Oslo is an unfinished process, but it is not destiny

The Palestinians remember the Oslo Accords more than they remember the Second Intifada, which was the strongest expression of demolishing the illusions attached to this ill-fated agreement, and of the popular refusal to surrender.

The invocation of Oslo on its anniversary annually is due to the fact that this agreement is an unfinished process, meaning that Israel aimed, through it, and under its cover, to deepen the settler-colonial project and perpetuate hegemony over all of Mandatory Palestine. Only the Palestinian Authority, one of the outcomes of Oslo, is committed to it, specifically security coordination, which is the essence of this agreement. If we borrow Patrick Wolfe's common saying about colonialism, this agreement is "a structure, not an event."

This agreement has disastrous repercussions that will take perhaps an entire generation to be eliminated, to achieve salvation from the nightmare of colonialism, and to achieve liberation and return. The most dangerous of these repercussions: The fragmentation of the national movement, the occurrence of division, the dissipation of the national liberation project, and the undermining of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which has a dual historical function. As a tool of liberation and a gathering vessel for all the Palestinian people, at home and in places of refuge.

These repercussions are ongoing, resulting in continuous attempts to reproduce it and make it eternal. To clarify and add, to understand the factors for the sustainability of this agreement, what it protects and protects the ever-expanding colonial project is the emergence of a political-economic class, upon which the rule of the Ramallah Authority is based, and whose interests have become linked to the survival of this agreement.

Over the past years, this agreement/deal has been thoroughly analyzed and dissected by research centres, forums, magazines, analysts and others, and these institutions have hardly finished dealing with a new development in the Zionist settlement project, until they are surprised by another new development, to confront it in an attempt to understand it and anticipate its consequences. Israeli, Palestinian and international.

The latest of these developments is the most blatant version of colonial brutality, the so-called decisive plan, by its architect, the Minister of Finance and Minister in the Ministry of Defense, Bezalel Smotrich, which is being implemented on the ground, under the current right-wing settler coalition government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

On the Arab and global levels, this agreement allowed Israel’s unprecedented expansion in the Arab and global world, as new Arab regimes fell into the clutches of normalization and the security alliance. At the global level, the Palestinian cause has lost large, important countries such as China and India. The number of countries that recognized Israel after the Oslo Accords reached 165, up from 110 before Oslo.

Years passed after the suppression of the second intifada, which was dominated by almost complete Palestinian submission, and which ended with thousands of martyrs, wounded, and detainees. During this very bad period, the Palestinian security forces were re-engineered, at the hands of the American General, Leith Dayton, to consolidate their function as a protector of Israeli security, by preventing and suppressing resistance. Money also flowed from donor countries, whose goal was to protect the authority and not to liberate the West Bank and Gaza Strip from occupation and settlement, or popular economic development.

This money played a role in linking the authority and its dependent and distorted economy to the neoliberal system, and in providing comfort for the occupation to practice oppression, expansion, theft, and siege at a small cost. This resulted in profound social, economic and moral transformations, which strengthened poverty on the one hand, and grew a middle class with the ability to consume and a wealthy segment, which distanced people from the mentality of struggle and resistance.

Resistant reaction

In recent years, specifically the last decade and a half, initiatives to appeal the Oslo Accords and what it represents, and what results from it on a daily basis, of brutal colonial practice against the land, people, and history, have been renewed and even intensified. These are independent popular initiatives. The living forces of the Palestinian people wrote verses of resistance and steadfastness on many occasions.

These initiatives, which take different and diverse forms, from cultural, to popular and armed resistance, in addition to civil resistance on international arenas, people’s arenas, played an important role in reviving hope among broad popular groups, and new groups crystallized, especially vital ones, such as youth, Freed from the shock of the defeat of the second intifada. These groups, especially the most aware, educated, and courageous, are currently undertaking the recovery of the narrative and regaining awareness of one Palestine, one people, and one destiny, but in the face of major internal and external challenges, and many dangers.

Important opportunities have arisen and are emerging for these generations, and their vanguards, in their resistance to the Zionist and colonial project, which generated an official apartheid system, represented by the issuance of successive reports about Israel as an apartheid regime that practices crimes against humanity.

Israel has created the reality of a single state, ruled by an apartheid system, which has contributed to re-exposing its settler-colonial reality, a system that is inconsistent with the era of democracy and human rights. All of this contributed to reviving the authentic Palestinian liberation project, which includes Palestine between the sea and the river, on the ruins of the colonial apartheid system.

Now comes the crushing, unprecedented internal crisis that is ravaging the Israeli entity, revealing its blatant contradictions and its horizontal and vertical divisions. But in order for this division to transform from a dispute over the form of the state, and between the desire to restore Jewish colonial democracy and abandon its colonial Jewish democracy, to a struggle for democracy between the sea and the river, that is, abandoning the colonial apartheid system and its privileges granted to the Jews, we need a qualitative shift. It is true in our thinking, our organisation, our vision of liberation, our performance and the way we manage the conflict. This is the greatest challenge facing vital segments of our people, whether young or old, men and women, individuals and institutions. "About Arabs 48"