Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March/April 2020, pp. 17-19
Special Report
By Gregory DeSylva
ON DEC. 6, 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution advocating the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Surprisingly, Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), her Muslim colleague Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and the two other members of their “Squad” opposed the resolution. Tlaib explained, “This resolution…endorses an unrealistic, unattainable solution, one that Israel has made impossible.”
Tlaib’s statement may well have mystified her House colleagues. Why is the two-state solution unrealistic and unattainable, and how is Israel to blame for that? Most U.S. politicians are unaware that the West Bank and Gaza Strip are under the yoke of apartheid and that a Palestinian state is impossible as long as that is the case. The fact that the majority of U.S. representatives evidently want to return to something like the Oslo “peace process” for two states indicates they don’t understand how Oslo failed and how it created apartheid. Especially in light of President Donald Trump’s new “peace plan,” it is timely to evaluate the Oslo process to understand why it would be a mistake to return to anything like it at this time.
A PALESTINIAN STATE—OR SOMETHING LESS?
The Oslo “peace process” began with the Sept. 13, 1993 Oslo I agreement, followed by the Sept. 28, 1995 Oslo II agreement. Israel’s desire to end the First Intifada, which had erupted in December 1987, was the impetus for these secret negotiations in which the PLO headed by Yasser Arafat represented the Palestinians. The Palestinians’ condition for peace was sovereignty over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as defined by the 1949 armistice “green line,” and East Jerusalem for a capital. Israeli settlements undermined these requirements and negotiators also demanded the resolution of the refugee issue. These territories constituted only 22 percent of Palestine. The Palestinians considered this a huge compromise conceding to Israel the 78 percent from which it had ethnically cleansed them in 1948. A viable state required contiguity, so an undivided West Bank with a secure land link to Gaza was essential.
Israel dominated the Oslo process. Israeli scholar and politician Yossi Beilin was a principal architect of the Accords. Perhaps Oslo’s greatest flaw was its failure to acknowledge Palestinian rights to a state. Arafat put that right—and Palestine’s equal status with Israel—at risk in a Sept. 9, 1993 exchange of letters with Israeli Prime Minster Yitzhak Rabin. Momentously, he acknowledged Israel’s right to exist. In exchange, Rabin merely acknowledged the PLO’s right to represent the Palestinians. Moreover, in 1992 Rabin had advised the Palestinians, “We are offering you the fairest and most viable proposal from our point of view today—autonomy, self-government.” The autonomy proposals envisioned local self-rule, not sovereignty. In 1994 Rabin declared, “We do not accept the Palestinian goal of an independent Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan. We believe in a separate Palestinian entity short of a state.” Regarding Jerusalem, he wrote in his memoirs, “Jerusalem is and will continue to be united [under Israeli sovereignty] and our eternal capital.”
Despite Rabin’s aims, the Oslo Accords could have acknowledged Palestinian rights to a state. Failure to do so opened up the possibility of something less than a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Yet the Palestinian residents of the territories—many of them victims of ethnic cleansing by Israel during the 1948 and 1967 wars—had strong rights, backed by international law, to statehood in this remnant of Palestine. Oslo did indicate that Israel would withdraw from parts of the West Bank, which were to be transferred to the Palestinians, but precise areas and timing were left ambiguous. The proposals could be construed to mean that parts of the territories—even large parts—might go to Israel. Whether the remainder would be sufficient for a viable state was purely hypothetical. Such ambiguity was Oslo’s second great flaw, making for misunderstandings, unrealized expectations, loss of faith in the process and violence.
Non-recognition and ambiguity didn’t eliminate all possibility of a Palestinian state. There were still issues essential to statehood in which the Palestinians had strong grounding in international law. These included Israeli settlements and military locations, borders, Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees and foreign relations. The settlements and military locations and troops in the territories contravene international law prohibiting colonization of territories occupied by war and requiring timely termination of military occupations. The borders would define the location, extent and contiguity of the state. According to international law they would be the same as those of the territories, which also would clarify the Jerusalem issue. The right of refugees to return or to be compensated also is well established in international law, as is the right of a sovereign state to conduct its own foreign relations. These “permanent status” issues, emphatically, should have been at the top of the agenda. Instead, Oslo postponed the deadline for resolving those issues until May 4, 1999.
Putting off difficult issues normally means they will be taken up later in a particular negotiation. Deferring them five years after an agreement per Oslo was highly unorthodox, and no progress was made during that period. Rather, these issues became increasingly intractable with each passing day as Israel created more settlements and other “facts on the ground.” This was not the first nor the last time vital Palestinian interests were swept under the rug. They were the sticking point in the 1978 Camp David negotiations, in which Palestinian rights to a state also were unacknowledged and the key issues were put off five years. Nothing was accomplished during that period either, allowing Israel to achieve peace with Egypt without negotiating—let alone reaching an agreement—with the Palestinians. Postponement and other aspects of the Oslo Accords evidently were modeled upon the 1978 Camp David Accords.
In sum, by not demanding explicit statehood recognition and by going along with ambiguous schemes, the PLO was signaling—perhaps unwittingly—that it would accept something less than a state. By acceding to the long postponement of the permanent status issues, the Palestinians were virtually guaranteeing that that would be their only option.
SEPARATION AND DOMINATION: APARTHEID
With Palestinian dreams in deep freeze, Israel waited until the final days of the Oslo II negotiations to foist upon the PLO the notorious A-B-C scheme splitting up the West Bank.
Superficially, this might seem like the basis for a state to start small and expand to re-unite the territory. In the context of non-recognition, ambiguity, postponement and withdrawal failures, it’s hard not to suspect that this scheme was intended to become permanent. Area A consists of Palestinian cities, theoretically to have autonomy, local self-rule and internal security. Area B encompasses Palestinian villages and nearby lands, to be under Palestinian local rule and supposedly joint Palestinian-Israeli security control. In fact, Israeli security dominates Area B. This arrangement enables Israel to suppress dissent in B and invade A at will, despite A’s nominal internal security. C is under full Israeli control and contains all the settlements and most of the water and other essential natural resources lacking in A and B. C also completely surrounds and transects A and B, cutting them into many non-contiguous fragments incapable of constituting a viable state. All of this gave Israel dominating control of the population of A and B and the movement of people, goods and services into and out of those areas.
A and B form three rough non-contiguous blocks: Nablus to the north, Hebron to the south and Ramallah in between. The Second Intifada prompted Israel to impose severe restrictions on Palestinian movement between these blocks and between fragments thereof. It did so by installing numerous checkpoints requiring permits to pass, as well as hundreds of roadblocks and other obstacles along roads connecting the blocks and their fragments. By 2006, 528 checkpoints and obstacles and Jewish-only roads were disrupting Palestinian lives and damaging their economy. Israel also started building a high wall to physically separate West Bank Palestinians from Israeli Jews and from some of the illegal settlements.
The A-B-C scheme allowed Israel to tightly control A and B and the Palestinian residents of C in the name of security. It was a blueprint for apartheid, a prototype for separation and domination disturbingly reminiscent of the “autonomous” bantustans engulfed by the dominating matrix of white South Africa. Its intent clearly was not to create a bona-fide contiguous state for the Palestinians but to isolate and control them. They didn’t fail to recognize A and B as bantustans to which they could be restricted as Israel settled C and annexed the West Bank. Arafat reportedly shouted that they were like “the cantons of South Africa!” (Gaza became a bantustan in 2005 when Israel removed its settlements and enclosed it in a separation barrier.)
But wasn’t C supposed to be transferred to A and B in stages, putting the West Bank Humpty-Dumpty back together? Postponement of the settlements issue made this impossible. As long as they remained and continued to expand, most of C could not be transferred. Though Oslo II prohibited actions changing the status of the territories during permanent status negotiations, it erred by not explicitly banning settlement expansion. Israel took full advantage. Between the signing of Oslo II and the 1999 deadline for those negotiations, the number of West Bank settlers increased 9.2 percent per year. Withdrawal delays and ceaseless settlement expansion led to Palestinian loss of confidence in the process and anti-Israel violence, causing more delays. Consequently, only limited areas of C have been transferred to A and B.
By 2013, Area A, initially 3 percent of the West Bank, grew to 18 percent; Area B, initially 24 percent, declined to 22 percent. Area C, initially 73 percent, declined to 60 percent. The map above shows combined areas A and B today: scattered bantustans totaling 8.8 percent of pre-1947 Palestine. Palestinian residents of C—many of them refugees and even refugees twice over—are under pressure to migrate to A and B or emigrate due to the lack of housing. Building is not an option because Israel virtually always denies them permits and demolishes houses they build without permits.
Israel justifies all of this on the basis of security. But the sole cause of Palestinian violence is resistance to Israel’s settler colonization of Palestine. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said of black violence, “It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.” Just so, Palestinian violence is born of the greater, original crimes of the Zionist society. Israel can no more justify its apartheid crimes by Palestinian violence than South Africa could justify its apartheid crimes by African National Congress (ANC) violence.
JUSTICE DELAYED/JUSTICE DENIED: CAMP DAVID 2000 AND BEYOND
Each delay of the permanent status issues—especially the settlements—drove another nail into the two-state coffin. Nevertheless, President Bill Clinton convened another Camp David Summit in 2000 to try again. Since Oslo II (1995), the number of West Bank settlers had increased 48 percent. Prime Minister Ehud Barak made a half-baked proposal that still did not acknowledge Palestinian statehood and under which many West Bank settlements were to be annexed. It rejected the green line border and gave Israel a 99-year lease on the Jordan Valley; most of East Jerusalem was to be under Israeli sovereignty with no Palestinian capital; and the world would bear most of the responsibility for the refugees. In Gaza, Israeli settlements and border control would have remained. None of this was in writing and there was no map. Leery now of ambiguous schemes, Arafat walked out and was blamed for the failure—never mind Israel’s proposed settlement annexations and rejection of other Palestinian permanent status positions. Once again those were left in limbo as Israel gained more time to establish facts on the ground.
The January 2001 Taba negotiations were a hasty attempt to salvage the 2000 Summit before Ariel Sharon’s probable election as prime minister. Considerable progress was made, but differences on settlement annexations and compensating land swaps, as well as Jerusalem and refugee restitutions, could not be resolved in time. Once again, the permanent status issues stymied negotiations and were kicked further down the road.
Israel didn’t make all the proposals. The stipulations of the 2002 Arab League Peace Initiative were virtually identical to Palestinian demands, for which it offered Israel peace with all Arab League states. Israel rejected this proposal on Jerusalem and refugees.
George W. Bush’s 2003 “Roadmap” further postponed the permanent status issues until the end of 2005—by which time the number of settlers had increased 84 percent over 1995—and also ended up in the peace plan graveyard.
Israeli policy thawed briefly when Ehud Olmert became prime minister in 2006. In late 2008, with the number of West Bank settlers up 109 percent, he made a proposal similar to the 2001 Taba concept. But differences persisted over settlement land swaps, Jerusalem and refugees, and the deal could not be done before rejectionist Binyamin Netanyahu returned to power in 2009.
UNHOLY APARTHEID IN THE HOLY LAND
Twenty-seven years of the “peace process” haven’t come close to a two-state solution. Rather, it has resulted in apartheid in the territories. Assuming the House of Representatives is sincere about two states, that outcome indeed is unrealistic—even fanciful—under current circumstances. It also is not a little hypocritical, given its approval of more than $75 billion in aid to Israel from the beginning of the “peace process” in 1993 to 2017 and $3.8 billion per year in military aid thereafter—which has helped to establish and maintain this apartheid.
Apartheid in the Palestinian territories is a clear and present evil that cannot be whitewashed by Israel apologists. It’s a legitimate target for the kind of grassroots action that helped bring down South African apartheid. Assembling a bona-fide state from the shattered, dominated fragments Oslo created is highly improbable. Apartheid must be disassembled before that can be a real possibility. Adequate physical, legal and political space must be cleared before a Palestinian state can take root. All the apartheid laws, regulations, institutions and infrastructure first must be swept away, beginning with the official condemnation and outlawing of Zionist apartheid itself.
So, politicians and citizens: put aside two states for now. Help bring down this apartheid if you can. But get out of the way if you can’t lend a hand.
Gregory DeSylva is a board member of Deir Yassin Remembered and has written and produced six videos related to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
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