Why there's no peace in Palestine

by Catherine Cook*

On September 13, 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine 
Liberation Organisation Chairman Yasser Arafat signed a Declaration of 
Principles on the White House lawn, heralding the beginning of the Oslo 
peace process. Ten years later, the process is completely deadlocked. 
Israel has decided to "remove" Arafat, and many outside observers are left 
wondering what went wrong. The answer lies in the fundamental failure of 
the Oslo process to address the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian 
conflict.

While scenes of bombed-out Israeli buses on television screens have become 
a familiar sight for many, this conflict is not about suicide bombings. 
Rather, violent attacks on Israeli civilians stem from larger unresolved 
issues, particularly Israel's ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza 
Strip.

The Oslo agreements, which were to be implemented in phases, made no 
mention of occupation and postponed, until the final stage, negotiations 
over the most contentious issues, including borders, refugees, Jerusalem 
and settlements. It failed to address the fundamental power imbalance 
between Israel, which has a regional hegemony, and the Palestinians, a 
stateless, occupied population.

Palestinians hoped that the Oslo process would lead to an end of occupation 
and the creation of an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. 
But Oslo's phased process, and the absence of an effective enforcement 
mechanism or a clear end goal, allowed Israel, as the more powerful party, 
to continue a policy of territorial expansion, leaving Palestinians with 
little recourse.

While Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were haggling over areas in which 
Israeli troops would redeploy, Israel continued to build settlements in the 
occupied territories. Between 1994 and 2000, the Israeli settler population 
doubled. Concurrently, Israel constructed a network of "bypass roads" to 
connect the settlements to each other and to Israel.

By early 2000, nearly 250 miles of bypass roads had been built on 
confiscated Palestinian land. Israeli settlement building went largely 
unchecked by the United States, supposedly an "honest broker" between the 
two sides.

What the world perceived as a "peace process" was resulting in a marked 
decrease in Palestinians' already poor standard of living. Israel 
maintained its control of the land and resources of the West Bank and Gaza 
Strip, and through a series of increasingly restrictive checkpoints, it 
controlled movement of persons and goods as well. Israel had altered the 
form of its occupation, but not the content.

The attempted reincarnation of the Oslo process in the U.S.-backed "road 
map" is faring no better. While the road map calls for an end to occupation 
and is intended to be based on "reciprocal steps," attention thus far has 
almost exclusively focused on what measures the Palestinian Authority is 
taking to crack down on militant groups.

Israel's obligations, such as freezing settlement activity and removing 
roadblocks, have largely been ignored. At the same time, Israel continues 
to carve up the West Bank, seizing more Palestinian land, demolishing 
businesses and destroying livelihoods as it constructs its so-called 
security wall there.

No one should doubt that Palestinian suicide bombings pose a major security 
threat to Israeli civilians, but these attacks do not occur in a vacuum, 
and neither Israelis nor Palestinians are served by a political process 
that ignores the cause of conflict and focuses on one group's security at 
the expense of the other's. Attacks on Israeli civilians are unlikely to 
end until the conditions that encourage them are removed.

If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to end, there needs to be a 
fundamental change in the approach to its resolution. As the party with the 
most power, the choice is Israel's. Israel can maintain the status quo.

But occupation has not brought Israel security, and choosing to continue it 
will undoubtedly ensure the deaths of more Israeli and Palestinian 
civilians. Conversely, Israel can accept the solution that the majority of 
Palestinians and the international community have accepted: two states 
based on the 1967 borders, an end to occupation and the possibility of true 
peace and security.

* * *

*Catherine Cook is senior analyst at the Middle East Research and 
Information Project http://www.merip.org