The
Oslo Disaster: Executive Summary
by Efraim Karsh
• Sep 14, 2016
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Executive summary of The
Oslo Disaster, Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies,
September 2016.
Viewed from a 23-year vantage point, the Oslo "peace
process" between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) stands as one of the worst-ever calamities to have hit Israelis and
Palestinians.
For Israel, it has been the starkest strategic blunder in the
country's history – establishing an ineradicable terror entity on
Israel's doorstep, deepening its internal cleavages, destabilizing its
political system, and weakening its international standing.
For West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, it has brought about subjugation
to corrupt and repressive PLO and Hamas regimes – regimes that have
reversed the hesitant advent of civil society in these territories,
shattered their socioeconomic wellbeing, and made the prospects for peace
and reconciliation with Israel ever more remote.
This abject failure is a direct result of the Palestinian leadership's
perception of the process as a pathway not to a two-state solution —
meaning Israel alongside a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza —
but to the subversion of the State of Israel; not to nation-building and
state creation, but to the formation of a repressive terror entity that
would perpetuate conflict with Israel while keeping its hapless
constituents in constant and bewildered awe as its leaders line their
pockets from the proceeds of this misery.
Palestinian leaders see the peace
process as a pathway not to a two-state solution, but to the subversion
of Israel.
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So long as things on the Palestinian side are permitted, or even
encouraged, to remain as they are, there will be no progress whatsoever
toward peace. There will be no advancement towards peace in the framework
of a French-initiated international conference, nor even in bilateral
talks (were the Palestinians to be somehow coerced to return to the
negotiating table).
Just as the creation of free and democratic societies in Germany and
Japan after World War II necessitated a comprehensive sociopolitical and
educational transformation, so it will only be when Palestinian society
undergoes a real "spring" that the century-long conflict
between Arabs and Jews can at long last be resolved and a
semi-functioning Palestinian state come into being. This requires
sweeping the corrupt and oppressive PLO and Hamas rulers from power,
eliminating endemic violence from political and social life, and teaching
the virtues of coexistence with Israeli neighbors.
Sadly, the possibility of a Palestinian spring, which seemed to be in
the offing in 1993 when the PLO hovered on the verge of extinction and
West Bank and Gaza leadership appeared eager to strike a historic deal
within the framework of the Washington peace negotiations, has been
destroyed for the foreseeable future by the Oslo "peace
process."
Read the full report: The
Oslo Disaster, Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies,
September 2016. See also Efraim Karsh's article in the Fall 2006 issue of
Middle East Quarterly, "Why
the Oslo Process Doomed Peace."
Efraim Karsh is emeritus
professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at Kings College
London, a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for
Strategic Studies, and principal research fellow at the Middle East
Forum.
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