For once, a column that actually brings new information to the discussion - at least, information I hadn't known before:
Why Oslo failed, By Yehoshua Porath
Today it is already clear that the Oslo agreements have failed. I will demonstrate that the agreements were doomed to failure from the outset, although the Palestinians' behavior over the past 10 years contributed significantly to the magnitude of that failure.
A very important and unknown fact should be borne in mind: The PLO became involved in the agreement on a formal level only at the very last minute.
Until just a few days before the signing of the first agreement, negotiations were still going on with the representatives of the Palestine Delegation to the Madrid-Washington talks. That is what Yitzhak Rabin as the prime minister of Israel knew, and that is why in the draft agreement that had been prepared for signing, it was the Palestine Delegation rather than the PLO that appears as the party to the agreement. This is why until the last moment, the agreement did not mention the need to fight terror.
Arafat forced the Israeli side to agree that the PLO - rather than the Palestine Delegation - would be party to the agreement under pressure of an ultimatum, threatening that if the PLO was not part of the agreement, there would be no agreement. This is also why at the very last moment, the draft agreement was changed, and the entire issue of the treatment of terror and the abrogation of the Palestinian Covenant was dealt with in such a clumsy fashion and worded so ambiguously.
Rabin was not strong enough in those final days to reject the agreement when faced with this difficult reality. His consent to negotiate with the PLO (contrary to his position that Israel should conduct negotiations only with the representatives of the Palestinian territories because the PLO principally represented the Palestinian refugees and the demand for the right of return) did not constitute a radical turning point based on his realization that without the PLO there would be no agreement; it was the result of inability to withstand the pressure. This is evinced not only by the documents of those days; Rabin's close associates and those who were privy to the negotiations have also confirmed this central fact in public debates held since.
It is the basic assumptions upon which the agreements were based that are the principal cause for their failure. Lacking a proper understanding of the Palestinian and Arab position, the Israeli side deluded itself that if the discussion on the fundamental issues (refugees and borders) were put off until the negotiations on the final settlement, and the two Oslo agreements were to deal only with interim agreements requiring extensive Israeli withdrawals, a favorable atmosphere would be created.
This would make it easier to reach an agreement on the borders and enable Israel to resist acceding to the Palestinian demand to carry out the right of return of the 1948 refugees "to their homes and lands," as the Palestinians put it.
What those conducting the negotiations for the Israeli side did not understand was that as far as the Palestinians and Arabs are concerned, all of Israel and the territories is rightfully theirs and that everything returned to them through the interim agreements would be only the beginning of the return of their "stolen property" in exchange for which Israel deserved nothing. Consequently, there was no chance of Israel receiving anything in return for what it had already given to the Palestinians.
This is precisely why the negotiations should have begun with the issue of the refugees - the fundamental issue dividing Israel and the Palestinians - and that of Jerusalem, and culminated in a comprehensive settlement.
Only after such a settlement was attained should Israel have moved on to the next stage, that of the territorial concessions, rather than the other way around.
THE TERRITORIAL content of the second Oslo agreement was even more catastrophic.
In it, Israel committed to withdraw from all the territories, with the exception of "Jewish settlements and military locations."
A short time after the signing of this agreement, Rabin realized that he had in fact agreed to almost a total Israeli withdrawal. Dismayed, he regretted what he had done and made a public speech in which he provided his own interpretation of the term "military locations," saying that in his view this meant "any territory in which Israel has a military interest." In this way, he considerably increased the extent of the territory that would remain in Israeli hands, but it is doubtful if this interpretation was faithful to the text itself.
Thus, the two Oslo agreements required Israel to make significant withdrawals from the vast majority of the occupied territories without the Palestinians making any binding parallel concession of the right of return of the 1948 refugees to their homes and lands inside Israel. Clearly, no Israeli government could stand for that.
The late Yitzhak Rabin, who was dragged into the entire matter and agreed to the first agreement with the PLO only at the last moment, attempted to change the direction in which things were moving a very short time before he was assassinated.
However, the PLO was not satisfied with that. The way it dealt with the implementation of the agreements shows that it was in quite a bit of a hurry. Following the signing of the agreements, it behaved foolishly - completely contrary to all its commitments. This was due to its desire to step up the process of ejecting Israel from all the territories it occupied in 1967 and forcing Israel to accede to the return of the 1948 refugees to its territory, thereby destroying itself.
The PLO immediately began smuggling in terrorists and arms into the territories. Upon his return to Gaza, Arafat personally smuggled in two terrorists and weapons. The Palestinian police force was twice as large as the agreements allowed and armed with a far greater number of weapons than Israel had supplied it with in accordance with the agreement.
All Israel's confidence-building measures beyond those required by the agreements (trade, special dispensations for fishermen on Gaza's shores, permission to enter Israel for medical treatment, etc.) were exploited for this purpose. Israel did not even bother to ask for reciprocal confidence-building measures from the Palestinians to indicate they were indeed moving in the direction of peace. The Palestinian education and media continued to foster hatred of and animosity towards Israel, its culture and very existence as a non-Arab entity in the Middle East.
The case of the abrogation of the Palestinian covenant, which was perhaps the only quid pro quo on the symbolic level that the Palestinians were required by the agreements to give Israel, was turned into a bad joke, which is now obvious to all. Many of the terrorists Israel released - who signed a written commitment to refrain from further terror against Israel - reverted to their old habits.
Most important, it soon became clear - even to those so blinded that they refused to see this from the beginning - that the Palestinians had never relinquished their original demand: the return of all or part of the 1948 refugees and their descendants to their homes inside Israel, which would bring about the destruction of Israel.
The pinnacle was perhaps reached on December 21, 1995, when Salim Zaanoun, the speaker of the Palestinian National Council, signed an agreement with chief of Hamas's political bureau, Haled Mashal, according to which Hamas would be permitted to continue its terror attacks ("resistance," as they put it) against Israel as long as the "Palestinian Authority would not be embarrassed."
The agreement was presented at a press conference in Cairo and reported by all the Arab media outlets.
Thus, openly and in full view, the Palestinians revealed their true intentions. Instead of condemning the agreement and revealing the real goals of those who signed it to the entire world, then prime minister Shimon Peres initially denied its existence from the Knesset podium, and afterwards kept mum about it. Instead of viewing it as a violation and voiding of the agreement, Peres allowed the Palestinian side to understand that it could continue its double game - on the one hand continuing to demand that Israel continue its withdrawals from the territories, while on the other, persisting in terrorism against it.
There are those who say that Israel is no less, and perhaps even more, responsible for the failure of the Oslo Accords than the Palestinians because it did not halt the establishment and building up of the settlements. It must therefore be reiterated that nowhere in the Oslo agreements is there anything that expressly prohibits the establishment of settlements or requires that they be dismantled in part or in whole.
I do not believe that it was wise politically or security-wise to establish most of them, certainly not the settlement in the heart of Hebron or in Sebastia in Samaria, for which the Labor governments and Peres are responsible, but they are not the reason why the Oslo process failed. The mistaken basic assumptions upon which it is based are.
The writer is professor emeritus of Middle East history at the Hebrew University.
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