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How Arafat Distorted the Oslo Process

(Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies-Bar-Ilan University) Efraim Karsh - The Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza has paid a heavy price for its leaders' perennial disinterest in statehood and obsession with violence. Just as these leaders' rejection of the November 1947 partition resolution and the waging of a war of annihilation against their Jewish neighbors led to the collapse and dispersal of Palestinian society, so the use of the Oslo Accord as a tool for anti-Israeli activities and domestic repression rather than the vehicle for peace and state-building it was meant to be has made these goals ever more remote. For all his rhetoric about Palestinian independence, Arafat had never been as interested in the attainment of statehood as in the violence attending its pursuit. Once given control of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza as part of the Oslo process, Arafat established a repressive and corrupt regime where the rule of the gun prevailed over the rule of law and where large sums of money donated by the international community for the benefit of the civilian Palestinian population were diverted to funding racist incitement, buying weaponry, and filling secret bank accounts. Within a short time, the Palestinian Authority had literally become the largest police state in the world with one policeman for every 40 residents - four times as many as in Washington, D.C., the American city with the highest number of law enforcement officers per capita. Just as the creation of free and democratic societies in Germany and Japan after World War II necessitated a comprehensive socio-political and educational transformation, so it is only when Palestinian society undergoes a real "spring" that will sweep its corrupt and oppressive PLO and Hamas rulers from power, eradicate the endemic violence from political and social life, and value the virtues of coexistence with their Israeli neighbors, that the century-long conflict between Arabs and Jews can at long last be resolved. The writer is emeritus professor of Middle East studies at King's College London and director of the BESA Center for Strategic Studies.
2016-09-30 00:00:00
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