Adam Hanieh and Catherine Cook
(Adam Hanieh is a human rights worker and researcher living in Ramallah. Catherine Cook is media coordinator at the Middle East Research and Information Project.)
May 15, 2003
...The road map offers no new path forward, but simply repackages many of the flaws that led to the failure of the Oslo "peace process" of the 1990s. Many critics have argued since the 1993 Oslo accord that the Oslo process was not a plan for peace, but a plan to institutionalize the Israeli occupation. By transferring limited powers to the newly established Palestinian Authority, the Israeli army could redeploy outside Palestinian population centers, decreasing the level of risk to its own soldiers while maintaining the occupation through checkpoints and periodic closures. Oslo's phased implementation postponed discussion of the central issues -- borders, settlements, Jerusalem, refugees -- to the end, while allowing Israel to prejudice the outcome of "final status" negotiations with newly created "facts on the ground."
Elements of the Oslo accord find echoes in the road map: it also sets forth a phased approach, again delaying discussion of the crucial sticking points, it contains no detailed enforcement mechanism and it is vague about how disputes will be resolved. Having seen the dangers of this approach during the seven years of the Oslo process, Palestinians remain largely skeptical of the road map. Abbas, who has accepted the document, garnered only 3 percent of popular support in a recent poll, in part because Palestinians suspect that he will do the bidding of the US and Israel in whatever negotiations may eventually come about. Many Palestinians view the road map, like Oslo, as enabling the culmination of Israel's political designs for the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- a process that began shortly after 1967 and continues until today....
[The full text of the article is available at <http://www.merip.org/mero/mero051503.html>.] *****
Further Info
Click here to see the Palestinian and Israeli NGOs' map of the "separation" wall in the West Bank: <http://gush-shalom.org/thewall/index.html>.
For background on the "remote control" of the Oslo era, see Jeff Halper, "The 94 Percent Solution: A Matrix of Control," in Middle East Report 216 (Fall 2000), accessible online: <http://www.merip.org/mer/mer216/216_halper.html>. -- Yoshie
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>