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Why
the Oslo Process Doomed Peace
by Efraim Karsh
Middle East Quarterly
Fall 2016 (view PDF)
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In
1994, (left to right) PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, Israeli prime
minister Yitzhak Rabin, and foreign minister Shimon Peres received the
Nobel Peace Prize following the signing of the 1993 Oslo accords. But
twenty-three years later, peace is still illusive. For Israel, the
accords have been the starkest strategic blunder, establishing an
ineradicable terror entity on its doorstep, deepening its internal
cleavages, and weakening its international standing.
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Twenty-three years after its euphoric launch on the White House lawn,
the Oslo "peace process" between Israel and the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) stands out as one of the worst calamities
to have afflicted the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For Israel, it has
been the starkest strategic blunder in its history, establishing an
ineradicable terror entity on its doorstep, deepening its internal
cleavages, destabilizing its political system, and weakening its
international standing. For the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, it has
brought subjugation to the corrupt and repressive PLO and Hamas regimes,
which reversed the hesitant advent of civil society in these territories,
shattered their socioeconomic wellbeing, and made the prospects of peace
and reconciliation with Israel ever more remote. This in turn means that,
even if the territories were to be internationally recognized as a
fully-fledged Palestinian state (with or without a formal peace treaty
with Israel), this will be a failed entity in the worst tradition of Arab
dictatorships at permanent war with both Israel and its own subjects.
False
Partner, Missed Partner
"We make peace with enemies," Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
reassured a concerned citizen shortly after the September 13, 1993
conclusion of the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles on Interim
Self-Government Arrangements (DOP, or Oslo I). "I would like to
remind you that the [March 1979] peace treaty with Egypt had many
opponents, and this peace has held for 15 years now."[1] True enough. But peace can only
be made with enemies who have been either comprehensively routed (e.g.,
post-World War II Germany and Japan) or disillusioned with the use of
violence—not with those who remain wedded to conflict and war. And while
Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was a "reformed enemy" eager to
extricate his country from its futile conflict with Israel, Yasser Arafat
and the PLO leadership viewed the Oslo process not as a springboard to
peace but as a "Trojan Horse" (in the words of prominent PLO
official Faisal Husseini) designed to promote the organization's
strategic goal of "Palestine from the [Jordan] river to the
[Mediterranean] sea"—that is, a Palestine in place of Israel.[2]
Arafat admitted as much five days before signing the accords when he
told an Israeli journalist, "In the future, Israel and Palestine
will be one united state in which Israelis and Palestinians will live
together"[3]—that
is, Israel would cease to exist. And even as he shook Rabin's hand on the
White House lawn, the PLO chairman was assuring the Palestinians in a
pre-recorded, Arabic-language message that the agreement was merely an
implementation of the organization's "phased strategy" of June
1974. This stipulated that the Palestinians would seize whatever
territory Israel surrendered to them, then use it as a springboard for
further territorial gains until achieving the "complete liberation
of Palestine."[4]
The next eleven years until Arafat's death on November 11, 2004,
offered a recapitulation, over and over again, of the same story. In
addressing Israeli or Western audiences, the PLO chairman (and his
erstwhile henchmen) would laud the "peace" signed with "my
partner Yitzhak Rabin." To his Palestinian constituents, he depicted
the accords as transient arrangements required by the needs of the
moment. He made constant allusion to the "phased strategy" and
the Treaty of Hudaibiya—signed by Muhammad with the people of Mecca in
628, only to be disavowed a couple of years later when the situation
shifted in the prophet's favor—and insisted on the "right of
return," the standard Palestinian/Arab euphemism for Israel's
destruction through demographic subversion. As he told a skeptical
associate shortly before moving to Gaza in July 1994 to take control of
the newly established Palestinian Authority (PA):
I know that you are opposed to the Oslo
accords, but you must always remember what I'm going to tell you. The day
will come when you will see thousands of Jews fleeing Palestine. I will
not live to see this, but you will definitely see it in your lifetime.
The Oslo accords will help bring this about.[5]
This perfidy was sustained by Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas, who
has had no qualms about reiterating the vilest anti-Semitic calumnies: In
his June 2016 address to the European Parliament, Abbas accused Israeli
rabbis of urging the poisoning of Palestinian water.[6] In his doctoral dissertation,
written at a Soviet university and subsequently published in book form,
he argued that fewer than a million Jews had been killed in the
Holocaust, and that the Zionist movement colluded in their slaughter.[7] He has vowed time and again
never to accept the idea of Jewish statehood, most recently in March
2014, when he rallied the Arab League behind his "absolute and
decisive rejection to recognizing Israel as a Jewish state,"[8] and in September 2015, when he
derided Israel in his U.N. address as "a historic injustice ...
inflicted upon a people ... that had lived peacefully in their
land."[9]
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An
unreconstructed Holocaust denier, PA president Mahmoud Abbas has voiced
incessant anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incitement. In his June 2016
address to the European Parliament, Abbas accused Israeli rabbis of
urging the poisoning of Palestinian water. He has pledged to prevent
the Jews from "defiling al-Aqsa with their filthy feet" and
has vowed time and again never to accept the idea of Jewish statehood.
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Back home in the PA, Abbas was even more forthright, pledging to
prevent the Jews from "defiling al-Aqsa with their filthy feet"
and stating that "every drop of blood that has been spilled in
Jerusalem is holy blood as long as it was for Allah."[10] When this incitement
culminated in a sustained wave of violence that killed scores of Israelis
in a string of stabbings, car rammings into civilians, and shooting attacks,
Abbas applauded the bloodshed as a "peaceful, popular uprising. ...
We have been under occupation for 67 or 68 years [i.e., since Israel's
establishment]," he told his subjects in March 2016. "Others
would have sunk into despair and frustration. However, we are determined
to reach our goal because our people stand behind us."[11]
In other words, more than two decades after the onset of the Oslo
process, Israel's "peace partner" would not even accept the
Jewish state's right to exist, considering its creation an "illegal
occupation of Palestinian lands."
What makes this state of affairs all the more tragic is that, at the
time of the Oslo accords, the Rabin government had a potentially far
better peace partner in the form of the West Bank and Gaza leadership. To
be sure, Israel's hand-off policies during the two-and-a-half decades
from the June 1967 capture of the territories to the onset of the Oslo
process enabled the PLO to establish itself as the predominant force there
at the expense of the more moderate local leadership. But this meant no
blind subservience to the organization's goals or means. Unlike the PLO's
diaspora constituents (or the "outside" in Palestinian
parlance) who upheld the extremist dream of returning to their 1948
dwellings at the cost of Israel's destruction, West Bankers and Gazans
(the "inside") were amenable to peaceful coexistence that would
allow them to get on with their lives and sustain the astounding economic
boom begun under Israel's control. During the 1970s, for example, the
West Bank and Gaza were the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world,
ahead of such "wonders" as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea,
making socioeconomic conditions there far better than in most neighboring
Arab states. While the "outside" diaspora had no direct
interaction with Israelis (and for that matter with any other democratic
system), Israel's prolonged rule had given the "inside"
Palestinians a far more realistic and less extreme perspective: hence
their perception of Israel as more democratic than the major Western
nations;[12]
hence their overwhelming support for the abolition of those clauses in
the Palestinian charter that called for Israel's destruction and their
rejection of terror attacks;[13]
and hence their indifference to the thorniest issue of the
Palestinian-Israeli dispute, and the one central to the PLO's persistent
effort to destroy Israel, namely, the "right of return." As
late as March 1999, two months before the lapse of the official deadline
for the completion of the Oslo final-status negotiations, over 85 percent
of respondents did not consider the refugee question the most important
problem facing the Palestinian people.[14]
The PLO had been ostracized by its
Arab peers following its support for Iraq's brutal occupation of
Kuwait.
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Against this backdrop, the Rabin government had a unique opportunity
to steer the Palestinian populace in the West Bank and Gaza in the
direction of peace and statehood, possibly in collaboration with Jordan's
King Hussein, who just a few years earlier had thrown his hat in the ring
only to be rebuffed by Prime Minister Shamir. In a Nablus public opinion
poll shortly before the DOP signing, 70 percent of respondents preferred
Hussein to the PLO as their sovereign,[15] not least since the PLO had
been totally ostracized by its Arab peers following its support for
Iraq's brutal occupation of Kuwait. At that point, its prestige in the
territories was at one of its lowest ebbs; Hamas was at an early stage of
development; the radical Arab regimes were thoroughly disorientated by
the collapse of their communist backers; and the West Bank and Gaza
leadership was bent on participating in the U.S.-sponsored peace talks
between Israel and its neighbors, launched at the October 1991 Madrid Conference
and sustained in Washington, against the PLO's adamant objection.[16]
But then, instead of seizing the moment and opting for the obvious
peace partner that was far better attuned to the needs and wishes of the
local Palestinian populace, and against his personal inclination to
strike a deal with the "moderate insiders" rather than the
"extremist Tunis people [i.e., PLO leadership]," Rabin was
persuaded by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and his deputy Yossi Beilin
(who reportedly collaborated with the PLO in obstructing the Washington
talks) into surrendering the West Bankers and Gazans to an
unreconstructed terror organization whose leader would not hang up his
ubiquitous battledress, not even for the signing ceremonies of the
various Oslo accords or the receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, and who
used peace as a strategic deception aimed at promoting the eternal goal
of Israel's destruction.[17]
As a result, twenty-three years of 1) incessant hate mongering by the
PLO/PA (not to mention Hamas, which exploited the Oslo process to become
the preeminent military and political factor in the territories); 2)
countless terror attacks (including a full-fledged terror war,
euphemistically named "al-Aqsa Intifada" after the Jerusalem
mosque); 3) three protracted large scale military encounters between
Hamas and Israel; and 4) economic collapse induced by the PA's and
Hamas's corrupt and inept rule have thoroughly radicalized the West Bank
and Gaza populace with a new generation of Palestinians brought up on
vile anti-Jewish (and anti-Israel) incitement unparalleled in scope and
intensity since Nazi Germany.
Tarnished
Security
Apart from making the prospects of peace and reconciliation ever more
remote, the Oslo process substantially worsened Israel's security
position. At the heart of the DOP lay the conviction that it would end
three decades of PLO violence and transform the organization overnight
from one of the world's most murderous terror groups into a political
actor and state builder. As Oslo's chief architect, Yossi Beilin,
confidently prophesied shortly after the DOP signing, "The greatest
test of the accord will not be in the intellectual sphere. Rather, it
will be a test of blood."[18]
This chilling prediction was put to the test in short order as
terrorism in the territories spiraled to its highest level since Israel
took control following the June 1967 Six-Day War. In the two-and-a-half
years from the signing of the DOP to the fall of the Labor government in
May 1996, 210 Israelis were murdered—nearly three times the average death
toll of the previous twenty-six years[19] when only a small fraction of
the fatalities had been caused by West Bank- or Gaza-originated attacks.[20] Moreover, nearly two thirds of
the 1994-96 victims were murdered in Israeli territory inside the
"Green Line"—nearly ten times the average fatality toll in
Israel in the preceding six violent years of the Palestinian uprising
(intifada).[21]
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Israeli
soldiers patrol Nablus during Operation Defensive Shield. Following the
signing of the Oslo accords, the Palestinians have engaged Israel in a
near constant state of war and terror, including hundreds of terror
attacks in Israeli cities, a full-fledged terror war (the "al-Aqsa
intifada"), and three protracted large scale military encounters
between Hamas and Israel.
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In September 1996, Arafat escalated the conflict and crossed another
threshold when he reverted to direct violence by exploiting the opening
of a new exit to an archaeological tunnel under the Western Wall,
Judaism's holiest site, to unleash widespread riots (labeled the
"tunnel war") in which 17 Israelis and some 80 Palestinians
were killed. And while the PA quickly dropped the tunnel issue from its
agenda once it had outlived its usefulness, Arafat was to repeat this
precedent on several occasions, most notably by launching the September
2000 terror war (al-Aqsa intifada) a short time after being offered
Palestinian statehood by Israel's prime minister Ehud Barak.
By the time of Arafat's death four years later, his war—the bloodiest
and most destructive confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians
since 1948—had exacted 1,028 Israeli lives in some 5,760 attacks—nine
times the average death toll of the pre-Oslo era.[22] Of these, about 450 people (or
43.8 percent of victims) were killed in suicide bombings—a practically
unheard of tactic in the Palestinian-Israeli context prior to Oslo. The
only pre-Oslo suicide bombing, in which one local Palestinian and the two
bombers were killed, took place in April 1993 in the desolate Jordan
Valley, outside the pre-1967 line.[23] All in all, more than 1,600
Israelis have been murdered and another 9,000 wounded since the signing
of the DOP—nearly four times the average death toll of the preceding
twenty-six years.[24]
It was Hamas, rather than the PLO,
which was to bring Arafat's genocidal vision for Israel to fruition.
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But the story does not end here. For underlying this bloodletting was
the transformation of the territories into unreconstructed terror
bastions in line with Arafat's vision of making them a springboard of
"a popular armed revolution" that would "force the
Zionists to realize that it is impossible for them to live in
Israel."[25]
Only it was Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood,
which made its debut during the 1987-93 intifada, rather than the PLO,
which was to bring Arafat's genocidal vision to fruition.
With its initial fears of repression by the newly-installed PA quickly
assuaged, Hamas waged a sustained terror campaign (with Arafat's tacit
approval) that exerted a devastating impact on the nascent peace process.
Its March 1996 murder of 58 Israelis in the span of one week, for
example, was instrumental in Benjamin Netanyahu's electoral defeat of
Prime Minister Peres two months later. But Hamas also reached an
agreement with the PLO/PA on the continuation of these attacks provided
they did not emanate from territories under the latter's control.[26] Collaboration between the two
organizations reached its zenith during the "al-Aqsa intifada"
when Hamas played the leading role, especially in the field of suicide
bombings, carrying out the deadliest and most horrific attacks inside
Israel. And while Israel managed to destroy the West Bank's terror
infrastructure in a sustained counterinsurgency effort, Hamas managed to
retain its Gaza base largely intact despite the targeted killing of many
of its top leaders, including founding father Ahmad Yasin and his
immediate successor Abdul Aziz Rantisi.
Moreover, by way of compensating for its dwindling capacity for
suicide bombings—which dropped from sixty in 2002 to five in 2006—the
Islamist terror group reverted to massive high trajectory attacks from Gaza.
In 2004, 309 home-made Qassam rockets and 882 mortar shells were fired on
Israeli villages in the Strip and towns and villages within Israel
(compared to 105 and 514 respectively in 2003), and the following year
saw 401 and 854 respective attacks despite Hamas's acceptance of a
temporary suspension of fighting.[27]
This left little doubt among Palestinians as to who spearheaded the
"armed struggle" against Israel, and when, in the summer of
2005, the Israeli government unilaterally vacated the dozen odd villages
in the south of the Strip with their 8,000-strong population, the move
was widely considered a Hamas victory. A few months later, on January 25,
2006, the organization reaped the political fruits of its military prowess
when, in its first electoral showing since the DOP (it boycotted the
first parliamentary elections in 1996), it scored a landslide victory
winning 74 of parliament's 132 seats. As the PLO/PA would not accept this
reality, in 2007, relations between the two groups deteriorated into
violent clashes, especially in Gaza, with scores of people killed and
many more wounded as Hamas seized full control of the Strip.[28]
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Smuggling
tunnel in Rafah. Following the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the
Philadelphi patrol route along the Gaza Strip's border with Egypt,
Hamas embarked on a massive buildup of its terror infrastructure. By
2008, Hamas was launching ten rockets, missiles, and mortar shells into
Israel a day.
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Flushed with success and encouraged by the withdrawal of Israeli
forces from the Philadelphi patrol route along the Strip's border with
Egypt, Hamas embarked on a massive buildup of its terror infrastructure
with vast quantities of weapons and war matériel smuggled from Sinai
through an extensive and rapidly expanding underground tunnel system.
Within a year of Israel's unilateral withdrawal, there was a fourfold
increase in the number of rockets and missiles fired from the Strip (from
401 to 1,726); and while this pace ebbed slightly in 2007 (to 1,276
attacks), it peaked to a whopping 2,048 attacks in 2008 (in addition to
1,668 mortar shells), or ten attacks a day.[29]
In an attempt to stem this relentless harassment of its civilian
population, in December 2008-January 2009, Israel launched a large ground
operation in Gaza (codenamed Cast Lead). But while the operation eroded
Hamas's military capabilities and led to a vast decrease in the firing of
rockets and missiles,[30]
it failed to curb the organization's military might and political
ambitions. In the ensuing five years, Israel was forced to fight two more
inconclusive wars against the Islamist group—Operation Pillar of Defense
(November 14-21, 2012) and Operation Protective Edge (July 8-August 26,
2014). And to add insult to injury, it was Israel, rather than Hamas,
that came under scathing international censure for its supposed use of
"disproportionate force," including two major U.N. fact-finding
reports and a string of indictments by humanitarian organizations. In
December 2014—a mere four months after Hamas had criminally subjected
millions of Israelis to sustained rocket and missile attacks for seven
full weeks—the European Court of Justice removed the group from the EU's
list of terrorist organizations.[31]
The PLO's
Growing International Stature
Since no theme has dominated the discourse of the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict more than Israel's "illegitimate occupation of Palestinian
lands," it was believed by the Oslo architects that by ceding
control of the territories' population, Israel would be able to quiet the
chorus of criticism and to boost its international standing.
Withdrawal from Gaza had been completed by May 1994 apart from a small
stretch of territory in the south of the Strip containing a few Israeli
villages. By January 1996, Israel had also withdrawn its forces from the
West Bank's populated areas with the exception of Hebron where
redeployment was completed in early 1997, leaving 99 percent of the
territories' population under PLO/PA rule. "As of today, there is a
Palestinian state," gushed Arafat's Arab-Israeli advisor Ahmad Tibi
after the January 1996 elections for the incipient Palestinian parliament.
This upbeat prognosis was echoed by the Israeli minister of the
environment, Yossi Sarid, while Beilin proclaimed the elections to have
made the political process irreversible, expressing relief at the ending
of Israel's occupation of Palestinian populated areas:
We have been freed of a heavy burden. I
never believed in the possibility of an enlightened occupation. It was
necessary to lift that burden so as to avoid becoming a target for
organizations throughout the world that viewed us as oppressors.[32]
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During
Bill Clinton's eight years in office, Arafat (left) was welcomed to the
White House more often than any other world leader. The EU, for its
part, stuck with the PLO leader, disregarding PLO/PA excesses and
growing disillusionment in the West Bank and Gaza with Arafat's
repressive and corrupt leadership.
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In fact, not only did Israel get no credit whatsoever for its
withdrawal from the territories, but this move went virtually unnoticed
by the international community while the PLO surged to unprecedented
international heights—without shedding its genocidal commitment to
Israel's destruction, surrendering its weapons, or abandoning its
terrorist ways. So much so that during Bill Clinton's eight years in
office, Arafat was welcomed to the White House more often than any other
world leader; he even happened to be seated opposite the U.S. president
when he was first questioned about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.[33] Within five years from the
signing of the DOP, the PA had received $2.5 billion of the pledged $3.6
billion in international aid, apart from some $600 million contributed to
activities in the West Bank and Gaza through the U.N. Relief and Works
Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA); by 2016, the
United States alone had committed more than $5 billion in bilateral
economic aid to the Palestinians.[34]
But then, rather than use their formidable economic leverage to
pressure the PLO/PA to abide by its peace obligations, the donor states
turned a blind eye both to Arafat's condoning of proxy terrorism (by
Hamas and the Islamic Jihad) and to his direct use of violence. Not only
did his launch of a terror war shortly after being offered statehood by
Barak fail to attract international criticism, it boosted the PLO/PA's standing
and boxed Israel into a corner. Media outlets, commentators, and
politicians throughout the world blamed the premeditated Palestinian
violence on the supposed "provocation carried out at al-Haram
al-Sharif in Jerusalem on 28 September 2000 [i.e., Ariel Sharon's visit
to Temple Mount]," to use the words of a special Security Council
resolution, which the United States failed to veto.[35] Even President Clinton, who
two months earlier had publicly chided Arafat for failing to seize
Barak's generous offer of statehood,[36] swiftly changed tack and
pressured the Israeli government for further concessions (which it made),
only to be rebuffed yet again by the Palestinian leader.
The European Union became the PA's
foremost international backer as the terror war against Israel
escalated.
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For its part, the European Union became the PA's foremost
international backer as the terror war escalated. Making no distinction
between terror attacks and counterinsurgency measures aimed at their
deflection, it blamed both sides for the continuation of violence,
criticized Israel at every turn, and increased financial aid to the Palestinians
despite the incontrovertible evidence that much of this aid was being
channeled to terror activities: In 2001-04, international disbursements
doubled from an annual average of $500 million to over $1 billion as
Arafat's terror war plunged the territories into dire economic straits.[37]
Disregarding both the PLO/PA excesses and the growing disillusionment
in the West Bank and Gaza with Arafat's repressive and corrupt
leadership, the EU stuck with the PLO leader to his dying day,
jeopardizing President George W. Bush's attempt to bring about "a
new and different Palestinian leadership ... not compromised by
terror."[38]
So did the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ
of the United Nations, which condemned Israel's attempt to stem the tidal
wave of suicide bombings through the construction of a security barrier
between its territory and the West Bank as "contrary to
international law."[39]
The PLO painted Israel as the main
obstacle to peace despite Jerusalem's consistent supportfor the
two-state solution.
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The solemn pledge by Abbas to persist in his predecessor's (violent
and corrupt) path failed to impress the Palestinians' international backers
as evidenced among other things by their indifference to the
disappearance of $3.1 billion worth of aid between 2008 and 2012; to his
abstention from disarming the terror groups operating under his
jurisdiction as required by the Oslo accords; and to his refusal to hold
new elections upon the expiry of his presidency in January 2009. Nor was
Abbas's supposed interest in peace questioned despite his categorical
rejection of the idea of Jewish statehood (the root cause of the
decades-long failure of the two-state solution); his incessant
anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incitement; and his abandonment of the
bilateral peace talks in search of an internationally imposed Palestinian
state—without a peace agreement. On the contrary, with Barack Obama
determined to put the maximum "daylight" between Washington and
Jerusalem,[40]
the U.S. administration not only snubbed the Israeli government as a
matter of course but exploited blatant anti-Israel activities (e.g., the
international chorus of condemnation attending the May 2010 Mavi Marmara
incident) to tighten the political noose around Jerusalem.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's attempt to break the
stalemate by agreeing in June 2009 to the creation of a Palestinian state
and imposing in November 2009 a 10-month freeze on Jewish construction
activities in the West Bank failed to impress the Palestinians.
Dismissing his gestures out of hand, they walked away from the
negotiating table upon the expiry of the construction moratorium and
sought to present Israel with a fait accompli by gaining U.N. recognition
of Palestinian statehood—in flagrant violation of the Oslo accords that
envisaged the attainment of peace through direct negotiations between the
two parties. Having failed to garner sufficient support at the Security
Council, in November 2012, they obtained General Assembly recognition of
Palestine as a "non-member observer state," following which the
PA set out to join a string of international bodies and agencies, most importantly
the International Criminal Court (ICC). On January 2, 2015, the
"State of Palestine" acceded to the Rome statute, the ICC's
founding treaty, and two weeks later, the court opened a preliminary
examination into "the situation in Palestine," having received
jurisdiction over alleged crimes committed "in the occupied
Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, since June 13,
2014."[41]
Nine months later, on September 30, fresh from yet another anti-Israel
diatribe, Abbas joined Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for an official
ceremony in which the Palestinian flag was raised for the first time
outside the U.N.'s headquarters in New York.
The significance of these developments cannot be overstated.
Twenty-four years after its exclusion from the U.S.-orchestrated
international peace talks in Madrid and its wall-to-wall ostracism by its
Arab peers, the PLO had recast itself in the eyes of the international
community as the legitimate, peaceable, and democratically-disposed ruler
of the prospective Palestinian state against all available evidence to
the contrary, painting Israel as the main obstacle to peace despite its
surrender of control of the territories' population and consistent
support for the two-state solution. In addition, the former terrorist
group had laid the groundwork for Israel's international indictment for
supposed "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity."[42] And all this transpired
without the PLO/PA accepting the Jewish state's right to exist as
stipulated by the United Nations sixty-eight years earlier and while
remaining committed to Israel's eventual demise.
Radicalizing
the Israeli Arabs
The Oslo process has confronted Israel with the likely creation of a
revanchist Palestinian state committed to its destruction (whether
tacitly as in the case of the PLO/PA or overtly as with Hamas) and
imposed severe constraints on Jerusalem's international maneuverability
and capacity for self-defense. But the process has also dealt a devastating
blow to the delicate edifice of Jewish-Arab relations within Israel—not
that the PLO had previously refrained from meddling in the affairs of the
Israeli Arabs. Yet the Oslo process raised this involvement to a
qualitatively different level for the simple reason that by recognizing
the PLO as "the representative of the Palestinian people," the
Rabin government effectively endorsed its claim of authority over a
substantial number of Israeli citizens and gave it a carte blanche to
interfere in Israel's domestic affairs. Such a concession would be
problematic even under the most auspicious circumstances; made to an
irredentist party still officially committed to the destruction of its
"peace partner," it proved nothing short of catastrophic.
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Decades
of incitement and radicalization following Oslo have had a palpable
effect on Arab-Jewish relations in Israel. Arab Israeli leaders have
openly identified with Israel's sworn enemies, and Israeli Arabs have
rioted often in reaction to Israeli attempts to stop Palestinian
terrorism.
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As the PLO seized its newly-gained opportunity with alacrity, open
identification of Israeli Arab leaders with the country's sworn enemies
became commonplace with many visiting the neighboring Arab states—from
Syria, to Lebanon, to Libya, to Yemen—to confer with various heads of the
"resistance movement" and to urge anti-Israel terror
activities.[43]
As the 1990s wore on, open calls for Israel's destruction substituted
for the euphemistic advocacy of this goal. Azmi Bishara, founding leader
of the ultranationalist Balad party, predicated on the demand for "a
state of all its citizens"—the standard euphemism for Israel's
transformation into an Arab state in which Jews would be reduced to a
permanent minority—began comparing the Jewish state's fate to that of the
crusading states. He fled the country in 2006 to avoid prosecution for
treason, having allegedly assisted Hezbollah during its war with Israel
in the summer of that year. His successor, Jamal Zahalka, preferred a
more contemporary metaphor, claiming that just as South Africa's
apartheid had been emasculated, so its Zionist counterpart had to be
destroyed.[44]
And Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the northern branch of the Islamic
Movement in Israel, who never tired of crying wolf over Israel's supposed
designs on the al-Aqsa mosque, prophesied the Jewish state's demise
within two decades should it not change its attitude to the Arab
minority.[45]
Even the "national committee of the heads of local Arab
municipalities in Israel," the effective leadership of the Israeli
Arabs, issued a lengthy document outlining its "Future Vision for
the Palestinian Arabs in Israel," which derided Israel as "a
product of colonialist action initiated by the Jewish-Zionist elites in
Europe and the West"; rejected Israel's continued existence as a
Jewish state, and demanded its replacement by a system that would ensure
Arab "national, historic and civil rights at both the individual and
collective levels."[46]
Most Arabs would rather remain
Israeli citizens, knowing that life in a democratic society is
preferable to that in the prospective Palestinian state.
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It is true that most Arabs would rather remain Israeli citizens,
knowing full well that life in a civil, democratic, and pluralistic
society, albeit a Jewish one, is preferable to what will be on offer in
the prospective Palestinian state.[47] Yet the Oslo decades of
incitement and radicalization have had a palpable effect on Arab-Jewish
relations in Israel. When, in February 1994, a Jewish fanatic murdered
twenty-nine Muslims at prayer in Hebron, large-scale riots erupted in
numerous Arab settlements throughout Israel with mobs battling police for
four full days. The scenario repeated itself in April 1996 when dozens of
Lebanese Shiites were mistakenly killed in an Israeli bombing of
terrorist targets in south Lebanon, and yet again in September 1996,
during the Jerusalem tunnel riots, reaching an unprecedented peak on
October 1, 2000, when the Israeli Arabs turned on their Jewish
compatriots—in support of an external attack on their own state (i.e.,
the "al-Aqsa Intifada.").
Small wonder that commemoration of the October 2000 riots has often
been accompanied by violence, at times coordinated with the PA, as have
Israel's defensive measures against Palestinian terrorism. When on March
29, 2002, the Israel Defense Forces launched Operation Defensive Shield
against the terror infrastructure in the West Bank, violent
demonstrations broke out in Arab settlements throughout Israel, and the
Arab-Israeli Islamist movement initiated widespread activities in support
of the West Bank Palestinians. Similar outbursts of violence occurred in
December 2008-January 2009 when Israel moved to end years of rocket and
missile attacks on its towns and villages (Operation Cast Lead) from
Hamas-controlled Gaza.[48]
Destabilizing
Israel's Political System
However dramatic, the radicalization of its Arab citizens has not been
Israel's worst Oslo-related domestic debacle; far more significant has
been the destabilization of the country's political system from which it
has not recovered to date. In the twenty-three years from the signing of
the DOP, just one of the nine reigning Israeli governments completed its
four-year tenure with one term ended by the unprecedented assassination
of the incumbent prime minister. Meanwhile, parliament's average duration
dropped from 3.6 years to 3 years, and an unprecedented number of parties
were formed, torn apart, and disbanded.
To be sure, Israel's diverse political system has seen the rise and
fall of sectorial parties from the early days of statehood; yet the
proliferation of "atmosphere parties" thriving on the general
yearning for change while effectively servicing their founders' political
ambitions, skyrocketed to new heights during the Oslo years as the
cognitive dissonance between realization of Palestinian perfidy and the
lingering longing for peace drove many Israelis to cling to the latest
celebrity hope peddler to emerge on the political scene. Thus the nascent
Third Way Party won four of the Knesset's 120 seats in 1996, only to
evaporate into thin air three years later. It was followed by the
similarly disposed Center Party, which won six seats in 1999 before
disappearing from the political scene in the 2003 elections when another
one-term party—One People—came into brief and unremarkable existence. The
Shinui (Change) party, a splinter of the one-term Democratic Movement for
Change (DASH) that played a key role in Likud's 1977 historic ascendance,
managed to win six and fifteen seats in the 1999 and 2003 elections
respectively, before vanishing altogether in 2006. Its unhappy fate was
replicated by the Kadima party, established by a string of prominent
Likud and Labor defectors headed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, which
managed to form a government in 2006 and win the 2009 elections by the
slimmest of margins (though it was Likud that eventually formed a
government), before fading into oblivion in the 2013 elections. So did
Hatenua party, formed by Likud-defector-turned-Kadima-refugee Tzipi
Livni, which was amalgamated with Labor in the 2015 elections.
It remains to be seen for how long the Yesh Atid party, which made an
impressive debut in 2013 (19 seats, dropping to 11 in 2015) and is headed
by television personality Yair Lapid, or the Kulanu Party, which entered
the political fray in 2015 (10 seats) and is led by Likud defector Moshe
Kahlon, will survive, identified as they are with their founders'
personal fortunes. Yet the detrimental effects of these parties, as well
as those of their many failed precursors and likely successors, are bound
to haunt Israel's political system and the country's governability for
years to come.
Palestine
Betrayed
|
A
dozen Palestinian Authority security and intelligence services all
answered directly to Arafat. They supported Arafat's repression of his
Palestinian subjects and his terror war against Israel and secured
extensive protection and racketeering networks.
|
International relations are rarely a zero-sum game where one's loss is
necessarily the other's gain, and the Oslo process has been no exception
to this rule. Not only have its massive Israeli setbacks not been
translated into direct Palestinian gains, but the Palestinian population
of the West Bank and Gaza (and Palestinian Diaspora communities for that
matter) has paid a heavy price for its leaders' perennial disinterest in
statehood and obsession with violence. Just as these leaders' rejection
of the November 1947 partition resolution and the waging of a war of
annihilation against their Jewish neighbors led to the collapse and
dispersal of Palestinian society, so the use of Oslo as a tool for
anti-Israeli activities and domestic repression rather than the vehicle
for peace and state-building it was meant to be has made these long
overdue goals ever more remote, plunging relations between the two
parties to their lowest ebb since 1948.
For all his rhetoric about Palestinian independence, Arafat had never
been as interested in the attainment of statehood as in the violence
attending its pursuit. In the late 1970s, he told his close friend and
collaborator, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, that the
Palestinians lacked the tradition, unity, and discipline to become a
formal state, and that a Palestinian state would be a failure from the
first day.[49]Once
given control of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza as
part of the Oslo process, Arafat made this bleak prognosis a
self-fulfilling prophecy, establishing a repressive and corrupt regime
where the rule of the gun prevailed over the rule of law and where large
sums of money donated by the international community for the benefit of
the civilian Palestinian population were diverted to funding racist
incitement, buying weaponry, and filling secret bank accounts.
|
Arafat
told his friend and collaborator, the Romanian dictator Nicolae
Ceausescu (left), that the Palestinians lacked the tradition, unity,
and discipline to become a formal state, and that a Palestinian state
would be a failure from the first day. Arafat was true to his word.
|
Within a short time of its creation, the Palestinian Authority had
literally become the largest police state in the world with one policeman
for every forty residents—four times as many as in Washington, D.C., the
American city with the highest number of law enforcement officers per
capita.[50]
Backed by a dozen security and intelligence services, all answering
directly to Arafat, these forces were ostensibly designed to enforce law
and order and to combat anti-Israel terrorism. In reality, they served as
Arafat's repressive tool over his Palestinian subjects, as an instrument
of terror against Israel, and as guardian of the extensive protection and
racketeering networks that sprang up in the territories under the PA's
control while the national budget was plundered at will by PLO veterans
and Arafat cronies. In May 1997, for example, the first-ever report by
the PA's comptroller stated that $325 million, out of the 1996 budget of
$800 million had been "wasted" by Palestinian ministers and
agencies or embezzled by officials.[51]
Though this breathtaking corruption played an important role in
Hamas's landslide electoral victory of January 2006, the PLO/PA
leadership seems to have learned nothing and to have forgotten nothing.
For one thing, Abbas sustained his predecessor's repressive regime,
blatantly ignoring the results of the only (semi) democratic elections in
Palestinian history by establishing an alternative government to the
legally appointed Hamas government (which he unsuccessfully sought to
topple through the denial of international funding) and by refusing to
hold new elections upon the expiry of his presidency in January 2009.[52] For another, he seems to have
followed in Arafat's thieving footsteps, reportedly siphoning at least
$100 million to private accounts abroad and enriching his sons at the
PA's expense while blocking the timid reform efforts of his appointed
prime minister, Salam Fayyad, and eventually forcing him out of office.[53]
Under the PA's control, the
national budget was plundered at will by PLO veterans and Arafat
cronies.
|
In these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the well-being
of the West Bank/Gaza population has ebbed dramatically during the Oslo
years. At the time of the DOP signing, and despite the steep economic
decline in the six years of the intifada (1987-93), socioeconomic
conditions in the territories were far better than in most neighboring
Arab states after two decades of constant expansion under Israeli control
that saw a tenfold rise of the per-capita gross domestic product. As late
as September 2000 when Arafat launched his war of terror, Palestinian
income per capita was nearly double Syria's, more than four times
Yemen's, and 10 percent higher than Jordan's (one of the better off Arab
states) despite the steady deterioration of the West Bank and the Gaza
economies under the PA's control.[54]
By the time of Arafat's death in November 2004, however, his terror
war had slashed this income to a fraction of its earlier levels, with
real GDP per capita some 35 percent below pre-September 2000 levels, with
unemployment more than doubling and most Palestinians reduced to poverty
and despondency. And while Israel's suppression of the terror war generated
a steady recovery with the years 2007-11 recording an average yearly
growth above 8 percent, by mid-2014, a full-blown recession had taken
hold in the territories with the growth rate dropping to minus 1 percent
(0.5 percent in the West Bank and -4 percent in Gaza), a quarter of the
population living in poverty (with rates in Gaza twice as high as in the
West Bank), and unemployment soaring to over a quarter of the workforce.[55]
Conclusion
Twenty-three years and thousands of deaths after the launch of the
Oslo "peace process," one might have hoped that the
international community would begin to realize that the Palestinian
leadership is as implacably opposed to the two-state solution as its
predecessor was to the U.N.'s endorsement of the idea sixty-nine years
ago. But that is evidently a pipe dream. Just as President Clinton, whose
hope of brokering a Palestinian-Israeli peace was dashed by Arafat in the
July 2000 Camp David summit and again in December of the same year, and
who blamed the PLO leader for the collapse of the Oslo process, could
suggest five months before Arafat's death that the United States and
Israel had no choice but to resume negotiating with the PLO/PA leader,[56] so the EU has recently
endorsed a French plan for an international peace conference in total
disregard of Abbas's adamant rejection of Israel's right to exist.
This soft racism—asking nothing of the Palestinians as if they are too
dim or too primitive to be held accountable for their own words and
actions—is an assured recipe for disaster. For it is the total absence of
accountability from Middle Eastern political life that has allowed a long
succession of local dictators, from Gamal Abdel Nasser, to Saddam
Hussein, to Yasser Arafat, to Bashar al-Assad, to inflict recurrent
disasters and endless suffering on their peoples and mayhem on the world.
So long as policies and actions on the Palestinian side are permitted,
or encouraged, to remain as they are, there will be no progress
whatsoever toward peace: not in the framework of a Paris international
conference, not even in bilateral talks, were the Palestinians to be
somehow coerced to return to the negotiating table. Just as the creation
of free and democratic societies in Germany and Japan after World War II
necessitated a comprehensive socio-political and educational
transformation, so it is only when Palestinian society undergoes a real
"spring" that will sweep its corrupt and oppressive PLO and
Hamas rulers from power, eradicate the endemic violence from political
and social life, and value the virtues of coexistence with their Israeli
neighbors, that the century-long conflict between Arabs and Jews can at
long last be resolved. Sadly, this possibility, which seemed to be in the
offing in 1993, has been eliminated for the foreseeable future by the
Oslo "peace process."
Efraim Karsh, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is emeritus professor
of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College London and
professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University where he also
directs the BESA Center for Strategic Studies. This article is part of a
wider study prepared under the auspices of the BESA Center.
[1] Roy
Mandel, "'Shalom
osim im oivim: mikhtavim shekatav lanu Rabin," Ynet (Tel
Aviv), Oct. 18, 2010.
[2]
Faisal Husseini, interview with al-Arabi (Cairo), June 24, 2000.
[3] Ha'olam
Ha'ze (Tel Aviv), Sept. 8, 1993.
[4]
"Political Program for the Present Stage Drawn up by the 12th
PNC, Cairo, June 9, 1974," Journal of Palestine Studies,
Summer 1974, pp. 224-5.
[5]
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), "Al-Quds al-Arabi
editor-in-chief: Arafat
planned that Oslo would chase away Israelis," Sept. 3, 2015.
[6] Haaretz
(Tel Aviv), June
23, 2016.
[7]
Mahmoud Abbas, al-Wajh al-Akhar: al-Alaqat as-Sirriya bayna an-Naziya
wa-l-Sihyuniya (Amman: Dar Ibn Rushd, 1984).
[8] Haaretz,
Mar. 26, 2014.
[9]
WAFA (PLO/PA official news agency), Sept. 30, 2015.
[10] Al-Hayat
al-Jadida (Ramallah, official PA daily), Sept. 17,
2015, PMW.
[11]
"Mahmoud
Abbas: Murdering Israelis is 'peaceful popular uprising,'" PMW,
Dec. 1, 2015; "Abbas:
All of Israel Is Occupation," official PA TV, Mar. 11, 2016,
PMW, Apr. 6, 2016.
[12]
"Results of Public Opinion Poll No. 25," Center for Policy Analysis
on Palestine, Washington, D.C., Dec. 26-28, 1996, p. 14.
[13]
"Palestinian Public Opinion about the Peace Process,
1993-1999," Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine, Washington,
D.C., 1999; "New Beginning," U.S. News & World Report,
Sept. 13, 1993.
[14]
"Public Opinion Poll No. 31—Part I: On Palestinian Attitudes towards
Politics," Jerusalem Media and Communications Center, Mar. 1999, p.
3.
[15]
Mohamed Heikal, Secret Channels: The Inside Story of Arab-Israeli
Peace Negotiations (London: Harper Collins, 1996), p. 450.
[16]
See, for example, Pinhas Inbari, Beharavot Shvurot (Tel Aviv:
Misrad Habitahon, 1994), chap. 18-23.
[17]
See, for example, Mamduh Nawfal, Qisat Ittifaq Uslu: ar-Riwaya
al-Haqiqiya al-Kamila, (Amman: al-Ahliya, 1995), pp. 61-3; Efraim
Sneh, Nivut Beshetach Mesukan (Tel Aviv: Yediot Ahronot, 2002),
pp. 22-3; Adam Raz, "Hazitot
Mitnagshot: Haanatomia 'Hamuzara' shel Hakhraat Oslo shel Rabin,"
Israelim, Autumn 2012, pp. 107-9.
[18]
Beilin, interview with Maariv (Tel Aviv), Nov. 26, 1993.
[19]
"Fatal
Terrorist Attacks in Israel, Sept. 1993-1999," Israel Ministry
of Foreign Affairs (MFA), Jerusalem, Sept. 24, 2000; "Terrorism
Deaths in Israel—1920-1999," idem, Jan. 1, 2000; Wm. Robert
Johnston, "Chronology
of Terrorist Attacks in Israel: Introduction," Johnston's
Archive, Jan. 8, 2016; "Global
Terrorism Database," National Consortium for the Study of
Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, University of Maryland, College
Park, Md., accessed July 6, 2016.
[20]
Thus, for example, the May 1972 Lod (now Ben-Gurion) airport massacre, in
which 26 people were murdered, was carried out by three Japanese
terrorists arriving from Rome while the Maalot and Kiryat Shmona
massacres two years later, in which 43 people (including 30 children)
were killed, were perpetrated by terrorists coming from Lebanon as was
the coastal plain massacre of March 1978, where 38 Israelis (including 13
children) were murdered.
[21]
"Statistics:
Fatalities in the First Intifada," B'Tselem, Jerusalem, accessed
July 6, 2016.
[22]
"Analysis
of Attacks in the Last Decade 2000-2010," Israel Security Agency
(ISA), Jerusalem accessed July 6, 2016; "Terrorism
Deaths in Israel – 1920-1999," MFA.
[23]
"Suicide
and Other Bombing Attacks in Israel since the Declaration of Principles,"
MFA, accessed July 6, 2016.
[24]
"Victims
of Palestinian Violence and Terrorism since September 2000,"
MFA, accessed July 6, 2016.
[25]
Arafat, interview with al-Anwar (Beirut), Aug. 2 1968.
[26] Al-Quds
(Jerusalem), Dec. 22, 1995; Yigal Carmon, "So Now We All Know,"
The Jerusalem Post, Jan. 5, 1996.
[27]
"2006
Summary—Palestinian Terror Data and Trends," ISA, accessed July
6, 2016; "Analysis
of Attacks in the Last Decade 2000-2010," idem, accessed July 6,
2016; "2004
Terrorism Data," MFA, Jan. 5, 2015.
[28] The
New York Times, June
14, 2007.
[29]
"2006 Summary," ISA; "Analysis of Attacks in the Last
Decade," idem.
[30]
"Rocket
Launching," ISA, accessed July 6, 2016; "Mortar
shells launching attacks," idem, accessed July 6, 2016.
[31]
See, for example, "Human
Rights in Palestine and other Occupied Arab Territories. Report of the
United Nations Fact-finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,"
(Goldstone Report), U.N. General Assembly, Human Rights Council, Sept.
25, 2009; "Report
of the independent commission of inquiry established pursuant to Human
Rights Council resolution S-21/1," idem, June 22, 2015; "'Black Friday': Carnage in Rafah
during 2014 Israel/Gaza Conflict," Amnesty International, July
29, 2015; The Independent (London), Dec. 17, 2014.
[32] Davar
Rishon (Tel Aviv), Jan. 21, 1996; Maariv, Jan. 22, 1996.
[33]
Tony Karon, "Clinton
Saves Last Dance for Arafat," Time, Jan. 2, 2001.
[34] "The
Promise, The Challenges and the Achievements: Donor Investment in
Palestinian Development 1994-1998," World Bank and the U.N.
Office of the Special Coordinator in the Occupied Territories, Jerusalem,
1999, p. 14; Jim Zanotti, "U.S. Foreign Aid
to the Palestinians," Congressional Research Service,
Washington, D.C., Mar. 18, 2016.
[35]
"Resolution 1322 (2000). Adopted by the Security Council at its
4205th meeting on 7 Oct. 2000," U.N. Security Council, New York.
[36]
See, for example, Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, "Camp David: the
Tragedy of Errors," New York Review of Books, Aug. 9, 2001; The
Jerusalem Post, July 26, 30, 2000; The New York Times, July
26, 2000.
[37]
"The
Palestinian war-torn economy: aid, development, and state formation,"
U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), New York and Geneva,
2006, p. 37.
[38]
"President Bush
Calls for New Palestinian Leadership," White House Press Office,
Washington, D.C., June 24, 2002.
[39]
"Legal
Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian
Territory," International Court of Justice, The Hague, The
Netherlands, July 9, 2004.
[40]
Scott Wilson, "Obama
Searches for Middle East Peace," The Washington Post,
July 14, 2012.
[41]
"The
Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, opens a
preliminary examination of the situation in Palestine,"
International Criminal Court, Jan. 16, 2015.
[42]
U.N. Watch, Geneva, Nov. 25, 2015.
[43]
See, for example, Haaretz, June 13-17, July 11, Nov. 4, 2001, Feb.
26, 2002, Jan. 12, 2009; Ynet News, Apr. 25, 2010, Feb. 25, 2011.
[44] Haaretz,
June 5, 2008, Jan. 22, 2009.
[45] The
Marker (Tel Aviv), Feb. 16, 2007; Haaretz, Apr. 1, 2007.
[46]
Havaad Haartzi Leroshei Harashuyot Haarviyot BeIsrael, "Hahazon
Haatidi Laarvim Hafalestinim BeIsrael," Nazareth, 2006, pp. 5,
9.
[47]
See, for example, Itamar Radai et al., "The
Arab Citizens in Israel: Current Trends According to Recent Opinion
Polls," Strategic Assessment, 18/2, Institute for National
Security Studies, Tel Aviv, July 2015; Shibley Telhami, "2010
Israeli Arab/Palestinian Public Opinion Survey," Washington
D.C., Brookings Institution, Oct. 20- Nov. 3, 2010.
[48] Haaretz,
July 30, Oct. 1, 2001, Mar. 2, Apr. 3, 14, 15, Sept. 29, 2002, Oct. 9,
Dec. 28, 2008, Jan. 12, 2009, Oct. 1, 2012.
[49]
Ion Pacepa, Red Horizons. Inside the Romanian Secret Service—The
Memoirs of Ceausescu's Spy Chief (London: Coronet Books, 1989), p.
28.
[50]
"Law
Enforcement Officers Per Capital for Cities, Local Departments,"
Governing, accessed July 5, 2016.
[51]
Agence France-Presse, May 24, July 30, 1997; Khaled Abu Toameh,
"Money down the Drain?" Jerusalem Report, Jan. 8, 1998,
p. 26; Ronen Bergman, Veharashut Netuna (Tel Aviv: Yediot Ahronot,
2002), p. 156.
[52]
See, for example, Ali Abunimah, "When
Salam Fayyad secretly urged the US to block salaries to Palestinian
Authority employees," The Electronic Intifada, Oct. 4,
2012; The Jerusalem Post, May
5, 2012.
[53]
Jonathan Schanzer, "Chronic
Kleptocracy: Corruption within the Palestinian Political Establishment,"
Hearing before U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on
the Middle East and South Asia, Washington, D.C., July 10, 2012, pp.
17-8; Bergman, Veharashut Netuna, pp. 162-3; Rachel Ehrenfeld,
"Where Does the Money Go? A Study of the Palestinian
Authority," American Center for Democracy, New York, Oct. 1, 2002,
pp. 9-10; Yediot Ahronot (Tel Aviv), July 14, 2002.
[54]
See, for example, "A Poorer Peace," Newsweek, Sept. 1,
1997; Keith Marsden, "The Viability of Palestine," The Wall
Street Journal, Apr. 25, 2002; Patrick Clawson, "The
Palestinians' Lost Marshall Plans," The Jerusalem Post, Aug.
9, 2002.
[55]
"Four
Years—Intifada, Closures, and Palestinian Economic Crisis. An Assessment,"
World Bank, Washington, D.C., Oct. 2004, pp. xv, 3, 9. 13, 29-32; "Assistance
Strategy FY15-16 for the West Bank and Gaza," idem, Oct. 8,
2014, pp 3-5; "Economic
Monitoring Report to the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee," idem, May
27, 2015.
[56] The
Guardian (London), June 21,
2004.
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