Amira Hass With Oslo, Israel’s intention was never peace or Palestinian statehood
The
reality of the Palestinian Bantustans, reservations or enclaves — is a
fact on the ground. Their creation is the most outstanding geopolitical
occurrence of the past quarter century. It is of course possible to say
that its seeds were sown with the occupation in 1967
but the process accelerated, consolidated, matured and deepened
paradoxically in parallel with the negotiation process between Israel
and the Palestinians – first with the Madrid/Washington talks starting
at the end of 1991 and then with the Oslo process.
Those who give
credence to lofty verbal declarations about peace and a new Middle East
will continue to believe that only chance, regrettable human errors, bad
luck and technical hitches led to the formation of the Palestinian
reservations buried in a contiguous Israeli space between the
Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River – contrary to any logic of a fair
settlement between the Palestinians and the Israelis and negating the
former’s right to self-determination. Others will continue to argue that
it all happened only as a reaction to the attacks carried out by
Palestinian opponents of the Oslo agreements and Palestinian opponents
of Yasser Arafat.
However, I wish to
give, have given and am giving credit to the planning skills of the
Israeli security and diplomatic establishment and the calculated
sophistication behind the ability to speak softly in words the world
wants to hear (“peace”) and in actual fact to do the opposite
(continuing the occupation through outsourcing while dropping the burden
of economic and legal responsibility for the population that is under
occupation).
The following were
the warning signals that started flashing right at the moment of the
signing of the Declaration of Principles and very early on taught me to
cast doubt on Israel’s intentions vis a vis the negotiations:
*While
it was decided to take gradual steps toward the realization of the
interim agreement, the aim of the negotiations was not explicitly
stipulated. That is, it nowhere was it stated that the goal was the
establishment of a Palestinian state in the territory occupied in 1967,
contrary to what the Palestinians, many people in the Israeli peace camp
at that time and the European countries had concluded. What logic is
there in gradually moving forward towards a vague goal that only the
Palestinians and the supporters of a fair in Europe understand as
realization of the right to self-determination, while the strong side,
Israel, reserves the right to impose its interpretations?
*The
word “occupation” does not appear in the Declaration of Principles. In
his letter to Yitzhak Rabin, however, Yasser Arafat explicitly promises
that the Palestine Liberation Organization will relinquish terror. The
avoidance of any mention of “the occupation” as a given situation and as
the source of the violence was an expression of the
diplomatic-propaganda inversion that Israel succeeded in pulling off:
The real power relations — of occupier and occupied — were translated
into relations of the persecuted (the Israeli) and the persecutor (the
Palestinian). The burden of proof was imposed on the Palestinians (a
fight against terror) and not on Israel (an end to the occupation).
*Delegating the Civil
Administration to conduct the negotiations regarding the transfer of
civil responsibilities to the Palestinian Authority was another warning
signal. In the less than 15 years of its existence, the Civil
Administration had developed into a tool for implementing the
colonization policy and military control of the Palestinians, in the
guise of a civilian affairs institution. Contrary to the declarations
about “changing the disk,” the bureaucrats/officers who conducted the
civil negotiations had no alternative but to preserve the purpose of
their organization and to perpetuate the imperious attitude toward the
Palestinians.
*The
Declaration of Principles signed on September 13, 1993 stated: “The two
sides view the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a single territorial
unit, whose integrity will be preserved during the interim period.”This
did not happen. Instead, Israel did everything it could to detach the
population of Gaza from the West Bank by means of the regime of movement
restrictions. Though the number of Palestinians who exited and entered
Gaza in the 1990s was relatively large as compared to the minuscule
number of those exiting and entering today, that number was small
relative to the situation before January 15, 1991 when Israel first
implemented the regime of sweeping prohibitions on Palestinians’ freedom
of movement and the requirement that they apply for personal entry
permits into Israel (and that, three years before the suicide attacks
inside Israel). Thus, Israel controlled the economic, institutional,
social and familial relations between the population of Gaza and the
West Bank and restricted them however it pleased. In that way, Israel
was able to interfere with the proper functioning and development of the
PA institutions.
*In accordance with
Israel’s demand, it was stipulated in the negotiations that it would
continue to control the Palestinian population registry, which meant
that Israel alone had the power to decide whether to grant Palestinian
residency, to whom, when and to how many. In the Interim Agreement there
is a provision that empowers the Palestinian Authority to carry out a
few changes in the population registry, such as changes of address and
personal status but they are required to inform the Israeli side of the
change. At the end of 1996 it became clear to the Palestinians that
Israel was refusing to recognize changes of address as listed on
identity cards from towns in Gaza to towns in the West Bank (mainly for
thousands of people who were born in Gaza but had been residing in the
West Bank for many years), while it was approving changes of address
within the West Bank or within the Gaza Strip. This seemingly minor
bureaucratic measure has tremendous significance: It proves that Israel
continued to relate the Gaza Strip as an entity separate from the West
Bank. For Israel — Gaza is a separate enclave.
*Also
in 1997, Israel prohibited inhabitants of the Gaza Strip from entering
the West Bank from Jordan via the Allenby Bridge border crossing. Since
the regime of individual travel permits was imposed in January of 1991,
Palestinians who did not receive a permit to transit through Israel on
their way to the West Bank discovered that they could do a big detour:
They left through the Rafah crossing point into Egypt and from there
they traveled to Jordan and entered the West Bank via the Allenby
crossing. These were mainly students enrolled at the universities in the
West Bank, members of split families, businesspeople, PA officials and
others whose applications for permits to transit through Israel and been
denied. Ever since 1997, inhabitants of the Gaza Strip are also
required to apply for a permit to enter via Allenby (and these permits
are granted only in rare cases) — yet more proof that Israel relates to
the two parts of Palestinian territory as separate entities, in
contravention of the Declaration of Principles.
*The provision
concerning water in the Interim Agreement is an especially cynical
reflection of Israel’s attitude towards Gaza as a separate enclave.
Apart from a few million cubic meters of water that flowed into the Gaza
Strip from Israel (as compensation for the high-quality sweet water
pumped within its territory for the benefit of the Israeli settlements),
the Gaza Strip was required then and is required now to make do with
the aquifer within its boundaries. The same aquifer that supplied water
to the approximately 80,000 original Palestinians who lived there before
1948, continued to supply water to the refugee population that was
added (about 200,000 people) in 1949, and to the population that had
grown to about 900,000 by 1994 and stands at about 2 million people
today. Since the end of the 1980s Gaza has been suffering from seepage
of sea water into its ground water because of over-pumping. Instead of
the simple solution of piping in water from Israeli territory into Gaza
(which would have compensated somewhat for the vast amounts of water
Israel pumps from sources in the West Bank for the benefit of Israelis
inside Israel and in the settlements) — Israel has forced the Gaza
Strip to maintain an autarkic water economy. Thus the Gaza Strip reached
the catastrophic situation it is in today, with 97 percent of its water
unfit for drinking.
*The Goldstein massacre: Not only were the
violent Hebron settlers not evacuated from the city, they were also
given a reward. The Rabin government punished the Palestinians for the
massacre that a Jewish-Israeli citizen committed there and were put
under a prolonged curfew. Then a series of restrictions on movement were
imposed on the Palestinians in order to implement the principle of
separation between them and the settlers, while giving preference to the
convenience and welfare of the few Jews at the expense of the
Palestinian majority.
*Despite the impression of “reciprocity” and
“symmetry” between the Palestinians and the Israelis that the
Declaration of Principles tried to create, throughout the negotiation
process the status of the Palestinian prisoners was not made equivalent
to that of the Israeli soldiers, despite the fact that their commanders —
who at the time were meeting and negotiating with the other side — had
similarly sent them to fight and kill. The Palestinian prisoners were
depicted as criminals whose names and places of residence were common
knowledge and the Israelis — as heroes. Release of prisoners was not
even mentioned in the Declaration of Principles. The partial releases
later on were always accompanied by humiliations and procrastination and
did not include Palestinians who had killed Israelis prior to the
signing of the Oslo agreements.
*In the 1990s Israel continued to demolish
Palestinian structures in the West Bank, on the grounds of lack of a
permit, when everyone knew that ever since the 1970s Israel had been
very stingy about granting building permits to Palestinians and
developing master plans for them.
*In July of 1994, during the Oslo days and under a
Labor-Meretz government, eviction orders were issued to Bedouin of the
Jahalin tribe for the sake of the expansion of the settlement of Ma’aleh
Adumim. In May of 1995 the High Court of Justice rejected petitions
against the eviction. Similar eviction orders were issued to other small
communities of herders and farmers — people who traditionally and in
order to earn a living spend a considerable portion of their time on
lands that are outside their villages of origin, for example along what
was to become Highway 443 (from Jerusalem to Modi’in) and in the Etzion
Bloc.
*The Interim
Agreement established a blatantly unequal division of the water sources
in the West Bank and determined a quota on the amount of water
Palestinians are permitted to consume (no such quota was imposed on the
settlers). The water drilling in the Jordan Valley supplied and continues to supply the
approximately 6,000 settlers there with an amount of water equivalent to
about one-quarter of the amount allotted to approximately 1.5 million
to 2 million Palestinians. At meetings of the joint water committee, it
very quickly became clear to the Palestinians that it was better for
them to request approval of water pipes with a diameter smaller than the
diameter they had initially planned — otherwise the Israeli side would
not approve the proposed project.
*Even though in the
agreement there is a provision to the effect that the two sides will not
carry out any changes that could affect the results of the permanent
status agreement, at the end of 1995 the Interior Ministry headed by
Haim Ramon began to revoke the residency status of thousands of
Jerusalem Palestinians, on the grounds that their center of life was no
longer in the city. This gave the signal for what has been called the silent transfer, expulsion of
people from the city, the divestment of their legal status and identity
papers and the development of a regime of surveillance and spying on
tens of thousands of Palestinians by the Interior Ministry and the
National Insurance Institute. The restrictions on building in Jerusalem
also remained in force and the regime of travel permits cut off the
natural connection Palestinians had with this economic, religious,
social and cultural center.
*Another signal was the division of the West Bank
into areas of control A, B, and C that would be adapted to the
principle of the gradual redeployment of the Israel Defense Forces
(which was mistakenly called a withdrawal) — first from the towns, then
from the villages and finally from the less inhabited areas that are the
future reserves of land and space for the Palestinian entity. Even if
we ignore the fact that Israel determined the pace of the redeployment
and when and where it would stop, the agreement does not establish the
size of the area that Israel would ultimately leave. Each side
interpreted this in accordance with its own wishes and the vagueness
once again worked to the benefit of the stronger side, Israel.
Twenty-five years
later, Area C under full Israeli control covers more than 60 percent of
the area of the West Bank. There was security logic to the gradual
redeployment of the army but the retention by Israel of the civil and
administrative responsibilities in Area C gave it time to grab more land. Israel
has kept and is keeping most of the West Bank for itself as an area
where it is limiting Palestinian construction and development to a bare
minimum, and as a reserve of land for the endless spread of the
settlements.
*The bypass roads
were built so that the settlers would not have to travel to their homes
via the Palestinian towns. They butchered the area of the West Bank with
no consideration for the relationships between the Palestinian urban
centers and their hinterlands of surrounding towns and villages, and cut
off historic routes. The bypass roads were a tool for perpetuating an
agreement that was supposed to have been temporary. The organization of
the geographical space and construction were tailored to the needs of
the settlers in the present, which are also the needs of the settlement project in the future: Thus for example, the
“tunnels road,” paved the way to the Etzion Bloc practically becoming a
prestigious southern suburb of Jerusalem. The guarantees given to the
settlers in the Interim Agreement obviate the need for a permanent
status agreement that would have necessitated their evacuation, and thus
more Israelis have been lured into coming to live in the settlements
and to demand that they remain in place.
*Israel did not see
fit to pursue “confidence building measures” related to issues of land
and territory. The Israeli side could have compensated the Palestinians
for confiscating land for bypass roads, for example, by means of
returning hundreds of thousands of dunams of land that were declared “state lands”
in the 1980s, in a sly process that contravened international law. That
didn’t happen, because from the outset Israel did not give up its mantra
of “as much territory as possible, with as few Arabs as possible.”
Thus, the control of
Area C, the retention of bans on building and access for the
Palestinians, the construction of the settlements and the network of
bypass roads – all of these have together led to the creation of
numerous disconnected Palestinian enclaves that are swallowed up in the
Israeli expanse, in a process that has replicated in the West Bank the
same reality that characterizes the Gaza enclave. In the course of the
Oslo process, much thought was invested – not toward advancing peace,
but toward the establishment of Palestinian enclaves.
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