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oslo accords
The Gaza War Won’t End by Imposing a "Solution" on Palestinians
The place to start is to demand a cease-fire and end the crippling occupation. Palestinian views should be heard. The burden should be placed on Israel and its policies that created this mess and not on victims.
Nov 18, 2024
One century ago, when Western European powers were planning to carve up the Arab East, the US attempted to convince them to take a different path. Supporting the belief that the peoples recently freed from colonial rule should have the right to self-determination, the US sent a commission of prominent Americans to survey Arab public opinion to discover what they did and did not want for their future. The commission concluded that the overwhelming majority of Arabs rejected division or partition of their region, European mandates over them, and the establishment of a Zionist state in Palestine. What they hoped for was a unitary Arab state.
The commission report also warned of conflict if the planned partition moved forward. The British Lord Balfour rejected these findings saying that the attitudes of the indigenous Arab population meant little to him, especially when weighed against the importance of the Zionist movement.
In the end, Lord Balfour got his way, and the dire prediction of the US commission has been borne out. The Arab East was partitioned, and a Mandate was established in Palestine, which the British used to foster Jewish immigration leading to the establishment of Israel. Since then, Palestinians have been dispossessed, displaced, and subjected to unceasing violence. Because they have resisted, the last century has been one continuous conflict culminating in the unfolding genocide in Gaza and crushing repression on the West Bank.
At present, the problem faced by the Palestinian people is that during the past three decades they have lost even more control over the circumstances of their lives. Since signing the Oslo Accords, Israel has taken steps to make impossible the establishment of a unified Palestinian state in the territories they occupied in 1967. The Israelis have severed what they call East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, distorting its economy and forcing its population to become dependent on Israel for employment and services. In the West Bank, the Israelis followed a plan to expand settlements and use “Jewish only” roads, infrastructure, checkpoints, and security zones to divide the Palestinian territory into small controlled areas. Gaza has been de-developed and subjected to economic strangulation for decades. It too has been cut off from the rest of Palestine. The dream of what had been hoped for after Oslo has been crushed.
Still, the Western world pays little attention to the needs and aspirations of the Palestinian people. Instead, led by the US, plans are being put forward to govern the future of the Palestinians without the consent of the governed. What is being proposed is a Gaza ruled by a “reformed” Palestinian Authority, with security provided by an Arab-Islamic force, and nothing more than a commitment to negotiate a future two-state solution. The proposal is a non-starter for two reasons.
Despite being designed to meet Israel’s needs, Israelis themselves have rejected the terms of this “day after” concept. They refuse to leave Gaza or allow Palestinians to return to areas of Gaza from which they have been “cleansed.” The Israelis also reject the role of outside forces to provide security. And they are refusing to entertain any discussion of a Palestinian state that involves connecting the divided Palestinian areas, especially if that includes ceding land, removing settlers, surrendering security control, or expanding the role of the Palestinian Authority.
More importantly the “day after” plans fail to take into account Palestinian views.
Instead of prioritizing what Israel (or the US) wants or requires and imposing plans on the Palestinians to meet Israel’s security needs, a shift is needed to an approach that challenges those Israeli policies that have led to Palestinian displacement and anger; distorted Palestinian political and economic development; and made it impossible to build Palestinian institutions that can earn respect.
The place to start is to demand a cease-fire and end the crippling occupation. Palestinian views should be heard. The burden should be placed on Israel and its policies that created this mess and not on victims.
There are some encouraging signs that public opinion in the US is shifting in a more pro-Palestinian direction. Americans are more supportive of Palestinians, and more opposed to Israeli policies that violate Palestinian rights. They are receptive to changing policies that would help Palestinians. But this where the conversation gets stuck, precisely because there is no clear Palestinian vision for the future and no leadership that can articulate it.
With this in mind, a group of Palestinian businessmen commissioned Zogby Research Services to measure the impact of Israeli policies in Gaza, the threats facing those on the West Bank, and to ask Palestinians what they identify as the best path forward to achieve their rights and peace.
What the poll reveals is that despite the different circumstances the Israelis have imposed on the Palestinians in each of the three regions under their control, there remains the common threads of identity, desire for freedom, and unity that continues to bind them together. What they want is that the knee of the Israeli occupation be lifted off their backs so that they can finally have freedom and independence in land of their own. Because they have lost faith, in varying degrees, with the performance of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, they favor: holding a popular referendum to elect a new generation of leadership that can advance a new vision for Palestine; unifying the Palestinian ranks to create a functioning government that can earn respect and recognition; while continuing to hold Israel accountable for its crimes in international bodies.
Of course, all of this must be developed further, but it is the better path to take precisely because it recognizes that instead of continuing to impose “solutions” on Palestinians, the place to begin is to ask them what they want, listen to what they say, and then work to make their aspirations a reality.
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UN Experts Say Israel 'Must Stop Acting as If Uniquely Above the Law'
Special rapporteurs and working group members argue that the Israeli government—and its allies—must comply with the recent International Court of Justice ruling that makes clear the occupation of both Gaza and the West Bank are unlawful and must end.
Jul 30, 2024
The United Nations' largest body of independent human rights experts on Tuesday said Israel is compelled to comply with a recent International Court of Justice ruling that said its "unlawful" military occupation of Palestinian territories in Gaza and the West Bank must come to a rapid end.
The group of 39 special rapporteurs and members of various working groups, which collectively help form what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council, hailed the July 19 ruling by the ICJ as "historic"—and one that should bolster the prospects for the end of Israel's military control of the occupied territories and strengthen international law more broadly.
The advisory opinion of the ICJ, said the experts in a statement, "reaffirms peremptory norms prohibiting annexation, settlements, racial segregation and apartheid, and should be seen as declaratory in nature and binding on Israel and all States supporting the occupation."
"Israel must comply with this advisory opinion, and other ICJ orders issued this year," the experts added. "Israel must stop acting as if uniquely above the law."
"May the ICJ advisory opinion be the catalyst for renewed international action to restore and preserve an international order premised on respect for international law."
Notably, the experts said, the ICJ ruling dismissed the idea that self-determination for the Palestinian people "must be achieved solely through bilateral negotiations with Israel—a requirement that has subjected Palestinians to violence, dispossession and rights violations for 30 years," since the Oslo Accords.
"The Court has finally reaffirmed a principle that seemed unclear, even to the United Nations: Freedom from foreign military occupation, racial segregation and apartheid is absolutely non-negotiable," the experts argued. "May this historic ruling begin the realization of the Palestinian people's fundamental right to self-determination, and peace premised on freedom for all."
While the Israel military continues its assault on Gaza—where as many as 186,000 people are estimated to have been killed over nine months of bombing and a ground incursion—the death toll, annexation of land, and systematic attack on human rights have all escalated in the West Bank as well.
The experts said that given the ICJ's examination of whether or not Israel has violated the Genocide Convention—and amidst widespread concern over war crimes and other violations perpetrated by Israeli officials, commanders, and soldiers in the field—the nation's global allies must "challenge Israel's deliberate efforts to rewrite the rules of international humanitarian law, using it as 'humanitarian camouflage' to legitimize potentially genocidal violence against all Palestinians."
"For too long, Palestinians have been held hostage to realpolitik, while Israel has made a mockery of international order and the normative framework of international law," the experts said. "May the ICJ advisory opinion be the catalyst for renewed international action to restore and preserve an international order premised on respect for international law."
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On the Resurrection of the Nakba Among Palestinians
Thanks to Palestinian memory, Palestinians are once more united around their understanding of the past, which is returning hope for a better future.
May 23, 2024
Inadvertently, Israel has pressed the reset button on its war with the Palestinian people, taking back the so-called conflict to square one.
Save a few self-serving Palestinian officials affiliated with the Palestinian Authority (PA), most Palestinians do not seem consumed with the return to the peace process, or even engaged in discussions about two state solutions.
The conversation among Palestinians is now mostly concerned with all aspects of the Palestinian struggle, starting with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine 76 years ago, an event known as the Nakba, or Catastrophe.
The Nakba is commemorated on May 15 of each year. The nature of the annual event, however, changes from one stage of the Palestinian struggle to the next. Indeed, the Nakba anniversary acquires its meaning from the political context of the time – it is elevated during times of hope, demoted during times of despair, defeat and infighting.
In the early phases of the Palestinian struggle, immediately following the expulsion of nearly 80 percent of the total Arab population of Palestine, the Right of Return was not a slogan or symbol. It was, at least in the minds of most refugees, a real possibility.
That right is enshrined in international law under United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948. At the time, Palestinian exile was perceived to be temporary – thus, the term 'temporary shelters' associated with the humble dwellings of refugee encampments immediately after the war. These refugee camps extended from Palestine itself to other countries throughout the Middle East.
Back then, Arab nationalism was a powerful political notion that defined a pan-Arab political discourse, which centered in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. With the passage of time, however, it became clear that Arab liberators were not coming to free Palestine, and that UN resolutions on Palestine were not meant to be implemented. They were mere ‘ink on paper’, Palestinians would often utter.
Experience taught Palestinians to be cynical about lofty promises, especially when the UN-supplied 'temporary shelters' became a permanent, everyday reality.
The Palestinians continued to commemorate the Nakba anyway, because their collective memory became their main weapon of fighting back against Israeli erasure.
The rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1960s, its emphasis on the liberation of all of Palestine and its use of revolutionary slogans and armed struggle resurrected hopes among ordinary Palestinians that the Right of Return was still possible.
These hopes were dashed, however, after the PLO's forced exile from Lebanon in 1982, and the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and increasingly irrelevant Palestinian leadership in 1993.
Oslo and its fraudulent US-led peace process allowed Israel to conclude what it started during the Palestinian Nakba. Israel's greatest achievement was creating a Palestinian entity that would help it manage its final victory over the Palestinian people. The PA became that entity, leading to widening the factional and class divides in Palestinian society.
The new political discourse emerging from Gaza following the war has forced an international rethink about Palestine and the struggle of the Palestinians.
Since then, Israel managed to annex large parts of what remained of historic Palestine, control dissenting Palestinians through the PA and besiege Gaza as an act of collective punishment for its ongoing resistance. All wars fought against Gaza in recent years were meant to serve as a reminder to Palestinians of Israel’s might and Palestinian inferiority.
Palestinians, however, continued to commemorate the Nakba, although the Right of Return, as a political concept, became marginal, hardly ever discussed, neither by Israel nor the PA as a pressing political issue.
Recent years indicated that Israel was ready to move past all of this into a whole new stage of politics, one that does not pay the slightest attention to Palestinian aspirations.
The Israeli occupation, illegal settlements, occupied Jerusalem and all other critical topics that mattered to Palestinians ceased to be part of Israeli election campaigns, or even part of the Israeli political discourse, in general. This mindset defined all mainstream Israeli political groups, from the extreme right to the left.
All that seemed to matter to Israel was the expansion of the illegal settlements, the annexation of the West Bank, the normalization of its military occupation and the occasional military raids and wars aimed at crushing the Resistance.
October 7, however, changed all of that. The new political discourse emerging from Gaza following the war has forced an international rethink about Palestine and the struggle of the Palestinians.
This was crystallized in the words of Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, who addressed, in a press conference on May 15, the Palestinian Nakba.
“Seventy-six years on, the historical injustice suffered by the Palestinian people, far from being redressed, has further worsened,” Wenbin said, linking the past to the present, Gaza to historic Palestine.
This new discourse is now taking hold, and the segmentation of Palestinian history resulting from Oslo is quickly disappearing in favor of a wholesome approach to justice in Palestine. Though Washington and a few of its western allies insist on returning to the status quo of endless negotiations, others are no longer beholden to that kind of stifling, self-serving discourse.
This shift in perspective was not only a result of the failure of Oslo, and the extent of the Israeli barbarity and genocide in Gaza, but mainly because of the steadfastness and resistance of the Palestinians themselves.
It turned out that collective memory was not just an academic notion, but a weapon in the hands of ordinary people.
Thanks to Palestinian memory, Palestinians are once more united around their understanding of the past, the steadfastness of the present and the hope for a just future.
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