Looking Back On Oslo (2)

Asharq Al-Awsat

23-05-2025

It has become common knowledge that Benjamin Netanyahu did not hesitate to mobilize the far right, in both its nationalist and religious wings, in a campaign against the Oslo Accords and Yitzhak Rabin. The latter was portrayed wearing the uniform of a Nazi officer in an infamous poster by this campaign that eventually led to Rabin's assassination in 1995.
A year earlier, a religious extremist by the name of Baruch Goldstein, an American-Israeli who had been a follower of Meir Kahane and a member of his movement, murdered 29 Palestinians in Hebron while they were praying.
Rabin's assassination is considered the major turning point of the Oslo process, and it was a prologue for the slow collapse of the 'peace camp.' On the other side, the growing wave of Hamas 'martyrdom operations,' which peaked in the mid-1990s, saw a security agenda occupy the space that had been vacated by the desire for peace. This eruption of violence coincided with rising tensions on the Israeli-Lebanese front, in 1993 and even more so in 1996. In turn, this polarized climate and broad sense of insecurity paved the way for Netanyahu's narrow electoral victory over Shimon Peres, the Oslo Accords' chief architect and its second key figure.
As the terrorist violence by radicals on both sides aggravated, the slur 'Osloist' grew out of 'Arafatist,' a slur that had been coined earlier by Assad's Damascus, whose sponsorship (alongside Iran) of Hamas and its affiliates' activities was no secret.
Although peace achieved a second victory through the Wadi Araba Treaty that Jordan and Israel signed in late 1994, Palestinian leaders, first and foremost Arafat, failed to exhibit the degree of responsibility needed to engage in a difficult and complex peace process and meet international commitments. Indeed, such behavior did not come naturally to the Palestinian leader, who had spent most of his political life jockeying with Levantine local communities and security regimes.
Moderation also receded among Palestinians, as illustrated by Arafat's flip-flopping during this period. He was torn over whether to comply with the Oslo Accords or not because of the performative bravado of Palestinian, Arab, and Iranian radicals seeking to delegitimize him, which only intensified with the onset of the Second Intifada. In 1994, Arafat made a gaffe at a mosque in South Africa, comparing Oslo to the 'Treaty of Hudaybiyyah' between the Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh at a time when the Israelis were criticizing him for failing to do anything to curb the aggravating terrorist attacks beyond condemning them.
Similarly, the elected government in the West Bank and Gaza that was supposed to replace the Palestinian Authority never emerged; corruption, nepotism, and arbitrary rule became entrenched. While opinion polls had, at one point, shown that over two-thirds of the Palestinian public supported Oslo, the number steadily dropped as the conviction that peace would achieve nothing grew. This authority born of peace was not compelling: the occupation persisted, and the checkpoints around Ramallah multiplied in parallel with the aggravation of both the frequency and scale of terrorist attacks, suffocating the Palestinians and restricting their mobility.
Meanwhile, the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which had stood at 110,000 when Oslo was signed, began to rise, first by tens of thousands and then by hundreds of thousands- international law's prohibition of such settlement activity was irrelevant. Not only did the number of settlements increase, the nature of these settlements also changed: what had begun as a pursuit of functional considerations (cheaper housing and living conditions than those in the cities) was increasingly driven by an ideological, religious, and nationalist desire to acquire land.
The Palestinian Authority's tenuous standing among its people went hand in hand with its weak position in the face of the Israelis, with each of these two problems feeding on the other. Because it was too weak to deter terrorist attacks, the Palestinian Authority was also too weak to force the Israelis from expanding settlements or to assert greater control over 'security coordination' with them, and this went both ways. As a result, the Palestinian Authority, focused on proving that it had not been breaching the agreement, was increasingly seen as an Israeli tool concerned only with maintaining the crumbs of a corrupt power structure on the one hand, and on the other, as complicit in the terrorist attacks against Israelis.
Even so, this wounded peace had not lost all of its power, and Oslo's potential had not been squandered yet. Following Rabin's assassination, Shimon Peres continued to pursue its implementation as prime minister. Even Netanyahu, after winning the 1996 election, seemed compelled to pretend he had been adhering to it. In early 1997, he allowed the Palestinian Authority to take back control of Hebron, drawing the ire of his right-wing base. In late 1998, Netanyahu, Arafat, and Clinton met at the Wye River Summit in the United States. They agreed to resume the Oslo process: Israel would withdraw from parts of the West Bank, counter-terrorism measures would be implemented, and the Palestinian Authority and Israel agreed to develop their economic ties and continue final status negotiations. The Knesset, for its part, approved the Wye River Memorandum that came out of the summit by a large majority, and the Israeli public largely supported it. When Netanyahu tried to stall and play tricks to obstruct its implementation, his government collapsed in 1999, triggering elections that were won by the Labor candidate and 'Osloist,' Ehud Barak.
With Barak's victory, the peace camp had some hope again, though it was faint in comparison to the optimism that followed Rabin's 1992 victory. Barak, amid a drop-in popular support for peace, seemed more hesitant and less decisive than Rabin or Peres. On the other side, Palestinians' confidence in the peace process declined as Israel imposed greater restrictions and set up larger numbers of checkpoints.
As for the notion that all of this proves Israel had never sought peace and never will, it is extremely a reductionist assessment.