The Oslo "Peace Process" and the Betrayal of Peace
Rosemary Radford Ruether

I want to argue in my talk here this afternoon that the Oslo "Peace Process" that went on between 1993 and 2000 has functioned as a betrayal of the conditions of a genuine or just peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The process has been stalled for more than a year, but the main reason for that is that it was never really intended by the Israeli side to conclude with minimal conditions for a just peace that would afford the Palestinians with an autonomous state and the economic and social conditions for a sustainable daily life. Rather the Israelis constructed these "peace" negotiations, with the full collaboration of the United States, to engineer a negotiated surrender of the Palestinians to permanent military occupation and economic dependency on Israel.

To understand how this took place one needs a quick review of the history, particularly in terms of control of land. In 1900 the Palestinian Arabs were 98% of historic Palestine and were occupying villages, towns and cities throughout the region. The Zionist movement in Europe was sending immigrants to buy land mostly from absentee landlords, but these were small groups. Most Jews in the Diaspora did not identify with this movement, but wanted full equality in the countries in which they were living. In 1917, as part of the take over of Palestine during World War I, the British issued the Balfour Declaration declaring its sponsorship of Zionist immigration with the goal of establishing a "homeland" for the Jewish people, but one which was not to prejudice the rights of the "non-Jewish" peoples of the region. Thus the waves of Jewish immigration were stepped up in the 20's and 30's, and the Palestinians and Arab peoples began to protest these immigrations as prejudicing their own rights. The British blocked Jewish immigration during World War II since they feared it would cause the Arabs to turn against them and ally with the Germans. They promised the Palestinians an independent Palestinian Arab state after the war. This, of course, was when the European Jews desperately needed a place to which to escape but the British and the Americans also blocked Jewish immigration to the United States and the British empire's territories, thus trapping Jews in Europe.

In 1946, remorseful over the terrible destruction of European Jewry by Hitler, the majority of the United Nations, with much pressure from the United States, voted to partition Palestine into two states, a Jewish state with 55% of the land and an Arab Palestinian state with 45%. At this time Jewish residents were about 600,000 and owned 10% of the land while Palestinians were a million and a half and occupied 90% of the land in all parts of the region. The 1948-9 war that broke out between the newly founded Jewish state and the Arabs became the occasion in which the Israelis expanded their control to 77% of the land, saw almost a million Palestinians either flee or be driven out. Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt what was left of Gaza. Thus the territory for the Palestinian state disappeared, and large numbers of Palestinians became refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon or Syria.

Only a small remnant of 145,000 Palestinians remained in the expanded state of Israel. Israel confiscated most of the land formerly occupied by refugee Palestinians, destroying over 400 villages. Thus Israel's control of the land expanded to 90% of the territory it now occupied. With few exceptions the Israelis refused to allow the refugees to return or to acknowledge any responsibility for their expulsion, even through the United Nations voted that the refugees had the right either to return to their homes and lands or be compensated for them, a resolution that remains a part of international law.

In 1967, in a preemptive strike against Syria and Egypt, Israel occupied the rest of the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli military leaders quickly drew up a plan, called the Allon plan, to partition this newly occupied territory and marginalize the Palestinian population in it. This called for a ring of Israeli settlements around Jerusalem, and the annexation of this area into Israel. Another line of settlements would be placed down the Jordan Valley. Israel would expand its control to most of the best agricultural land and control all the water, while the Palestinians would be reduced to largely landless enclaves in concentrated population centers. In some future "peace" negotiations these Palestinian enclaves would be transferred to the control of Jordan and Israel would annex the rest of the land without taking in any significant numbers of Palestinians as citizens of Israel.

The actual policies of Israel for the last 34 years have proceeded along the lines of this plan. There have been continual building of first an inner ring and then an outer ring of settlements around Jerusalem. A gerrymandered territory has been drawn up around Arab East Jerusalem which avoids Palestinian population enclaves, while confiscating the agricultural land around them. This settlement ring has now grown to ten times the size of former East Jerusalem, reaching beyond Ramallah to the North, almost to Jericho to the East and beyond Bethlehem to the South with the first ring annexed into Israel. Settlements have also expanded in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as land taken for "public purposes", i.e. military use, roads. This amounts to 70% of the West Bank and 40% of Gaza.

The Palestinians in the territories have been denied permits to build new houses. When they do so without permit, their houses are demolished. They are subject to continual efforts to withdraw their residency rights to live in Jerusalem. They have also been denied permits to build new hospitals, schools or factories, and agriculture has dwindled as land was taken and water made inaccessible. Thus the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to a continual process of what has been called "de-development." reducing them to economic dependency on Israel for work, work that can be withdrawn at any time through denial of permits to work or curfews that prevent them from leaving their enclaves. A network of by pass roads have and continue to be built, confiscating more land, linking Jewish settlements with each other, but cutting Palestinians off from each other and from access to Jerusalem. Palestinians are forbidden to use these roads. Thus Palestinians have been ever more ghettoized in separated enclaves with few economic or cultural resources.

In 1987 Palestinians rose in protest against these repressive policies and organized street protests, boycotts of Israeli goods and committees of economic and cultural developments. These protests began to dwindle away by 1990 as Israel responded with violent repression, killing some 2000 and injuring about 150,000. Hundreds of thousands were detained and usually tortured in prison. In 1989 the PLO, led by Yasir Arafat, voted for what has been called "the historic compromise." The Palestinians would give up their claims to the territories within the "green line," i.e. the 77% percent of Palestine that became the state of Israel in 1949, if Israel would concede the Occupied Territories, the 23% of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza, and East Jerusalem which Israeli occupied in 1967.

Recognizing the growing international pressure for a peace settlement that would end the conflict, labor leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres hit on a brilliant plan," they would accede to a "peace process" with the PLO, but in a way that would consolidate and legalize the settlements around East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. This would amount to a new partition of the remnant of Palestine along the lines conceived 25 tears earlier in the Allon plan, but instead of giving the Palestinian population centers to Jordan, they would be given local self-government but not real sovereignty in disconnected enclaves without adequate resources for an independent economy.

After a certain amount of international tinkering , this became the Oslo Plan. In this plan it was agreed that the densely populated Palestinian areas, Jericho, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus, Tulkarem, most of Hebron and 60% of Gaza would be turned over to a Palestinian Authority who would exercise local self-government. Arafat and his PLO fighters who had been evacuated to Tunis after the Lebanese war would be allowed to return and become this Palestinian authority. A vague hope was held out of a larger process in which the final status of East Jerusalem, additional land and the return of the refugees would be negotiated. Bill Clinton staged the famous handshake of Arafat and Rabin on the White House lawn and the world rejoiced.

But it gradually became clear that what Israel saw as the maximum goal of this peace process and what the Palestinians would accept as its minimal goal were totally different. The Palestinians assumed that the framework of the United Resolutions calling for the return of the 1967 occupied territories and the right of the refugees to return or be compensated would govern the negotiations. These negotiations would continue until Israel withdrew completely from the 1967 territories, refugees would be able to return or be compensated, the settlements would be dismantled and a fully sovereign Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, would emerge in the West Bank and Gaza.

For the Israeli government none of these final status outcomes were acceptable. The plan they presented under the Oslo process subdivided the West Bank and Gaza into three zones. Area A was the population centers to be put under the Palestinian Authority, about 9% of the West Bank and 60% of crowded Gaza. Area C was all the Jordan Valley and the settlement areas with buffer zones around them, about 70% of the West Bank. These would remain in Israeli hands. Area B, the additional 21% of the West Bank and Gaza between A and B would be jointly administered by the Israelis and the Palestinians, some of which might be given to the Palestinians. The extensive settlements around Jerusalem were already annexed into Israel and so were excluded from the division, even though this is still occupied territory from the point of view of international law.

It gradually became apparent that what Israel had in mind was not an autonomous state in all the West Bank and Gaza, but a series of cantons, divided from one another and from Israel, cut off from water and agricultural land. They would be wholly dependent on Israel for employment, water and movement between enclaves. "Security" would remain in the hands of the Israeli military who could close these enclaves at will, cutting off access to jobs, travel, education and health services outside their local borders. This arrangement quickly began to be called an apartheid system, like South Africa apartheid, that would segregate the Palestinians from the Jewish populations while continuing economic and military control over them.

Meanwhile the Palestinian Authority created out of the former PLO fighters led by Yazir Arafat quickly became an authoritarian and corrupt bureaucracy whose primary job, in the eyes of Israel and the United States, was not any real economic development of the area, but rather to be a local police to suppress any resistance of the Palestinians to this system of Israeli control, particularly to control Islamic groups, such as Hamas. Arrest and detention without trial and even torture were acceptable as ways to keeping dissident Palestinians under control, including journalists and lawyers that questioned this abuse of human rights. In so far as Arafat was not able to prevent militant actions, such as suicide bombers, he was to be blamed as failing to do his job, hence as responsible for these actions, despite the fact that such actions did not originate from groups he controlled. Palestinians became increasingly alienated from the Palestinian Authority and saw themselves as having been tricked by Israel and the US.

Then on September 28, 2000 Ariel Sharon carried out a deliberately provocative action by visiting the Muslim Holy site, the Dome of the Rock, with 1000 soldiers, implicitly asserting Israel's right to take over this area, long claimed by conservative Jews. The frustrated Palestinians rose in spontaneous street protests in what became called the second or Al-Aqsa Intifada. Sharon was then elected Prime Minister of Israel in the Spring of 2001, putting in charge of Israel the man responsible for the massacre of refugees in the Shabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon and a man clearly willing to engage in almost any kind of oppressive violence against Palestinians that he could get away with. That has proved to be much indeed, including extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian leaders claimed to be responsible for planning actions against Israel. Needless to say, such assassinations often kill bystanders as well.

Israel again responded with massive fire power, only now not simply shooting demonstrators, but bombing Palestinian houses, and public buildings, bulldozing Palestinian houses around settlement areas in Gaza to widen buffer zones. In the last year Palestinians have suffered more than 700 deaths and more than 16,000 injuries; about 150 Jews have been killed. But deaths and injuries is only a part of the toll taken on Palestinian daily life by "the siege" of Palestine. Israel has put the subdivided enclaves under continuous closure, cutting these areas off from each other. People were prevented from moving from one area to another, getting to jobs, schools, hospitals. The already impoverished Palestinian economic has suffered further devastation with 70% of the Palestinian population reduced to close to starvation or just above that level.

In the last days of the Clinton administration there was a last minute effort to create an agreement that would end the protest. Barak promised to turn over to the Palestinians 95% of the land, if the Arafat would sign away the final status issues of return or compensation of the refugees and East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state. Arafat knew well the rage that would be turned against him if he accepted this agreement and turned it down. Clinton and Barak engaged in a campaign of vilification of Arafat for the world media for this refusal, but in fact this so-called "wonderful offer" was largely delusory. It gave the Palestinians control over Area A and most of B, but without any dismantling of settlements or ceding land in area C under Israel's control. As Jeff Halper, Israeli peace activist, put it, it was like offering prisoners in a prison the right to run the internal space of a prison, without conceding any control over the walls that imprisoned them which remain in the hands of armed guards.

Where does all this put us in terms of hopes for a more just peace in Israel-Palestine today, October 20, 2001, not only after more than a year of siege against the Palestinian entrapped population, but also with the new reality of the use of three airplanes as living weapons to crash into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon? Ariel Sharon tried to seized this moment to link the Palestinians with the Muslim terrorist network under Osma bin Ladin, and thus profile the Palestinians as a collective terrorist group that should be given no consideration as having any just cause. Increasing protest against Israel's treatment of the Palestinians has been growing world wide in the last year, including significant new Jewish voices, such as the anti-occupation network, Not in My Name. By linking Palestinians somehow with being part of the Bin Ladin terrorists, this growing sympathy among Americans, including American Jews might be stifled.

Ariel Sharon took to referring to Arafat as "our Bin Laden," even though there is not the slightest evidence of a connection between the two. Shortly after the news of the bombings in New York and Washington reached Israel, Palestinian youth were filmed celebrating and passing out candy in a street in East Jerusalem, thus presenting a vivid icon for Americans, as well as to the rest of the world, of Palestinians as "rejoicing" that such a terrible thing has happened Americans and hence in some way guilty for it. There is some evidence that this event was partly staged by the Israeli Defense force who bought the candy from an Arab sweet shop and ordered the owner to distribute it to the youth, who were then filmed celebrating. Once the actual extent of the tragedy in the United States became know to Palestinians, condolences have poured in from Palestinian individuals and groups to American friends. Palestinians held prayer services for the victims.

There was also considerable effort in our media to shore a deepened identification between America and Israel as two people presumably united against the same threat of mindless "Arab terrorism." Americans must begin to live like Israel, taking daily precautions against terrorists through security checks at the entrance of every public building. We must be ready to do to terrorists what israel does against Palestinians, including extra-judicial assassinations. Laws that were passed some years ago to forbid the kind of assassination plots that the CIA hatched against leaders such as Fidel Castro were rescinded, to allow the present Bush administration to carry out such assassinations. Dark hints were made that criticism of the government and the American "way of life" will no longer be tolerated. Thus the gateway seems to be opening up for some serious violations of human rights. There has been an effort to stifle any criticism in advance by telling Americans that this is the way Israel does it and this is what we must now do to be "safe." "Security" becomes the all encompassing justification for a vast realm of questionable violations of our and other peoples basic human rights.

On October 7 the expected military assault against the Taliban government in Afghanistan began in the name of defeating those who "harbored" the al Queda network, eventually creating a new government more amenable to our interests and seizing or killing Osma bin Ladin and his associates. The result so far has been further battering an already battered country with little infrastructure left to destroy, but slow progress to either of these goals. But Bush and Powell also realized that they could not build an international coalition that must include most of the Muslim countries in the world without conciliating the Muslim world somewhat on the issue of injustice to the Palestinians and pulling back on the stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims as representatives of evil. Thus both Powell and Bush have announced that they support a Palestinian state based on the guidelines of the UN declarations of 242 and 338, guidelines which have been largely ignored in the Oslo "peace" process. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has also publicly endorsed a "viable" Palestinian state, a phrase which implies a contiguous land base and adequate land, water and economic resources, not the apartheid enclaves under Israeli rule which Israeli has been trying to sell to the world in the name of "peace." Rather than gaining a free hand to attack the Palestinians, and perhaps even kill or remove Arafat, as he had hoped, Sharon has been ordered by Washington to pull back from provocative actions, such as house demolitions and invasion of Palestinian areas, and to restart negotiations with Arafat. Tony Blair has met with Arafat, thus restoring him as the Palestinian leader
recognized by the West.

These developments have enraged Sharon and the Israeli hard liners and reawaked some cautious hope among Palestinians that, in the name of lessening the anger of the Muslim world against America, their situation might be given some consideration, but as Washington absorbs itself in the war in Afghanistan and the anthrax pranks that have set the US on edge, it is not clear how much energy will actually be put into the Palestinian situation. A recent round of assassinations of Hamas leaders, sparking a Hamas killing of an Israeli cabinet minister and justifying new invasions of Palestinian territory, were clearly intended by Sharon to prevent any improved relations.

This seems to me to be an enormously dangerous moment, but also one with significant opportunities that need to be embraced creatively. On the one hand, we have been the characteristic American responses to any threat to our position in the world, appeals to national unity, the national flag displayed at every check out counter, a rhetoric of righteous violence that startlingly mirrors that of Osma Bin Ladin. Both sides employ an apocalyptic world view divided between the forces of Light and Darkness, good and evil. Such righteous violence operates with a false concreteness of symbols of the "evil other." Each side images that by destroying symbols and representatives of the other, they somehow actually destroy "evil." Both sides kill ordinary people who happen to be living, working or traveling in these symbolic structures, whose deaths they justify as "collateral damage." But what is collateral damage to one side are the loved ones of the other side, thus fueling outrage and a thirst for revenge. The cycle of violence is not ended, but fed by such retaliation.

On the other side, this moment is pregnant with opportunities to change the discourse and paradigm of relationship between peoples. Americans are startled to find out that a large part of the Muslim and third worlds are angry with us. This is a severe jolt to our assumption that we are the elect of the world, American the Good, America the Innocent, America the Righteous, the bearer of democracy and prosperity whom everyone should admire. We need to help Americans understand that the issues in this conflict are far wider than the grievances about our policies in the Middle East, although these are important and symptomatic. Ultimately this anger has to do with a world divided between an affluent 20% of the worlds population, disproportionately concentrated in the US, that enjoys 85% of the world's resources, while the other 80% scrapes by on the remaining 15% and the poorest 20%, one a billion people live at the starvation level. This is what has been called the "champagne glass" world economy. Anger is fueled by daily experiences of injustice that point to a world system of unjust corporate and military power. This is the recruiting ground for terrorist networks that plot acts of vengeance. What happened in New York and Washington may be the first salvo of a global class war.

I think this is the moment to try to educate Americans on how we actually look to those who are on the underside of our power. Much of how our government and military actually acts in the Middle East and the Third World is unknown to Americans. This is the time to do some concerted education about our actual history and reality as a world power from the perspective of the others.

It is also a time for Americans to learn sometime about Islam. With Muslims now some 6 million US citizens, there has been some recognition from President down to local communities that the image of Islam needs to be seriously changed in American culture. In some places local religious councils have organized "getting to know you" meetings between Christians and Jews with Muslim communities. This needs to go much farther. Churches and schools need to put on their agendas programs of education on Islam, education about the complexity of the Arab and Muslim worlds. Muslim scholars need to become an integral part of university education.

Secondly, it is a time to insist that there be a significant shift in concrete US policies in a number countries, starting with a viable Palestinian state that will allow for their genuine dignity and self-determination. We should also insist that the US and Britain desist from the embargo against Iraq which has so far done nothing but kill 100s of 1000's of Iraqi women and children and dismantled the infrastructure of a once fairly developed country, but has done nothing to change the repressive leadership of Saddam Hussein. This needs to be acknowledged as a failed and immoral policy.

More generally, we need to start imagining a changed paradigm of relationship between the affluent sector of the US and Western world, and the rest of the planet. What would it mean for Israelis and Palestinians to really share the land together, discovering that they can flourish together, whereas now they are locked in an endless cycle of impoverishment and retaliation against each other? Can this transformed imagination of a shared land where both sides can flourish together become extended to global relations between the 20% that enjoy 85% of the world's wealth and the 80% that are struggling to survive? Can we imagine a shared earth where we all can flourish modestly, humans, animals, plants, sky, earth and water, rather than a few humans living in great affluence, but also endless insecurity in fear of those who have been shut out?

Can we, as the Jubilee movement has demanded, forgive the debts of the poorest nations, now paid many times over, so they can be released from the vicious cycle of debt payment that never ends? Can we convert ourselves from a petroleum guzzling society to one based our renewable energy, so we can relax our grip of the oil producing nations of the Middle East and elsewhere? We need to forge a new ethic of letting go of excess power which crafts a new relation of mutuality and partnership between peoples and between people and the natural world on every level, from households and neighborhoods to bioregions to global relations.

This is not an optional task. It is the task for survival of humanity in the next century. As Dan Mcquire has said, "If present trends continue, we will not." It is what Thomas Berry has called the "great work" of our generation. Only through some kind of transformation along these lines can we avoid an impending global class war that will destroy us all.