Thirty years after the Oslo Accords, Israeli-Palestinian peace seems a pipe dream

by James Mackenzie

JERUSALEM, September 13 (Reuters) – Thirty years to the day after the Oslo Accords, concrete block dams, separation walls and the visible presence of Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank illustrate Israel’s failure on a daily basis and Palestinians to conclude a concrete peace.

These agreements, intended as intermediate measures intended to build the confidence necessary for the conclusion of a definitive peace, have long fallen into disuse and no longer serve anything other than to contain a conflict with no end in sight.

The prospect of peace seems all the more remote as Israel is led by a government giving pride of place to nationalists and settlers, rejecting under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu any idea of ​​a Palestinian state, and the West Bank is prey to violence. regular and that the Islamist movement Hamas no longer seems to be content with its power in Gaza.

The day Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas dies, aged 87 and negotiator of the 1993 agreements, this conflict relegated to the background of international news could return to the forefront.

“We are at the end of an era both in Palestine and in Israel and probably in the region as a whole,” says Hanan Achraoui, an activist and former spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation for the 1990s peace negotiations. .

“This whole generation, this era when we spoke of mutual recognition, of two States, of negotiated compromise, of peaceful resolution, is coming to an end in Palestine,” she adds.

Few in either camp still believe in a two-state solution, with an independent Palestinian state coexisting with Israel with guaranteed security. This project is nothing more than a “convenient fiction”, according to Hanan Achraoui.

With the gradual erection of barriers and walls controlled by the Israelis in the West Bank, young people from both camps have grown up without ever knowing each other for 30 years.

“Oslo and I were born in the same year,” says Mohannad Kafecha, a legal activist in Hebron, in the southern West Bank. “For me, I was born and there were roadblocks around me, around our house and if I had to leave my house and go to friends, I had to go through a roadblock.”

According to United Nations statistics, around 700,000 Jewish settlers are now installed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, supposed to form the heart of a future Palestinian state, and these settlements, condemned by the international community, continue to develop rapidly . An estimated 3.2 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and 2.2 million in the Gaza Strip.

For a year and a half, the resurgence of violence has led to the death of dozens of Israelis, civilians or soldiers, killed in attacks in the West Bank but also in Israel while Jewish settlers no longer hesitate to attack Palestinian localities in the West Bank .

The almost daily operations of the Israeli army in the West Bank have left hundreds dead on the Palestinian side, whether activists or ordinary civilians, and a myriad of new armed groups have formed in towns like Jenin or Nablus, with no real connection to the Palestinian old guard.

“I have never seen the West Bank as it is today. I have been coming there regularly for almost 30 years and I have never experienced a worse situation,” declared the UN special coordinator, Tor Wennesland, at a conference this week.

The structures created by the Oslo Accords nevertheless remain in place, for lack of anything better.

The Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas remains Israel’s preferred interlocutor, even with suspicion, even though it lost control of the Gaza Strip to Hamas following elections won by the Islamist movement in 2006. This authority is, however, weakened by its dependence on international aid, its lack of electoral legitimacy and its unpopularity with the Palestinians.

“It’s very weak, it’s very poor, but these agreements still exist,” wants to believe Michael Milshtein, former head of the structure set up by the Israeli army following the Oslo accords for coordination between the Jewish State and the Palestinian Authority.

The handshake exchanged in 1993 on the lawn of the White House in Washington between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, under the gaze of American President Bill Clinton, sparked a brief wave of hope for supporters Peace. Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli nationalist while Yasser Arafat died in Clamart, near Paris, in 2004.

For Yossi Beilin, former Minister of Justice and Israeli negotiator, the failure of the Oslo Accords is due to the fact that successive Israeli governments since the mid-1990s have chosen to interpret what was originating a temporary truce as a permanent status quo.

The composition of Benjamin Netanyahu’s current government and the crisis caused by his plan to limit the powers of the Israeli Supreme Court make the prospect of peace with the Palestinians a little further away, he judges.

“The current government in Israel shows no signs of wanting to reach a permanent agreement. So those who talk about a permanent agreement must be talking about future governments,” says Yossi Beilin.

On the Israeli side, some fear that the disappearance, one day, of Mahmoud Abbas will leave the field open to Hamas, already increasingly present in the West Bank, or will open a period of disorder against a backdrop of struggle for succession.

Voices within the Israeli government are even pleading for a pure and simple annexation of the West Bank, a prospect which would however risk coming up against the reality of the facts on the ground and legal obstacles.

Palestinians and some human rights organizations already accuse Israel of implementing an apartheid regime in the West Bank. The Jewish state and its American allies reject this accusation.

An annexation of the West Bank would place Israel faced with the alternative between granting the Palestinians a citizenship status identical to that of the Israelis, despite their demographic weight likely to call into question the Jewish character of the country, and the establishment of a different status contrary to democratic principles.

“We are both here and we are not going to leave,” summarizes Rotem Oreg, 29, founder of the Israeli Democratic Alliance think tank.

“So we have to find a way, firstly, to stay in the same territory, secondly without killing each other, and thirdly while preserving a democratic Jewish state.” (With Ali Sawafta in Ramallah and Rami Amichay in Tel Aviv, French version Bertrand Boucey, edited by Blandine Hénault)