The European Union and Israel since Oslo

This chapter discusses the strengthening of ties between the EU and Israel during the breakdown of Oslo as well as during other fruitless peace initiatives. Shortly after the Oslo process began, the EU and Israel initiated negotiations on broadening their cooperation. This led to the signing of the EU–Israel Association Agreement in 1995. As well as economic cooperation, which was established as early as 1975 in a cooperation agreement, this new treaty included other areas, such as scientific and technical research. In more recent years the relationship between the EU and Israel has been deepened further. In 2014 the EU and Israel signed the Horizon 2020 scientific cooperation agreement, which gives Israel equal access with EU member states to the largest-ever EU research and innovation program. In itself, there is nothing wrong with the deepening of economic, scientific, cultural, and political relations between countries. However, the deepening of relations between the EU and Israel means indirect support for the Israeli occupation and the policy of expanding the settlements.

Israeli Impunity

This chapter discusses how Palestinians are being killed, wounded, maimed, and oppressed by Israeli governmental forces with little or no international pressure to limit, stop, or prosecute systematic attacks on Palestinian civilians. With its immense, deliberate destructiveness, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza have systematically attacked and eliminated people as well as predefined physical targets, all based on an Israeli military-political paradigm known as the Dahiya Doctrine. The aim of these Israeli attacks has been to “send Gaza decades into the past” while at the same time attaining “the maximum number of enemy casualties and keeping IDF casualties at a minimum.” Palestinian leaders have called on the Palestinian Authority to abolish the Oslo Accords since Israel has refused to commit to its obligations and instead has continued land grabs and settlement expansion in the West Bank and brutal attacks on civilian society in Gaza. Negotiations toward a final peace agreement have failed simply because Israel does not want peace.

The Oslo Accords and Palestinian Civil Society

This chapter discusses the role of civil society in helping Palestinians challenge Israeli occupation. Palestinian organizations have developed despite the absence of the state, independence, sovereignty, and citizenship. Organizational capacity and activism are an efficient tool and building block for unity and power here as elsewhere, which in turn will help Palestinians challenge their circumstances. The Norwegian People's Aid (NPA) has been active in the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 1987. Its goal is to help build the organizational and collective muscles of Palestinians to challenge occupation, oppression, and internal division. It is against this background that the NPA works in partnership with local Palestinian organizations. It is on this basis that they believe it is important to work with local forces rather than simply provide services. And it is from this perspective that they have watched the development of Palestinian civil society and the tensions, changes, and challenges that followed the Oslo Accords.

The Illusion of Palestinian Sovereignty

This chapter presents an article, originally published in Haaretz, that discusses the illusion of Palestinian soveriegnty. The article argues that the Israeli military's incursions into the West Bank's Area A and even Area B destroy the illusion of Palestinian sovereignty. It is a virtual sovereignty, fragmented and curtailed. Therefore, it is an illusion—but an illusion that works. The strength of the delusion of sovereignty can be seen in the way East Jerusalem residents, and even Palestinian citizens of Israel, often travel to West Bank enclaves and feel a sense of relief. In these enclosures, which are free of any army presence, they get a break from routine Israeli racism and vulgarity. This temporary feeling of rest and relief is only strengthened by the necessary return to Israel via an intimidating path of walls, barbed-wire fences, pointed rifles, threatening policemen and soldiers, and deluxe, verdant suburbs for Jews only.

Revisiting 1967: The False Paradigm of Peace, Partition, and Parity

This chapter examines the peace process historically as a strategy of the settler colonialist state and as a native response to it. It argues that the peace process was conceived at a particular moment, in June 1967, as part of the settler colonialist state's attempt to reconcile Israel's wish to remain demographically a Jewish state and its desire to expand geographically without losing the pretense of being a democratic state in the post-1967 context. It is also argued that the Israeli political and military elite knowingly engaged in this dilemma, contemplating the possibility of a scenario of its own or of others' making that would place it in control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. All three vantage points suggest that the two-state solution and the process that is supposed to bring it about are an Israeli plan, with modifications, by a powerful coalition of the US, EU, European Union, Russia, the United Nations, most of the Arab states, the Fatah Palestinian leadership, the Zionist Left and Center in Israel, and some well-known figures in the Palestinian solidarity movement. It is the power of the coalition and not the logic of the solution or the process that has maintained the “peace process” for so long, despite its apparent failure.

The Oslo Accords: Their Context, Their Consequences

In September 1993, United States President Bill Clinton presided over a handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn—capping off a “day of awe,” as the press described it with reverence. The occasion was the announcement of the Declaration of Principles (DOP) for political settlement of the Israel–Palestine conflict, which resulted from secret meetings in Oslo sponsored by the Norwegian government. This chapter examines the nature and significance of the Oslo Accords, and the consequences that flowed from them. It begins by reviewing highlights of the immediate background that set the context for the negotiations. It then turns to the DOP and the consequences of the Oslo process, which extends to the present, adding a few words on lessons that should be learned.

The Oslo Accords: A Common Savior for Israel and the PLO in Exile?

This chapter explores additional explanations for the negotiations resulting in the Oslo Accords. The dynamics within the Palestinian polity in general and in the Occupied Territories in particular changed dramatically after the Israeli occupation in 1967, and even more with the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1987. The overarching question in this chapter is the extent to which these developments had a substantial impact on the parties, not only the Palestinians but also the Israelis, leading them more actively to engage in dialogue. The chapter also looks at the possible outcome of these negotiations in relation to these changes in the Palestinian polity, not least for the Palestinian leadership. Its role as a guarantor for the security of Israel rather than the security of the Palestinian people has remained a paradox for the civilian population, victims of indiscriminate shelling and extensive house demolitions. A closer look at the elections of 2006 may broaden our understanding of these dynamics and how they developed in the aftermath of the accords.

A War of Ideas: The American Media on Israel and Palestine post Oslo

This chapter looks at several of the entities and tactics shepherding the opinions that Americans follow regarding Israel and Palestine; the experience journalists and others have in attempting to report on or expose this issue; and the oft-overlooked impact of Christian media on the perception, politics, and continuation of the status quo. Topics discussed include how most Americans perceive Oslo through the Israeli narrative; how a country that values its First Amendment cultivate a media that seems more interested in polarization, celebrities, and sensationalism than in reporting the news; the players who manage the narrative of Israel and Palestine; the media's employment of euphemisms and obfuscations rather than accurate terms in order to control the narrative; and reporting in the Middle East.

Facts in the Air: Palestinian Media Expression since Oslo

This chapter focuses on the struggle that has taken place over domestic Palestinian media, a battle that has been permanently hampered by the ways in which the international community reacted to the Oslo process and its extremely limited acceptance of Palestinian sovereignty. It argues that while individual Palestinian artists have thrived in the years since the accords, more systematic media efforts, such as Palestinian broadcasting, have been weighed down by the intense international scrutiny that Oslo invited upon Palestinian culture. The chapter aims to sketch some of the ways in which the Oslo Accords invited new structural limitations upon a struggling media sector already beset by the impositions of Israeli occupation.

Palestinian Identity in the Aftermath of Oslo

This chapter discusses the negative impact of the Oslo Accords on Palestinians. Palestinians did not win political sovereignty, a stable national economy, or independent civil society organizations. Instead, Oslo imprisoned them with restraints they could not escape. In a recent article, journalist Ben White asks why there has been no Palestinian Spring despite the eruption of revolutions in several Arab countries, including Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria. He argues that the Oslo Accords froze the Palestinian struggle for return and decolonization. He identifies several factors that restrain the Palestinian revolutionary spirit, including the checkpoints established by the Israeli occupation, the strategic planning of Israeli settlements, and the “separation wall” that closes off Palestinian cities. White also notes that Oslo has shaped the behavior and direction of key political actors in the Occupied Territories who marked the shift from a revolutionary focus to that of “interim” autonomy.