Oslo Revisited

By Uri Avnery

".......Lacking a clear and agreed-upon aim, the Oslo agreement gave rise to a situation that has almost no precedent. That was not understood at the time, nor is it clearly understood today.

Usually, when a national liberation movement reaches its goal, the change takes place in one move. A day before, the French ruled Algeria, on the morrow it was taken over by the freedom fighters. The governance of South Africa was transferred from the white minority to the black majority in one sweep.

In Palestine, an entirely different situation was created: a Palestinian authority with state-like trappings was indeed set up, but the occupation did not end. This situation was much more dangerous than perceived initially.

There was a sharp contradiction between the "state in the making" and the continuation of the liberation struggle. One of its expressions was the new class of authority-owners, who enjoyed the fruits of government and began to smell of corruption, while the mass of ordinary people continued to suffer from the miseries of the occupation. The need to go on with the struggle clashed with the need to strengthen the Authority as a quasi-state.......

THE PALESTINIANS might conclude from this that the very creation of the Palestinian Authority was a mistake. That it was wrong to stop, or even to limit, the armed struggle against the occupation. There are those who say that the Palestinians should not have signed any agreement with Israel (still less giving up in advance 78% of Mandatory Palestine), or, at least, that they should have restricted it to an interim agreement signed by minor officials, instead of encouraging the illusion that a historic peace agreement had been achieved.

On both sides there are voices asserting that not only the Oslo agreement, but the whole concept of the "two-state solution" has died. Hamas predicts that the Palestinian Authority is about to turn into an agency of collaborators, some sort of subcontractor for safeguarding the security of Israel and fighting the Palestinian resistance organizations......"