Palestine and Israel: Perils of a Neoliberal, Repressive 'Pax Americana.'

As diplomatic agreements normally do, the Declaration of Principles (DOP) signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization on September 13, 1993, and the subsequent implementation agreements reflect the international and regional balance of power, in this case Israel's overwhelming military superiority over its Arab neighbors and its firm alliance with the United States. The DOP defined a negotiating process and a five-year interim period with no clear goal and deferred the most basic Palestinian needs territory and sovereignty - to final status talks that were to convene in May 1996, but have not yet begun in earnest. Yasir Arafat and his advisors claimed that despite the many ambiguities and unresolved issues in the texts of the agreements, the Oslo process would result in the establishment of a Palestinian state in nearly all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, ignoring the fact that both Israel's Labor and Likud parties opposed this outcome (Labor removed its formal opposition in May 1996). What brought the two parties to conclude such an unbalanced agreement? Is there any chance that it can work? The Global and Regional Balance of Forces The fundamental strategic relationship governing the Arab-Israeli conflict has been the U.S.-Israeli alliance, which began in earnest with the Kennedy administration's sale of Hawk missiles to Israel in 1962. After the promulgation of the Nixon Doctrine in 1969, Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia became U.S. surrogates in combating what Washington regarded as pro-Soviet forces in the Middle East, including the PLO. The alliance with Israel subsequently became the main impediment to achieving a peaceful resolution of the conflict in accord with the international consensus that crystallized after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.(2) That consensus interprets U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 to require a more-or-less complete Israeli withdrawal from the Arab territories occupied in the 1967 war in exchange for a contractual peace and recognition of Israel by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In addition, since the mid-1970s, international opinion has overwhelmingly supported the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The United States endorsed Resolution 242, but since Henry Kissinger became Secretary of State in 1973 it has supported Israel's view that 242 does not require a complete withdrawal from the occupied territories and regularly used its veto in the U.N. Security Council to shield Israel from criticism of its violations of human fights and international law. Today, the U.S. and Israel are the only major actors in the Arab-Israeli conflict that oppose the right of the Palestinian people to establish an independent state. The 1993 DOP did not mark the first time the PLO recognized Israel and renounced attacks against civilians. The PLO began, with much equivocation and unclarity, to signal willingness to take these steps in 1974 (for details, see Muslih, 1990; Gresh, 1985). Yet Israel was not interested in testing its intentions, and the U.S. underwrote Israel's intransigence.(3) After the 1978 Camp David meeting, which ultimately resulted in an Egyptian-Israeli peace and Israel's evacuation of the Sinai Peninsula, the PLO backed away from its tentative exploration of diplomatic resolutions to the conflict because it believed, correctly as it turned out, that Camp David was a formula for establishing a separate Egyptian-Israeli peace and would leave the question of Palestine unresolved. The PLO unequivocally embraced what has come to be known as the "two-state solution" in November 1988, when the Palestine National Council (PNC), the supreme body of the PLO, adopted a declaration of Palestinian independence and a political statement recognizing Israel and forswearing attacks on civilians (Said, 1989). This PLO initiative was the consequence of a lively public debate among Palestinians during the first year of the intifada, the popular uprising against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that broke out in December 1987. …