ANALYSIS-Five years on, Oslo deal hopes are faded
07:06 a.m. Sep 10, 1998 Eastern
By Paul Holmes
JERUSALEM, Sept 10 (Reuters) - When Norway played at the World Cup finals in France this year, many Palestinian soccer fans who followed the televised games supported its opponents.
The reason, they said, was that no one likes Oslo.
Next Sunday marks the fifth anniversary of the signing in Washington of the Oslo interim peace accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) -- and nobody, it seems, is celebrating.
Conceived as a route map to a lasting accommodation between two peoples at odds over the same land, the process launched on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, has failed to meet hopes and expectations among Israelis and Palestinians alike.
The euphoria and bright talk of peace dividends that followed PLO leader Yasser Arafat's handshake with then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was shot dead two years later by a Jewish extremist opposed to peace moves with Arabs, has since given way to gloom and predictions of bloodshed next May.
That is the deadline for a final peace deal on which talks have yet to begin on the core issues of Jerusalem, Jewish settlements and borders, and it is when Arafat has vowed to declare a Palestinian state come what may.
Even Yossi Beilin, one of the Israeli architects of Oslo, says that the Israeli and PLO negotiators who forged the deal in secret talks in the Norwegian capital should have gone all out then for a permanent settlement.
In an article this week in the Jerusalem Post, he said the step-by-step approach and deliberate ambiguities of the Oslo framework had failed to achieve the central purpose of building the confidence needed to secure a final peace.
''In the end...these five years have not brought the two sides closer, but have distanced us and made the extremists more extreme; they have reduced trust between the sides,'' he wrote.
That lack of trust, analysts say, is now arguably the chief obstacle to efforts the United States renewed this week to break 18 months of paralysis in a process that has ground to a halt under Israel's right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
''When there's trust, we'll find that even the hardest issues can be solved, and without trust, we'll find that even the smallest issues become very difficult to solve,'' U.S. envoy Dennis Ross said.
Ross returned to the region on Wednesday after an absence of four months to try to bridge gaps that have blocked a deal between Netanyahu and Palestinian President Arafat on a long overdue Israeli troop pullback from more of the West Bank.
Elected in 1996 on a platform opposed to Oslo's core bargain of land for peace, Netanyahu spoke disparagingly last week of the inability of accords signed ''in a photo opportunity on a manicured lawn'' to bring lasting peace.
His emphasis has instead been on security, an approach Palestinians regard as a smokescreen for the expansion of Jewish settlements on occupied land and the refusal to cede them territory they believe is theirs by right under Oslo.
Despite the shortcomings of the Oslo process, however, opinion polls have consistently shown majority support for it among Israelis and Palestinians.
The initial accord and subsequent agreements have given Palestinians self-rule in most of the Gaza Strip and 27 percent of the West Bank, far short of what Arafat had expected to gain in areas Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War.
But they have not brought Palestinians the freedom of movement nor the economic prosperity they had expected.
Fathi Abu Sharia, 40, returned to Gaza after Oslo was signed with high hopes of investing the fruits of 19 years work in the Gulf states in profitable commerce.
A storeowner, he has shelved plans to open a shopping mall in Gaza City and his advice to others now is to think twice.
''If I was asked by an investor whether to put money in here I would say 'make your plans but wait','' he said.
For Israelis, the accords have brought an end to the daily trauma of soldiers in the occupied territories training their guns on the stone-throwing children at the forefront of the seven-year Palestinian uprising or intifada that preceded Oslo.
But the process has not relieved them of the fear of attack from Palestinian militants opposed to Israel's existence.
More than 100 Israelis have been killed since Oslo in suicide bombings by Islamic extremists.
''The initial mistake (in Israel) was to suggest to the public that this was the end of Palestinian terrorism,'' said Joseph Alpher, head of the Jerusalem office of the American Jewish Committee.
''The dissonance between this message and the reality that began in 1994 of bus bombings and suicide bombings was very, very difficult for the public to deal with.''
Alpher and other analysts on both sides nonetheless still view the Oslo process as ''the only game in town'' and say its failings should not overshadow the sea change it has brought.
Recognition of the PLO by Israel and vice versa, anathema for decades, is now official policy.
Israel's peace treaty with Jordan in 1994 would have been inconceivable without Oslo. And, analysts say, the idea that the Palestinians should eventually have some form of state has gained ground even on the Israeli right.
''The Oslo agreements will ultimately lead, through the facts it enforced on the ground, to establishing a Palestinian state despite all the obstacles it faces,'' said Hassan Asfour, one of the Palestinian team at Oslo.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited |
