Oslo is dead
JVL Introduction
Whatever the hopes or illusions at the time might have been, the signing of the Oslo Accords thirty years ago has proven to have been about one thing only: the dispossession of the Palestinian people.
David Hearst’s overview of the Oslo process makes it clear that Israel never intended there to be a Palestinian state, alongside a sovereign Israel. Whatever hopes might have been invested in it, the Palestinian Authority, from its inception was always an extension of Israeli security policy.
The Oslo process was never a process to reach a solution to this conflict. It survives as a fig leaf, to which the international community pays obeisance while it allows Israel’s annexation of the West Bank to continue apace.
Oslo is dead. What alternative is there, asks Hearst, but one state for all its peoples living as equals?
RK
This article was originally published by Middle East Eye on Wed 6 Sep 2023. Read the original here.
Oslo is dead. Liberal Israelis must make common cause with the Palestinians
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It is easy for people to be wise after the event but in October 1993 in National Labour Briefing, in a debate with Julia Bard of the JSG I wrote in an article ‘Birthright sold for a mess of potage’ alluding to the Biblical parable of Esau selling his inheritance for a bowl of soup that
‘this agreement will not lead to an independent state but further misery and defeat… This agreement… represents a massive victory for imperialism and its Zionist allies.’
I didn’t have a crystal ball and I don’t today. What I did have was an understanding that Zionism was not founded in order to hand over a portion of what it considered its patrimoney. The Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) was theirs, all of it.
Zionism was always a movement of Jewish Supremacy. As Ahad Ha’am had also written in Truth from the Land of Israel, the natives were invisible.
At the time people dismissed those of us who said that you could not ignore Zionism. Even today there are those who believe that Zionism is irrelevant. It isn’t. When Ben Gvir and Netanyahu talk about ‘Zionist values’ what they mean is the desire to erase and eliminate the Palestinian presence. See
https://tinyurl.com/bddy7cfm
Aljazeera has made a documentary on the lives of Palestinians in the overcrowding refugee camps & I just sat & cried!
Why has the world financed & approved Zionists to commit such HORRORS, DEHUMANISATION, in a land not that long ago called Palestinian WHY?? I’m still crying at this Zionist Israeli atrocity against Palestinians! Have Israelis forgotten the Nazis & Gestapos ???
Please see this programme on Aljazeera!