Why the Oslo Process Doomed Peace (2016)

Twenty-three years after its euphoric launch on the White House lawn, the Oslo between Israel and the 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 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 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 PartnerWe make 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] treaty with Egypt had many opponents, and this has held for 15 years now.1 True enough. But 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 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 in place of Israel.2Arafat admitted as much five days before signing the accords when he told an Israeli journalist, the future, Israel and will be one united state in which Israelis and Palestinians will live together3-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 achieving the complete liberation of Palestine.4The 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. …