The Secretary-General of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the comrade and leftist thinker Naif Hawatmeh, was right when he said that the Oslo agreement carries its miscarriage within it and will miscarry on itself by itself.
On the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the agreement in the courtyard of the White House in Washington, nothing remains for us from a Palestinian point of view but to admit that the agreement has failed abysmally and that it has inflicted on the Palestinian national project a catastrophe equal to the Nakba of 1948 and the Naksa of 1967, and brought gains to the Zionist state that its leaderships never dreamed of achieving since the seizure of Palestine.
The fundamental difference between the Nakba of 1948, the Naksa of 1967 and the Oslo catastrophe is that the latter occurred by the choice and conviction of the Palestinian leadership. At the time of the signing of the Oslo agreement, the fate of the Palestinian people and their land was not in Arab or foreign hands, as was the case when the past calamities occurred. The influential leadership of the Liberation Organization under the late Yasser Arafat bears alone the responsibility for this catastrophe before the Palestinian people and before history. This leadership signed the Oslo agreements and the subsequent agreements of submission and sale of the Palestinian national interests of its own will, without returning to the leadership institutions of the PLO and without questioning the people about the agreements concerning its fate – not even once during the past twenty years.
The leadership that ascended the throne after the assassination of President Arafat was no better than its predecessor. Mahmoud Abbas and those around him cemented submission, monopolized decision-making, and continued the previous approach built on security coordination with the occupation on the one hand, on the latter's continued dispossession of Palestinian land and building of settlements, and on the slow demolition of the national economy by tying it to the Zionist economy and begging from the donor countries on the other.
Twenty years after the signing of the Oslo agreements, we look upon the land of Palestine cut into segments by the Zionist settlements and the bypass roads, upon its people demoralized and broken – its resistance abandoned by the influential leadership's renunciation of the people's right to resist the occupation – and upon a Palestinian leadership in both halves of the homeland whose sole concern is preserving the privileges of its symbols and those who served them. Yes, Oslo legalized settlement and enabled the Zionists to seize Palestinian land by every means. The Oslo agreement, which Yasser Arafat and after him Mahmoud Abbas tried to market as an achievement for the Palestinian people and a gateway to national opening and the building of the would-be state, proved in its details to be the opposite. The land of Palestine became disputed land, and the right of control reserved for both parties of the conflict! And the Palestinian people became, by definition and daily handling, only those Arabs living in the occupied territories of 1967. With the founding of the Palestinian Authority as the agreements stipulated, the slow demolition of the Palestine Liberation Organization began. And today nothing remains of the PLO but a weak structure without a soul, to which the opposition forces cling in an attempt to save the Palestinian identity from extinction. And Mahmoud Abbas and those around him drive it to strip her peaceful policy of false legitimacy. And while the democratic opposition's call to reform the institutions of the PLO in their essence is sincere and reveals pure intention for the national interest, it is incomplete, and it is nothing but a shout in an empty desert. The opposition must begin by answering the critical question about the relationship between the authority and the PLO – and I do not mean here what was written in the protocols of the executive committee, for this institution and its decisions have had no value since the signing of Oslo, nor do I mean the honeyed talk Yasser Arafat sold to the Palestinian people, but I mean in this context the daily Palestinian reality. This reality shows to near and far that the Palestinian authority has replaced the PLO and inherited it, and the latter has nothing left but a nostalgic function, nothing more. Whoever wants to restore Palestinian unity and rebuild the Palestinian identity must work to dissolve the Palestinian authority and lift the mulberry leaf covering the shame of the occupation and its works – anything else is nothing but charlatanism and circumvention of the people's feelings and emotions.
Whoever follows the daily hardship and slow death of the sons of the Palestinian people in the Yarmouk camp, whoever follows the struggle of the sons of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories of 1948 against the Prawer plan and others, and sees what the PLO and its institutions have “done” to them, realizes that it no longer constitutes anything but a mirage on the horizon, and realizes also that the talk of the authority's idols is nothing but an echo and the selling of talk in the media, and that their fundamental concern is pleasing the donor countries and preserving their privileges. Whoever has not thought, even for a single moment, of freezing security coordination with the occupation, and does not stop marketing the talk about the false peace negotiations at the time the occupation daily, before his eyes, seizes the land and builds settlements, has moved into another category and is no longer entrusted with the national interest.
It is time for the forces of the Palestinian democratic opposition to confront their people with its reality and demand from it the movement to save what remains. It must begin by determining the people over its fate and be certain that the Palestinian people are strong, their will is steel, and their unity is the sole compass that moves them; it must also abandon the game of concealment behind resounding slogans that do not relieve hunger or thirst.
* Director of the Institute for Strategic Studies of the Middle East – Hanover/Germany
