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Palestine,
Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict
A Primer
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The
Oslo Accords
| The
PLO accepted this deeply flawed agreement with Israel because
it was weak and had little diplomatic support in the Arab
world. |
The
weakness of the PLO after the Gulf War, the stalemate in the Washington
talks, and fear of radical Islam brought the Rabin government to
reverse the long-standing Israeli refusal to negotiate with the
PLO. Consequently, Israel initiated secret negotiations in Oslo,
Norway directly with PLO representatives who had been excluded from
the Madrid and Washington talks. These negotiations produced the
Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles, which was signed in Washington
in September 1993.
The
Declaration of Principles was based on mutual recognition of Israel
and the PLO. It established that Israel would withdraw from the
Gaza Strip and Jericho, with additional withdrawals from further
unspecified areas of the West Bank during a five-year interim period.
During this period, the PLO formed a Palestinian Authority (PA)
with "self-governing" (i.e. municipal) powers in the areas
from which Israeli forces were redeployed. In January 1996, elections
were held for a Palestinian Legislative Council and for the presidency
of the PA, which was won handily by Yasir Arafat. The key issues
such as the extent of the territories to be ceded by Israel, the
nature of the Palestinian entity to be established, the future of
the Israeli settlements and settlers, water rights, the resolution
of the refugee problem and the status of Jerusalem were set aside
to be discussed in final status talks.
The
PLO accepted this deeply flawed agreement with Israel because it
was weak and had little diplomatic support in the Arab world. Both
Islamist radicals and local leaders in the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip challenged Arafat's leadership. Yet only Arafat had the prestige
and national legitimacy to conclude a negotiated agreement with
Israel.
The
Oslo accords set up a negotiating process without specifying an
outcome. The process was supposed to have been completed by May
1999. There were many delays due to Israel's reluctance to relinquish
control over the occupied territories, unwillingness to make the
kinds of concessions necessary to reach a final status agreement,
and periodic outbursts of violence by Palestinian opponents of the
Oslo process, especially HAMAS and Jihad. During the Likud's return
to power in 1996-99, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu avoided engaging
seriously in the Oslo process, which he distrusted and fundamentally
opposed.
A
Labor-led coalition government led by Prime Minister Ehud Barak
came to power in 1999. Barak at first concentrated on reaching a
peace agreement with Syria. When he failed to convince the Syrians
to sign an agreement that would restore to them less than all the
area of the Golan Heights occupied by Israel in 1967, Barak turned
his attention to the Palestinian track.
During
the protracted interim period of the Oslo process, Israel's Labor
and Likud governments built new settlements in the occupied territories,
expanded existing settlements and constructed a network of bypass
roads to enable Israeli settlers to travel from their settlements
to Israel proper without passing through Palestinian-inhabited areas.
These projects were understood by most Palestinians as marking out
territory that Israel sought to annex in the final settlement. The
Oslo accords contained no mechanism to block these unilateral actions
or Israel's violations of Palestinian human and civil rights in
areas under its control.
Final
status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians were to
have begun in mid-1996, but only got underway in earnest in mid-2000.
By then, a series of painfully negotiated Israeli interim withdrawals
left the Palestinian Authority with direct or partial control of
some 40 percent of the West Bank and 65 percent of the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian areas were surrounded by Israeli-controlled territory
with entry and exit controlled by Israel.
The
Palestinians' expectations were not accommodated by the Oslo accords.
The Oslo process required the Palestinians to make their principal
compromises at the beginning, whereas Israel's principal compromises
beyond recognition of the PLO were to be made in the final status
talks.
Page
13 | Camp
David II
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