There was no agency for the side defined as the weaker one. In essence, it was a search for the best that the stronger party was willing to offer, followed by an attempt to coerce the weaker party into accepting it. It adopted a methodology which was very advantageous to the Israelis and disastrous for the Palestinians. Norway’s Fafo Research Foundation took charge of the mediation efforts.
#Ozzle accords professional#
The negative aspect of PLO participation was the fact that a unilateral Israeli policy of incremental annexation and partition of the occupied territories now received legitimacy from an agreement that the PLO leadership had signed.Īnother difference was the involvement of an allegedly professional and neutral academic outfit in facilitating the accords. Its participation, and the international recognition it received, was the one positive (or at least potentially positive) aspect of Oslo. It should be said, though, that the organization, to its credit, has not - to this day - accepted the Oslo Accords as a process that has been concluded. The most important one was that the PLO was Israel’s partner in this recipe for disaster.
Oslo differed from the previous initiatives in several ways. These various ideas - the Jordanian option, Palestinian autonomy, and the Oslo formula - had one thing in common: they all suggested partitioning the West Bank between Jewish and Palestinian areas, with the future intent of integrating the Jewish part into Israel, while keeping the Gaza Strip as an enclave connected to the West Bank by a land bridge that Israel would control. The second was the idea of limited Palestinian autonomy in these territories, which was at the heart of the peace talks with Egypt in the late 1970s. The Israeli Labor movement endorsed this policy. The first was the so-called Jordanian option, which would mean partitioning - geographically or functionally - control over the occupied territories between Israel and Jordan. This diktat was a new version of older Israeli ideas that had informed the so-called peace process since 1967. Any further demands, such as the right of return for the Palestinian refugees, or changes in the status of the Palestinian minority inside Israel, were excised from the “peace” agenda. Moreover, this arrangement would have to be declared as the end of the conflict. The best these representatives of the “Israeli peace camp” could offer was two Bantustans - a reduced West Bank and an enclaved Gaza Strip - that would enjoy some of the symbolism of statehood while in practice remaining under Israeli control.
The architects of the accords assumed that the Palestinians were in no position to resist an Israeli diktat which represented the maximum that the Jewish state was willing to concede at that time.
Their assumption was that a convergence of factors provided an opportune historical moment for imposing a solution on the Palestinian side: the success of the more dovish Labor Party in Israel’s 1992 elections on the one hand, the drastic erosion in the PLO’s international standing because of Yasser Arafat’s support for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait on the other. The agreement was the brainchild of a group of Israelis who were part of the think tank Mashov, led by then deputy foreign minister, Yossi Beilin. On September 13, 1993, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Israeli government signed the Oslo Accords with great fanfare.
0 kommentar(er)
