, 2007; Haaretz,
Apr. 1, 2007.
46 Havaad Haartzi Leroshei Harashuyot Haarviyot
BeIsrael, “Hahazon Haatidi Laarvim
Hafalestinim BeIsrael,” Nazareth, 2006, pp. 5, 9.
47 See, for example, Itamar Radai et al., “The Arab
Citizens in Israel: Current Trends According to
Recent Opinion Polls,” Strategic Assessment,
18/2, Institute for National Security Studies, Tel
Aviv, July 2015; Shibley Telhami, “2010 Israeli
Arab/Palestinian Public Opinion Survey,”
Washington D.C., Brookings Institution, Oct. 20Nov.
3, 2010.
prayer in Hebron, largescale
riots erupted in
numerous Arab settlements
throughout Israel
with mobs battling police
for four full days. The
scenario repeated itself in
April 1996 when dozens of Lebanese Shiites
were mistakenly killed in an Israeli bombing
of terrorist targets in south Lebanon, and yet
again in September 1996, during the
Jerusalem tunnel riots, reaching an unprecedented
peak on October 1, 2000, when
the Israeli Arabs turned on their Jewish
compatriots—in support of an external attack
on their own state (i.e., the “al-Aqsa
Intifada.”).
Small wonder that commemoration of
the October 2000 riots has often been
accompanied by violence, at times
coordinated with the PA, as have Israel’s
defensive measures against Palestinian
terrorism. When on March 29, 2002, the
Israel Defense Forces launched Operation
Defensive Shield against the terror
infrastructure in the West Bank, violent
demonstrations broke out in Arab settlements
throughout Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Islamist
movement initiated widespread activities in
support of the West Bank Palestinians. Similar
outbursts of violence occurred in December
2008-January 2009 when Israel moved to end
years of rocket and missile attacks on its towns
and villages (Operation Cast Lead) from
Hamas-controlled Gaza.48
Destabilizing
Israel’s Political System
However dramatic, the radicalization
of its Arab citizens has not been Israel’s worst
Oslo-related domestic debacle; far more
48 Haaretz, July 30, Oct. 1, 2001, Mar. 2, Apr. 3, 14,
15, Sept. 29, 2002, Oct. 9, Dec. 28, 2008, Jan.
12, 2009, Oct. 1, 2012.
Most Arabs would rather remain
Israeli citizens, knowing that life
in a democratic society is
preferable to that in the
prospective Palestinian state.
MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY Fall 2016 Karsh: The Oslo Process / 14
significant has been the destabilization of the
country’s political system from which it has
not recovered to date. In the twenty-three years
from the signing of the DOP, just one of the
nine reigning Israeli governments completed
its four-year tenure with one term ended by the
unprecedented assassination of the incumbent
prime minister. Meanwhile, parliament’s average
duration dropped from 3.6 years to 3
years, and an unprecedented number of parties
were formed, torn apart, and disbanded.
To be sure, Israel’s diverse political
system has seen the rise and fall of sectorial
parties from the early days of statehood; yet
the proliferation of “atmosphere parties”
thriving on the general yearning for change
while effectively servicing their founders’
political ambitions, skyrocketed to new
heights during the Oslo years as the cognitive
dissonance between realization of Palestinian
perfidy and the lingering longing for peace
drove many Israelis to cling to the latest
celebrity hope peddler to emerge on the
political scene. Thus the nascent Third Way
Party won four of the Knesset’s 120 seats in
1996, only to evaporate into thin
air three years later. It was
followed by the similarly disposed
Center Party, which won six seats
in 1999 before disappearing from
the political scene in the 2003
elections when another one-term
party—One People—came into
brief and unremarkable existence.
The Shinui (Change) party, a
splinter of the one-term Democratic
Movement for Change
(DASH) that played a key role in
Likud’s 1977 historic ascendance,
managed to win six and fifteen
seats in the 1999 and 2003
elections respectively, before
vanishing altogether in 2006. Its
unhappy fate was replicated by the
Kadima party, established by a string of
prominent Likud and Labor defectors headed
by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, which
managed to form a government in 2006 and win
the 2009 elections by the slimmest of margins
(though it was Likud that eventually formed a
government), before fading into oblivion in the
2013 elections. So did Hatenua party, formed by
Likud-defector-turned-Kadima-refugee Tzipi
Livni, which was amalgamated with Labor in
the 2015 elections.
It remains to be seen for how long the
Yesh Atid party, which made an impressive
debut in 2013 (19 seats, dropping to 11 in
2015) and is headed by television personality
Yair Lapid, or the Kulanu Party, which
entered the political fray in 2015 (10 seats)
and is led by Likud defector Moshe Kahlon,
will survive, identified as they are with their
founders’ personal fortunes. Yet the
detrimental effects of these parties, as well as
those of their many failed precursors and
likely successors, are bound to haunt Israel’s
political system and the country’s governability
for years to come.
Arafat told his friend and collaborator, the Romanian dictator
Nicolae Ceausescu (left), that the Palestinians lacked the
tradition, unity, and discipline to become a formal state, and
that a Palestinian state would be a failure from the first day.
Arafat was true to his word.
MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY Fall 2016 Karsh: The Oslo Process / 15
Palestine Betrayed
International relations
are rarely a zero-sum game
where one’s loss is necessarily
the other’s gain, and the Oslo
process has been no exception
to this rule. Not only have its
massive Israeli setbacks not
been translated into direct
Palestinian gains, but the
Palestinian population of the
West Bank and Gaza (and
Palestinian Diaspora communities
for that matter) has paid a
heavy price for its leaders’
perennial disinterest in
statehood and obsession with
violence. Just as these leaders’
rejection of the November
1947 partition resolution and
the waging of a war of annihilation
against their Jewish
neighbors led to the collapse and dispersal of
Palestinian society, so the use of Oslo as a
tool for anti-Israeli activities and domestic
repression rather than the vehicle for peace
and state-building it was meant to be has
made these long overdue goals ever more
remote, plunging relations between the two
parties to their lowest ebb since 1948.
For all his rhetoric about Palestinian
independence, Arafat had never been as
interested in the attainment of statehood as in
the violence attending its pursuit. In the late
1970s, he told his close friend and
collaborator, the Romanian dictator Nicolae
Ceausescu, that the Palestinians lacked the
tradition, unity, and discipline to become a
formal state, and that a Palestinian state
would be a failure from the first day.49 Once
given control of the Palestinian population in
the West Bank and Gaza as part of the Oslo
49 Ion Pacepa, Red Horizons. Inside the Romanian
Secret Service—The Memoirs of Ceausescu’s
Spy Chief (London: Coronet Books, 1989), p. 28.
process, Arafat made this bleak prognosis a
self-fulfilling prophecy, establishing a repressive
and corrupt regime where the rule of
the gun prevailed over the rule of law and
where large sums of money donated by the
international community for the benefit of
the civilian Palestinian population were
diverted to funding racist incitement, buying
weaponry, and filling secret bank accounts.
Within a short time of its creation, the
Palestinian Authority had literally become
the largest police state in the world with one
policeman for every forty residents—four
times as many as in Washington, D.C., the
American city with the highest number of
law enforcement officers per capita.50
Backed by a dozen security and intelligence
services, all answering directly to Arafat,
these forces were ostensibly designed to
enforce law and order and to combat antiIsrael
terrorism. In reality, they served as
50 “Law Enforcement Officers Per Capital for Cities,
Local Departments,” Governing, accessed July 5,
2016.
A dozen Palestinian Authority security and intelligence services
all answered directly to Arafat. They supported Arafat’s
repression of his Palestinian subjects and his terror war against
Israel and secured extensive protection and racketeering
networks.
MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY Fall 2016 Karsh: The Oslo Process / 16
Arafat’s repressive tool
over his Palestinian
subjects, as an instrument
of terror against Israel,
and as guardian of the
extensive protection and
racketeering networks that sprang up in the
territories under the PA’s control while the
national budget was plundered at will by
PLO veterans and Arafat cronies. In May
1997, for example, the first-ever report by the
PA’s comptroller stated that $325 million,
out of the 1996 budget of $800 million had
been “wasted” by Palestinian ministers and
agencies or embezzled by officials.51
Though this breathtaking corruption
played an important role in Hamas’s
landslide electoral victory of January 2006,
the PLO/PA leadership seems to have
learned nothing and to have forgotten
nothing. For one thing, Abbas sustained his
predecessor’s repressive regime, blatantly
ignoring the results of the only (semi)
democratic elections in Palestinian history by
establishing an alternative government to the
legally appointed Hamas government (which
he unsuccessfully sought to topple through
the denial of international funding) and by
refusing to hold new elections upon the
expiry of his presidency in January 2009.52
For another, he seems to have followed in
Arafat’s thieving footsteps, reportedly
siphoning at least $100 million to private
accounts abroad and enriching his sons at the
PA’s expense while blocking the timid
reform efforts of his appointed prime
51 Agence France-Presse, May 24, July 30, 1997;
Khaled Abu Toameh, “Money down the Drain?”
Jerusalem Report, Jan. 8, 1998, p. 26; Ronen
Bergman, Veharashut Netuna (Tel Aviv: Yediot
Ahronot, 2002), p. 156.
52 See, for example, Ali Abunimah, “When Salam
Fayyad secretly urged the US to block salaries to
Palestinian Authority employees,” The
Electronic Intifada, Oct. 4, 2012; The Jerusalem
Post, May 5, 2012.
minister, Salam Fayyad,
and eventually forcing
him out of office.53
In these circumstances,
it was hardly
surprising that the wellbeing
of the West Bank/Gaza population has
ebbed dramatically during the Oslo years. At
the time of the DOP signing, and despite the
steep economic decline in the six years of the
intifada (1987-93), socioeconomic conditions
in the territories were far better than in most
neighboring Arab states after two decades of
constant expansion under Israeli control that
saw a tenfold rise of the per-capita gross
domestic product. As late as September 2000
when Arafat launched his war of terror,
Palestinian income per capita was nearly
double Syria’s, more than four times Yemen’s,
and 10 percent higher than Jordan’s (one of the
better off Arab states) despite the steady
deterioration of the West Bank and the Gaza
economies under the PA’s control.54
By the time of Arafat’s death in
November 2004, however, his terror war had
slashed this income to a fraction of its earlier
levels, with real GDP per capita some 35
percent below pre-September 2000 levels,
with unemployment more than doubling and
most Palestinians reduced to poverty and
53 Jonathan Schanzer, “Chronic Kleptocracy: Corruption
within the Palestinian Political Establishment,”
Hearing before U.S. House Committee on
Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle
East and South Asia, Washington, D.C., July 10,
2012, pp. 17-8; Bergman, Veharashut Netuna,
pp. 162-3; Rachel Ehrenfeld, “Where Does the
Money Go? A Study of the Palestinian
Authority,” American Center for Democracy,
New York, Oct. 1, 2002, pp. 9-10; Yediot
Ahronot (Tel Aviv), July 14, 2002.
54 See, for example, “A Poorer Peace,” Newsweek,
Sept. 1, 1997; Keith Marsden, “The Viability of
Palestine,” The Wall Street Journal, Apr. 25,
2002; Patrick Clawson, “The Palestinians’ Lost
Marshall Plans,” The Jerusalem Post, Aug. 9,
2002.
Under the PA’s control, the national
budget was plundered at will by
PLO veterans and Arafat cronies.
MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY Fall 2016 Karsh: The Oslo Process / 17
despondency. And while Israel’s suppression of
the terror war generated a steady recovery with
the years 2007-11 recording an average yearly
growth above 8 percent, by mid-2014, a fullblown
recession had taken hold in the territories
with the growth rate dropping to minus 1
percent (0.5 percent in the West Bank and -4
percent in Gaza), a quarter of the population
living in poverty (with rates in Gaza twice as
high as in the West Bank), and unemployment
soaring to over a quarter of the workforce.55
Conclusion
Twenty-three years and thousands of
deaths after the launch of the Oslo “peace
process,” one might have hoped that the
international community would begin to
realize that the Palestinian leadership is as
implacably opposed to the two-state solution
as its predecessor was to the U.N.’s
endorsement of the idea sixty-nine years ago.
But that is evidently a pipe dream. Just as
President Clinton, whose hope of brokering a
Palestinian-Israeli peace was dashed by
Arafat in the July 2000 Camp David summit
and again in December of the same year, and
who blamed the PLO leader for the collapse
of the Oslo process, could suggest five
months before Arafat’s death that the United
States and Israel had no choice but to resume
negotiating with the PLO/PA leader,56 so the
EU has recently endorsed a French plan for
an international peace conference in total
disregard of Abbas’s adamant rejection of
Israel’s right to exist.
This soft racism—asking nothing of
the Palestinians as if they are too dim or too
55 “Four Years—Intifada, Closures, and Palestinian
Economic Crisis. An Assessment,” World Bank,
Washington, D.C., Oct. 2004, pp. xv, 3, 9. 13,
29-32; “Assistance Strategy FY15-16 for the
West Bank and Gaza,” idem, Oct. 8, 2014, pp 3-
5; “Economic Monitoring Report to the Ad Hoc
Liaison Committee,” idem, May 27, 2015.
56 The Guardian (London), June 21, 2004.
primitive to be held accountable for their
own words and actions—is an assured
recipe for disaster. For it is the total absence
of accountability from Middle Eastern
political life that has allowed a long
succession of local dictators, from Gamal
Abdel Nasser, to Saddam Hussein, to Yasser
Arafat, to Bashar al-Assad, to inflict
recurrent disasters and endless suffering on
their peoples and mayhem on the world.
So long as policies and actions on the
Palestinian side are permitted, or encouraged, to
remain as they are, there will be no progress
whatsoever toward peace: not in the framework
of a Paris international conference, not even in
bilateral talks, were the Palestinians to be
somehow coerced to return to the negotiating
table. Just as the creation of free and democratic
societies in Germany and Japan after World
War II necessitated a comprehensive sociopolitical
and educational transformation, so it is
only when Palestinian society undergoes a real
“spring” that will sweep its corrupt and
oppressive PLO and Hamas rulers from power,
eradicate the endemic violence from political
and social life, and value the virtues of
coexistence with their Israeli neighbors, that the
century-long conflict between Arabs and Jews
can at long last be resolved. Sadly, this
possibility, which seemed to be in the offing in
1993, has been eliminated for the foreseeable
future by the Oslo “peace process.”
Efraim Karsh, editor of the
Middle East Quarterly, is emeritus
professor of Middle East and
Mediterranean studies at King's
College London and professor of
political studies at Bar-Ilan
University where he also directs the
BESA Center for Strategic Studies.
This article is part of a wider study
prepared under the auspices of the
BESA Center.
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