Who Rules the World? (18 page)

The murderer of the schoolgirl, Shimon Yifrah, was arrested, but quickly released on bail when the court determined that “the offense is not severe enough” to warrant detention. The judge commented that Yifrah only intended to shock the girl by firing his gun at her in a school yard, not to kill her, so “this is not a case of a criminal person who has to be punished, deterred, and taught a lesson by imprisoning him.” Yifrah was given a seven-month suspended sentence while settlers in the courtroom broke out in song and dance. And the usual silence reigned. After all, it was routine.

And so it was: as Yifrah was freed, the Israeli press reported that an army patrol fired into the yard of a school in a West Bank refugee camp, wounding five children, likewise intending only “to shock them.” There were no charges, and the event again attracted no attention. It was just another episode in a program of “illiteracy as punishment,” as the Israeli press termed it, including the closing of schools, the use of gas bombs, the beating of students with rifle butts, and the barring of medical aid for victims. Beyond the schools, a reign of even more severe brutality that became yet more savage during the Intifada was enacted under the orders of Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin. After two years of violent and sadistic repression, Rabin informed Peace Now leaders that “the inhabitants of the territories are subject to harsh military and economic pressure. In the end, they will be broken,” and would accept Israel’s terms—as they did, when Arafat restored control through the Oslo process.
12

The Madrid negotiations between Israel and internal Palestinians continued inconclusively from 1991, primarily because Abdul Shafi insisted on an end to the expansion of Israeli settlements. The settlements were all illegal, as had repeatedly been determined by international authorities, including the UN Security Council (among other resolutions, in UNSC 446, passed 12-0, with the United States, the United Kingdom, and Norway abstaining).
13
The illegality of the settlements was later affirmed by the International Court of Justice. It had also been recognized by Israel’s highest legal authorities and government officials in late 1967 when the settlement projects were beginning. The criminal enterprise included the vast expansion and annexation of Greater Jerusalem, in explicit violation of repeated Security Council orders.
14

Israel’s position as the Madrid conference opened was summarized accurately by Israeli journalist Danny Rubinstein, one of the best-informed analysts on the topic of the Occupied Territories.
15
He wrote that, at Madrid, Israel and the United States would agree to some form of Palestinian “autonomy,” as required by the 1978 Camp David Accords, but it would be “autonomy as in a POW camp, where the prisoners are ‘autonomous’ to cook their meals without interference and to organize cultural events.”
16
Palestinians would be granted little more than what they already had—control over local services—and the Israeli settlement programs would continue.

While the Madrid negotiations and the secret Oslo negotiations were underway, these programs expanded rapidly, under first Yitzhak Shamir and then Yitzhak Rabin, who became prime minister in 1992 and “boasted that more housing in the territories is being built during his tenure than at any time since 1967.” Rabin explained the guiding principle succinctly: “What is important is what is within the boundaries, and it is less important where the boundaries are, as long as the State [of Israel] covers most of the territory of the Land of Israel [Eretz Israel, the former Palestine], whose capital is Jerusalem.”

Israeli researchers reported that the aim of the Rabin government was to radically expand “the greater Jerusalem zone of influence,” extending from Ramallah to Hebron to the border of Ma’aleh Adumim, near Jericho, and to “finish creating circles of contiguous Jewish settlements in the greater Jerusalem zone of influence, so as to further surround the Palestinian communities, limit their development, and prevent any possibility that East Jerusalem could become a Palestinian capital.” Furthermore, “a vast network of roads has been under construction, forming the backbone of the settlement pattern.”
17

The programs were expanded rapidly after the Oslo Accords, including new settlements and the “thickening” of old ones, special inducements to attract new settlers, and highway projects to cantonize the territory. Excluding annexed East Jerusalem, building starts increased by over 40 percent from 1993 to 1995, according to a Peace Now study.
18
Government funding for settlements in the territories increased by 70 percent in 1994, the year following the accords.
19
Davar
, the journal of the governing Labor Party, reported that Rabin’s administration was maintaining the priorities of the ultraright Shamir government it replaced. While pretending to freeze settlements, Labor “helped them financially even more than the Shamir government had ever done,” enlarging settlements “everywhere in the West Bank, even in the most provocative spots.”
20
This policy was carried forward in the following years, and is the basis for the current programs of the Netanyahu government. It is designed to leave Israel in control of some 40 to 50 percent of the West Bank, with the rest cantonized, imprisoned as Israel takes over the Jordan Valley, and separated from Gaza, in explicit violation of the Oslo Accords, thus ensuring that any potential Palestinian entity will have no access to the outside world.

The Intifada was initiated and carried out by the internal Palestinians. The PLO, in Tunis, tried to exert some control over the events but with little success. The programs of the early 1990s while negotiations were in process deepened the alienation of the internal Palestinians from the PLO leadership abroad.

Under these circumstances, it was not surprising that Arafat sought a way to reestablish PLO authority. The opportunity was offered by the secret negotiations between Arafat and Israel under Norwegian auspices that undercut the local leadership. As they were concluded in August 1993, the growing PLO estrangement was reviewed by Lamis Andoni, one of the few journalists who was keeping a close watch on what was happening among the Palestinians under occupation and in refugee camps in neighboring countries.

Andoni reported that the PLO is “facing the worst crisis since its inception [as] Palestinian groups—except for Fatah—and independents are distancing themselves from the PLO [and the] shrinking clique around Yasir Arafat.” She reported further that “two top PLO executive committee members, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and Shafiq al-Hout, have resigned from the PLO executive committee,” while Palestinian negotiators were offering their resignations, and even groups that remained inside were distancing themselves from Arafat. The leader of Fatah in Lebanon called on Arafat to resign, while opposition to him personally and to PLO corruption and autocracy were mounting in the territories. Along with “the rapid disintegration of the mainstream group and Arafat’s loss of support within his own movement … the speedy disintegration of the PLO’s institutions and the steady erosion of the Organisation’s constituency could render any breakthrough at the peace talks meaningless.”

“At no point in the PLO’s history has opposition to the leadership, and to Arafat himself, been as strong,” Andoni observed, “while for the first time there is a growing feeling that safeguarding Palestinian national rights no longer hinges on defending the PLO’s role. Many believe that it is the leadership’s policies that are destroying Palestinian institutions and jeopardising Palestinian national rights.”

For such reasons, she observed, Arafat was pursuing the Jericho-Gaza option offered by the Oslo agreement, which he hoped would “assert the PLO’s authority, especially amid signs that the Israeli government could go the extra ten miles by talking directly to the PLO, thus salvaging for it the legitimacy it is losing internally.”

Israeli authorities were surely aware of the developments within Palestine, and presumably came to appreciate that it made good sense to deal with those who were “destroying Palestinian institutions and jeopardising Palestinian national rights” before the population sought to realize its national goals and rights in some other way.

Reaction to the Oslo Accords among Palestinians within the territories was mixed. Some had high hopes. Others saw little to celebrate. “The provisions of the agreement have alarmed even the most moderate Palestinians, who worry that the accord consolidates Israeli control in the territories,” Lamis Andoni reported. Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian negotiator, commented that “apparently this agreement aims at reorganizing the Israeli occupation and not at a gradual termination.”
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Even Faisal Husseini, who was close to Arafat, said that the accord “is definitely not the beginning that our people were looking for.” Haidar Abdul Shafi criticized the PLO leadership for accepting an agreement that permitted Israel to continue its settlement policies and land appropriation, as well as the “annexation and Judaization” of its expanded Jerusalem area and its “economic hegemony” over Palestinians—and refused to attend the celebration on the White House lawn.
22
Particularly grating to many was what they saw as “the shabby behavior of the P.L.O. leadership, including a pattern of ignoring Palestinians who have suffered through 27 years of Israeli occupation in favor of exiles coming from Tunis to take power,” Youssef Ibrahim reported in the
New York Times
. He added that PLO representatives “were pelted with stones by Palestinian youths as they rode into [Jericho] in Israeli Army jeeps.”
23
Arafat’s provisional list for his governing authority revealed “that he is determined to stack it with loyalists and members of the Palestinian diaspora,” Julian Ozanne reported from Jerusalem in the
Financial Times
, including only two Palestinian “insiders,” Faisal Husseini and Zakaria al-Agha, both Arafat loyalists.
24
The rest came from Arafat’s “loyal political factions” outside the territories.

A look at the actual contents of the Oslo Accords reveals that such reactions were, if anything, overly optimistic.

The Declaration of Principles was quite explicit about satisfying Israel’s demands, but was silent on Palestinian national rights. It conformed to the conception articulated by Dennis Ross, President Clinton’s main Middle East adviser and negotiator at Camp David in 2000 and later a key adviser for Obama as well. As Ross explained, Israel has
needs
, but Palestinians have only
wants
—obviously of lesser significance.
25

Article I of the DOP states that the end result of the process is to be “a permanent settlement based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.” Those familiar with the diplomacy concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict should have had no difficulty understanding what this meant. Resolutions 242 and 338 say nothing at all about Palestinian rights, apart from a vague reference to a “just settlement of the refugee problem.”
26
Later resolutions referring to Palestinian national rights were ignored in the DOP. If the culmination of the “peace process” is implemented along such lines, then Palestinians could kiss goodbye their hopes for some limited degree of national rights in the former Palestine.

Further articles of the DOP spell all of this out more clearly. They stipulate that Palestinian authority extends over “West Bank and Gaza Strip territory, except for issues that will be negotiated in the permanent status negotiations: Jerusalem, settlements, military locations, and Israelis”—that is, except for every issue of significance.
27
Furthermore, “subsequent to the Israeli withdrawal, Israel will continue to be responsible for external security, and for internal security and public order of settlements and Israelis. Israeli military forces and civilians may continue to use roads freely within the Gaza Strip and the Jericho area,” the two areas from which Israel was pledged to withdraw—eventually.
28
In short, there would be no meaningful changes. The DOP also did not have a word to say about the settlement programs at the heart of the conflict, which even before the vast expansion under the Oslo process were already undermining realistic prospects of achieving any meaningful Palestinian self-determination.

In brief, only by succumbing to what is sometimes called “intentional ignorance” could one believe that the Oslo process was a path to peace. Nevertheless, this belief became virtual dogma among Western commentators and intellectuals.

The Oslo Accords were followed by additional Israel–Arafat/PLO agreements. The first and most important of these was Oslo II, in 1995, shortly before Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated, a tragic event even if the illusions concocted about “Rabin the peace-maker” cannot sustain analysis.

The Oslo II agreement is what one would expect to be crafted by intelligent law students assigned the task of constructing a document that would give U.S. and Israeli authorities the option of doing as they pleased while leaving room for speculation about more acceptable outcomes. When these outcomes remain unrealized, the blame can be laid on the “extremists” who have undermined the promise.

To illustrate, the Oslo II agreement stipulated that settlers (illegally) in the Occupied Territories would remain under Israeli jurisdiction and legislation. In the official wording, “the Israeli military government [in the territories] shall retain the necessary legislative, judicial and executive powers and responsibilities, in accordance with international law”—which the United States and Israel have always interpreted as they chose, with tacit European acquiescence. Such latitude also granted these authorities effective veto power over Palestinian legislation. The agreement stated that any such “legislation which amends or abrogates existing [Israeli-imposed] laws or military orders … shall have no effect and shall be void
ab initio
if it exceeds the jurisdiction of the [Palestinian] Council”—which had no authority in most of the territories and authority elsewhere only conditional on Israeli approval—or is “otherwise inconsistent with this or any other agreement.” Furthermore, “the Palestinian side shall respect the legal rights of Israelis (including corporations owned by Israelis) related to lands located in areas under the territorial jurisdiction of the Council”—that is, in the limited areas in which the Palestinian authorities were to have jurisdiction subject to Israeli approval; specifically, their rights related to government and so-called “absentee” land, a complex legal construction that effectively transfers to Israeli jurisdiction the land of Palestinians absent from territories taken by Israel.
29
The latter two categories constitute most of the region, though the government of Israel, which determines their boundaries unilaterally, provided no official figures. The Israeli press reported that “unsettled state lands” amounted to about half of the West Bank, and total state lands to about 70 percent.
30