Failure of the Oslo Accords

There has been a lot of debate over the years about who was at fault for the failure of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords. I will posit here that they were never meant to succeed. Here are excerpts from an article that appeared in Sept. 2023 in the Guardian by Avi Shlaim which puts it squarely on Netanyahu’s shoulders (link below). I remember reflecting on how he was behind the burgeoning land grabbing and building of massive settlements in the West Bank in the early 2000s and thinking, back then, what a travesty and act of defiance that was. A couple salient quotes from the article and link below.

Controversy surrounded Oslo from the moment it saw the light of day. The 21 October 1993 issue of the London Review of Books ran two articles; Edward Said put the case against in the first. He called the agreement “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles”, arguing that it set aside international legality and compromised the fundamental national rights of the Palestinian people. It could not advance genuine Palestinian self-determination because that meant freedom, sovereignty, and equality, rather than perpetual subservience to Israel.

Yet the PLO went along with it anyway.

Particularly destructive of the peace project was the [Israeli, not part of the Accords – my words] policy of expanding Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian territory. These settlements are illegal under international law and constitute a huge obstacle to peace.

The so-called security barrier that Israel has been building on the West Bank since 2002 further encroaches on Palestinian land. Land-grabbing and peace-making do not go together.

The rate of settlement growth in the West Bank and Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem is staggering. At the end of 1993 there were 115,700 Israeli settlers in the occupied territories. Their number doubled during the following decade.

Today the number of Israeli settlers on the West Bank exceeds 350,000. There are an additional 300,000 Jews living in settlements across the pre-1967 border in East Jerusalem. Thousands more settlement homes are planned or under construction.

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If anyone advocating for the Palestinians during the Oslo Accords (if there even was any advocacy) had read the Likud Party platform, they could have foreseen this. This is taken directly from the first paragraph of their platform.

Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.

In essence, not only as Edward Saed so ominously lamented that the Oslo Accords were an instrument of Palestinian surrender, in the eyes of Israel, it was a farce never intended to give an inch to the millions of Palestinians under its iron fist

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/12/oslo-israel-reneged-colonial-palestine

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