What Next After the Oslo Accords Collapse?

At the UN General Assembly meeting, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas declared that in light of Israeli breaches, Palestine would no longer be bound by the Oslo Accords - a series of agreements between Israel and Palestine. The intent of the Accords was not to directly establish peace between Israel and Palestine, but rather to create a framework and process which would build trust and eventually lead to a permanent settlement, with final talks to occur in 1999.

Abbas’s declaration is only the most recent major blow to the long-suffering Oslo Accords, but we can hope it may be the last. The truth is that the peace process in Israel/Palestine, as designed by the Oslo Accords, has been deeply flawed, even untenable from the start. Those events which have been perceived as blows, or setbacks to the process are in fact only symptomatic of deeper flaws, most notably, the failure of the Accords to account for intraparty conflict amongst both the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The first sign of this failure came in 1995, when Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist. The assassination showed that Israel is far from a fully unified entity, and exposed the failure of Rabin and the Labour party to effectively sell the agreement to the Israeli populace. The loss of the accord’s chief Israeli sponsor was significant and magnified by a combination of missteps by Israeli President Shimon Peres and a series of attacks by Palestinian militant group Hamas.  

Peres’s first mistake was his misjudgment of the widespread support following the assassination. Peres appears to have believed that this support was both stronger and more durable than it proved to be. Instead of scheduling snap elections to quickly establish a new government, probably with a stronger parliamentary majority than before, Peres delayed elections and attempted to restart controversial peace talks with Syria. Complicating matters further, during Peres's interim government, he was given, and took, the opportunity to assassinate a major leader of Hamas. He likely hoped the assassination would cripple Hamas, and would restore faith in security services shaken by their failure to prevent Rabin’s assassination. However, Hamas responded with a series of crippling attacks which shattered Israeli confidence in both Peres’s leadership and in the Accords. The combined effect was that the Labour Party that appeared unbeatable - at least one poll showed them with 76% approval to Likud’s 22%  - ultimately lost power to Likud in the next elections. The practical result was that Likud leadership was able to creatively reinterpret the Accords so that, while technically remaining within the letter of the agreements, they came to be used not as a means for Israeli withdrawal and trust building as originally intended, but rather as a means for consolidating control and expanding settlements.

Hindsight is 20/20, and while it may not have been possible to prevent the collapse of the Oslo Accords, we may be able to learn from their mistakes and increase the possibility of success for future efforts in the region. Most importantly, future agreements need to address intraparty conflict. Within Israel, efforts must be made to ensure that future agreements enjoy broad support, not merely the support of a leading party or coalition. As the events in 1995 and 1996 demonstrate, democracies are unstable and public opinion can be fickle. The success of any future agreement will be contingent on the ability and enthusiasm of its support from a substantial majority of Israel’s political and civic leaders. The same is true of the Palestinians. The first step of the Oslo Accords involved an agreement wherein the Palestine Liberation Organization renounced violence and recognized Israel’s right to exist in exchange for being recognized as the sole representative of the Palestinians. This extraordinary claim that Israel has the power to determine who represents Palestine, was inadequately contested, given, in part, that the UN had already taken the same step. The problems, however, were myriad.

First, the PLO had already split several times during its history, and would even split again as a result of these Accords. That Arafat proved unrepresentative of his whole organization was an ominous sign for his ability to lead an emerging Palestinian state.

Further complicating matters, Arafat, Abbas, and others in the PLO leadership were living in exile and had been for quite some time. The disconnect between the concerns of the PLO leadership and ordinary Palestinians was summed up by Edward Said in an article for the London Review of Books in October of 1993:

Neither Arafat nor any of his Palestinian partners…has ever seen an Israeli settlement. There are now over two hundred of them, principally on hills, promontories and strategic points throughout the West Bank and Gaza. ... An independent system of roads connects them to Israel, and creates a disabling discontinuity between the main centres of Palestinian population. ... In addition, Israel has tapped into every aquifer on the West Bank, and now uses about 80 per cent of the water there for the settlements and for Israel proper.

As Said observes, the Oslo Accords were largely silent on these issues. This silence is what ultimately enabled Likud and other Israeli factions to disregard the intent of the agreement and convert it into one for expanded Israeli occupation. If the Palestinians had not been represented only by a single organization, operating from exile, it is possible that the Accords would have addressed some of these crucial Palestinian concerns, which the PLO seems, at best, to have undervalued.

This disconnect between the PLO leadership and Palestinian concerns, and the exclusion of other Palestinian organizations from the negotiations likely also contributed to the previously mentioned attacks launched by Hamas, as they had no stake in the agreement. It is also possible that, with the engagement of a broader swath of the Palestinian population, Peres may have felt that he had more choices beyond the assassination of the Hamas leader which prompted those attacks.

At this point, we are dealing with hypotheticals and counterfactuals. There is nothing this discussion can do to alter the unfortunate events of the last 20 years, but we can hope that their consideration will lead to more effective solutions in the future.