- By: Antoine Shalhat
These days mark the 30th anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to former Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, his Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, for signing the Oslo Accords, which was described at the time as a “peace agreement” between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).
What remains of that “peace”, and was it even a “peace agreement”? First, we must start by recalling what was concluded from the Minutes of the session held by the Israeli government, specifically on 30 August, 1993, during which it ratified the Oslo Accords, officially named the Declaration of Principles, that it signed in Washington on 13 September of the same year. The official archives of the State of Israel disclosed the Minutes last year, and it revealed that Israel did not view this agreement as a starting point to abandoning the Occupation of the 1967 Territories, or to granting the Palestinians the right to freedom, self-determination and independence.
Moreover, the word “peace” no longer exists in the Israeli public domain, even before the current completely right-wing government took office in late December 2022. When this government came to office, it published in its platform that “the Jewish people have exclusive and indisputable rights” over the entirety of Israel and the Palestinian Territories. At the same time, the government promised to continue to advance additional peace agreements to “end the Arab-Israeli conflict”. This means, even according to many Israeli readings, that Netanyahu wanted to end the conflict but, at the same time, Israel must annex the West Bank, and the Palestinians would have no national rights, including in the Gaza Strip.
The Minutes also showed that the government refrained from discussing any broad political vision and political terms such as “Palestinian sovereignty” and “Palestinian State”. Given the military nature of the agreement, it was entrusted to the army to draft it after the principles were signed, and not to the Foreign Ministry. Reliable Israeli sources assert that the army drafted the Oslo Accords as military agreements, ensuring continued Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza, and not preparing the Palestinian Authority to act as a State, while the settlement project continues to flourish, and the Palestinians’ freedom of movement remains limited.
At this point, we reiterate the following: First, the Israeli right wing denies that the Palestinians are a nation, and this is its firm position. However, even the opposition, the centre and the remnants of the left, do not talk about peace with the Palestinians. In other words, the problem lies in Israeli policy, which sees the Palestinians as a group of subjects without any rights, and not as partners in shaping the future reality.
Second, the term peace no longer exists, given the political situation in which Israel witnessed an unprecedented success in its relations with the Arab world, following the Abraham Accords, which almost included Saudi Arabia, on the eve of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
Third, the day after the Minutes of the Israeli government’s approval of the Oslo Accords were revealed, Haaretz newspaper considered the Minutes to be very interesting in what it lacked, as it avoided addressing the Israeli Occupation or the Palestinians’ right to freedom and independence. In the newspaper’s opinion, it is clear from the Minutes that Israel, even when “the most left-wing government in its history” was in power, did not intend to withdraw from the 1967 Territories and establish a Palestinian State there. Rabin also opposed any discussion of Jerusalem, and his cabinet ministers stressed the importance of continuing its control over “public lands” or “state lands” (later renamed “Area C”) in order to preserve land reserves for settlement expansion. Rabin promised to establish a Palestinian Authority that would serve (in his view) as a security subcontractor to the Israeli military, trying to restrict the rise of Hamas, and nothing more.
- This article appeared in Arabic in Arab48 on 11 December, 2024.