Judging Oslo

The "Middle East Peace Process" has been thrown around so much and in so many different contexts that the phrase has all but lost its meaning. This is an attempt to recapture the meaning of that phrase. More precisely, it is an attempt to understand the factors which led to the start and collapse of Oslo through examining, roughly, three different perspectives. The first of these perspectives focuses on the structural global factors which prevailed during the lifetime of Oslo, the second blames the stillborn stab at peace on the lack of an Israeli will for a just peace, and the third explains the different stages of the process through the domestic economic factors which controlled Israeli society.

James Gelvin presents the process within its historical context, and assesses the conditions that made the process possible as well as those that led to its demise. Neither side of the negotiating table was able (willing?) to maintain momentum when the New World Order gave way to reality and as domestic political realities refused a process that alienated many on both sides. If the Intifada, Post Cold War optimism, and the Gulf War set the stage for Oslo, then the rise of the Israeli right, Hamas, the Aqsa Intifada and the War on Terror were the structural conditions that led to its demise. Whatever common ground the Israelis and Palestinians who negotiated in Oslo tried to build on fell out from under their feet when it came to implementation.

Yet there was an internal logic to the peace process- which nevertheless could not be separated from global political realities-at the heart of which was a fundamental and perhaps inescapable power inequality. Negotiating from a position of weakness, the Palestinians made concessions which were not matched by the Israeli side, and which built into the peace process the formula for its own undoing. If stressing process over content only hid the inequalities and stalemate at the heart of the conflict, it was also a reflection of global power realities which favored the Israeli side. Confidence building could not work in a context where one national narrative had to impose its will on the other in order to reach a "settlement." When substance became the focus of the negotiations at Camp David, it was the expression of an "Israeli peace" which was not-and probably could not-be accepted by the Palestinians.

As the process came to a halt, an Israeli settlement was imposed anyway. This by no means led to peace, but enabled Israel to expand its territorial reach, increase settlements and create a grid of infrastructure in the Occupied Territories which has all but made a two state solution physically impossible. With the construction of the Separation Wall, the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and the continued violence perpetuated on both sides in the Occupied Territories and inside Israel, the peace process seems dead for good.

This, of course, is the problem with explaining the success or failure of the process in terms of shifting international politics. While it is impossible to understand the process without situating it historically like Gelvin so lucidly does, it also infuses the process with an air of fatalism: if the core problem is an inequality in power and if the global power scale does not look like it's shifting in the direction of the Palestinians then the process is doomed to failure. Either Violence will continue, or Israel will finally succeed in smothering Palestinian nationalism. Such a bleak horizon though should not stop those whom it may concern to continue to look for radically different solutions. What is worth questioning here is whether Oslo would have faced the same fate had the international situation been different. While the Aqsa Intifada put one of the final nails in the coffin of the process, it was itself , essentially, a result of the failure of the process. Similarly, it is the failure of peace talks and, as a corollary, the absence of the United States from the scene that put the Israelis and Palestinians on opposing ends of the War on Terror doctrine which emerged after 9/11. There seem to be, then, other factors which poisoned the peace process which do not necessarily follow from regional and international politics.

Henry Siegman paints the picture a little differently. For him, the main problem is that "Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West bank. To be sure, Israel would allow-indeed it would insist on- the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a bi-national state in which Palestinians would be the majority."(Siegman) That there was/is a lack of will on the Israeli side, given the facts, is difficult to dispute. That the international community bears a large part of the blame for failing to create the political incentives that would create a will for peace in Israel is also true. In fact, it is only an Israeli will for a just peace that would have overcome the inherent power imbalance at the negotiating table which would have allowed for a sustainable settlement.

Yet it is to go a step too far to put the conflict in conspiratorial terms and to spare the Palestinians any portion of the responsibility for the failure of the process. It is true that Olmert does not offer anything acceptable either to Hamas or to Abbas. This is precisely because the cost of ignoring Palestinian demands is near negligible. If it can be asserted that the Palestinians have a right to reject flimsy peace settlements because of their inherent right to self determination and the right to engage in a struggle towards that goal, then it must be noted when the Palestinians have failed to bear the burden of their own struggle. What concerns me is not a question of which policy the Palestinians adopt, but that they adopt a unified and coherent policy at all and are capable of implementing it given the constraints imposed on Palestinian leadership by the facts of the occupation.

If the problem is the Israeli avoidance of peace talks, their blatant disregard for international law and Israeli expansionism masked as peace offers, then it is also a failure of Palestinian institutions and democratic culture and badly targeted use of violence which contributes to enabling Israel to behave in the way that it does. In this sense, the first step towards a just settlement is not a change in the stance of the international community towards Israeli policy (although this too is necessary), but rather the rebuilding of the Palestinian national movement which has all but disintegrated since the death of Arafat. If the Israeli claim that there is no Palestinian partner for peace means anything at all, it is that there is no visionary, strong willed leadership on the Palestinian side which has the ability to make decisions and implement them, not that the Palestinians have chosen the path of violence, nor that they continually reject "generous" Israeli "offers."

Yoav Peled offers an insightful explanation of Israeli attitudes towards the peace process through analyzing the structure of Israeli society, domestic politics and macroeconomic policy changes. The peace process-or lack thereof- can then be understood in terms of the internal dynamics in Israel which propelled it and those which sabotaged it. In layering the liberal, republican and ethno-national discourses in Israel and looking at the effect on such discourses of the neo-liberal shift in Israeli economic policy, Peled uncovers a complex interplay between competing narratives and overlapping hierarchal structures within Israeli society-and by extension the occupied territories. In this sense, the Peace process is held hostage to Israel's nation building project. While the domestic policy aspect in a conflict such as this one where the foreign and the domestic are so difficult to disentangle is a crucial one, it is a difficult idea to wrap ones mind around that the beginning and end of Oslo can be explained away by Israeli domestic economic policy and class/ethnic politics within Israel.

It is significant, though, that economics never function independently to shape policy towards the Palestinians, but always in a context of competing national discourses and a hierarchal citizenship structure. Interestingly, the liberal business/peace coalition which spurred the Oslo process according to Peled, gave way to the death of the peace camp and the survival of neo-liberal economic policy. This can be understood, at least in part, if the peace impetus part of this coalition is seen as having been treated instrumentally in order to achieve economic gains. Once peace became no longer necessary for the attainment of economic goals, Oslo became dispensable. Even if the picture is not so Machiavellian, the forces of political liberalization in Israel could not hold their ground vis a vis the self-defensive cultural (and, when it came to non-citizen Palestinians, military) war waged by the conservative, socially and economically disadvantage right, which nonetheless was able to employ a Zionist ethno-nationalist narrative to create real changes in policy. In a seemingly improbable situation, the disadvantaged castes of Israeli society emerged politically victorious and economically defeated.

The three narratives presented here (and it must be noted that except for Siegman, their authors do not present them as exclusive) collaborate to pain a picture, or more appropriately, piece together a collage, which is richer and more substantive than any one separate explanation. As I hope has been demonstrated, it is necessary not to give in to mono-causal explanations and to actively deconstruct even those arguments which seem the most self-evident in order to assess their validity if one is to come to a useful understanding of the peace process.