What’s unknown about Oslo?

Twenty-two years have passed since the ill-fated Oslo Accords were signed. Despite the Palestinian struggle over the past century and its many sacrifices, including the 170 souls lost during the current — and third — intifada, 68 per cent of our people would like to abolish the agreements with Israel. In addition, 70.5 per cent of the population would like to see an end to the Palestinian Authority’s security cooperation with the occupying power, while 72.3 per believe that it is essential to have an armed struggle if Palestinian rights are to be achieved.

Nevertheless, the PA is still holding on strongly to ill-fated Oslo even though it has been worse for Palestine’s situation than the 1917 Balfour Declaration or the UN Partition Plan of 1947. After all, these two texts, though they meant to establish a Jewish “homeland” then state in Palestine, had no intention to prejudice or deprive the Palestinians of their civil and religious rights.

I would like to ask the Palestinian delegation which negotiates on our behalf in all the secret as well as public negotiations in Oslo and Washington, where is your slogan for freedom and independence? Did you sacrifice our liberation slogans for your own benefit when you signed the Oslo Accords? We know for sure that legal advisors who sat in on the Palestinian delegation’s meetings in Washington (but not in Oslo) advised you to accept certain legal points that were sent to you. Did you place those in the wastebasket where you put all the other factors you ignored? It was for these reasons that the head of the delegation at the time, Dr Haider Abdulshafi, resigned and the result of this is that you gave the Palestinian people semi-autonomous rule. On the shallow level it is called self-rule but in reality it is not autonomous by any means, as it caters for Israeli security.

Joel Zenger, who was an adviser to Shimon Peres (and has authored several publications for Hebrew University Press and Oxford University Press), has stated that Oslo was meant to ensure the establishment of a military occupation. In addition, one of the major conditions of the agreement was to prohibit the exposing of collaborators with Israel or those who promoted corruption within the Palestinian Authority (see articles two and three). Hence, the committee against corruption, in fact, does not put anyone on trial.

Moreover, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, continues to represent two legitimacies: a legitimate revolution and the need for a legitimate state (one that more than 142 countries have now recognised). The undoubted legitimacy of the intifada confirms the military nature of the Israeli occupation. The Oslo Accords killed Arab resistance in its relationship to Israel. We have spared many Arab countries from embarrassment; after all, they cannot be more royal than the king.

The Zionist movement has entered a new phase of killings that are perpetrated against our people, who are executed by way of massacres, house and land confiscation, settlements and a kind of holocaust. The Zionists besieged President Yasser Arafat for three years in his Ramallah headquarters and later killed him, it is believed widely, by poisoning him. What this means is that no agreement with Israel will require it to revert to a previous stage. The only approach that we can work with is the one proposed by the UN in Resolution 3034, which dates back to 8 December 1972, and Resolution 3314 dated 14 February 1974.

Due to all of this, we must kill the Oslo Accords ten times over.

There is also evidence to suggest that the Israeli Mossad spy agency has collaborated with Norwegian intelligence to retrieve certain files from the country’s archives. Researchers no longer have access to such files.

Israel aims to define Israel as an exclusively “Jewish State”, which means that it will in effect be a state for Jews only. What Israel seeks is a global green light to “transfer” Palestinians from their land, especially those who are living within Israel itself. It claims that it will provide them with compensation, as it claimed similarly that the Arab states owes Israel four billion dollars for infringing on the rights of Arab Jews. Israel insists that many Jews were deported forcibly from Arab lands to Israel and raised the issue of the rights of the Jewish refugees on the fringe of the 68th Session of the UN General Assembly.

Finally, the Oslo Accords consider the Palestinian revolution and resistance as a form of terrorism; the fact that the Palestinian delegation signed the document means that its members accepted this definition. The oppression that the Israelis use against Palestinian protests is a form of denial for the bloody tactics that are being implemented by Zionists against Al-Aqsa Mosque. This, like forced cooperation with Israel, is one of the conditions of Oslo and our resilient people will see to it that the disastrous accords ultimately fail.

Translated from Alakhbar, 12 January, 2016.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.