The “Peace Process”
The Madrid Conference of 1991
The 1991 conference in Madrid can be seen as the start of the modern peace process era which continues in various manifestations today. It differs from the previous use of the term whereby the international relations of forces had included the USSR, which to some extent, had served to ballast Arab state positions vis-à-vis Israel and the US. But with the collapse of the USSR fully underway during the conference, a uni-polar world system, led by the US, emerged. The three day conference held in Madrid initiated a process of bilateral and multilateral negotiations which aimed to consolidate and impose its hegemony on all contending parties.
At this stage Israel had yet to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people, forcing the Palestinian delegation to be partners with the Jordanian. Although the Palestinian representatives were in constant contact with the PLO leadership in Tunis, the conference and its subsequent negotiations failed to yield substantial advances, as Israel was under no pressure to do so from the US. While the framework for a solution based on UN resolutions had existed for years, the US did not pressure Israel to abide by them. Continued Israeli settlement construction eventually resulted in the head of the Palestinian negotiation delegation (Dr. Haidar Abdel Shafi) resigning from his post, formerly ending any practical advances along this negotiations route.
Oslo
The Oslo negotiations emerged after the failure of the Madrid process and were negotiated in secret between PLO and Israeli representatives. The understandings reached were later formulated in what became the Declaration of Principles (DOP) that were eventually signed between the PLO and Israel on the White House lawn on 13 September 1993. The main tenets of the agreement reflected the imbalance of forces between Israel and the PLO and emphasized a staged approach to “resolving the conflict”: Israel would recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people (not recognize their historical rights), and would support the creation of a “Palestinian Authority” which would serve to administer the civil needs of the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories – a task Israel was anxious to be rid of because of racist demographic considerations, and continued Palestinian resistance to the occupation. The PA was not given sovereignty over the areas Israel chose to withdraw from (those of highest Palestinian population density), but “autonomy” over them, and with which they were expected to put down any organized resistance to the occupation, or to the Oslo process itself. The Oslo accords, and the subsequent agreements as part of this process, initiated the entrenching of the occupation while the world was deceived into thinking that the main issues under contention were being resolved. In fact, “final status issues” which composed some of the main contentious issues between the parties – refugees, water, settlements, borders and Jerusalem – were to be delayed while Israeli settlement construction was allowed to change the situation on the ground, and hence skew the negotiations themselves through the creation of facts on the ground.
Camp David
The Camp David negotiations of June 2000 were supposed to represent the culmination of the Oslo process, and where the final status negotiations were to be discussed. The reality was that on all major issues, there was no negotiations but rather the attempt by the US and Israel to impose a final “solution” that would abrogate all international resolutions and the national rights of the Palestinians. Hence, there was to be no right to return of Palestinian refugees to their lands and homes; there was to be no return to the 1967 lines before the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; there was to be no return of Jerusalem, and no creation of a fully sovereign Palestinian state. Essentially Israel and the US sought to consolidate their position of power vis-à-vis the Palestinians and erect an arrangement that complied with long-held Israeli geopolitical and strategic needs as outlined by racist demographic and militarist considerations of the Allon plan, when the 1967 occupation began. Moreover, the proposals sought to declare an “end to conflict”, and that Palestinians would have no recourse to international humanitarian law to gain their rights thereafter. When the Palestinian negotiators rejected the US and Israel proposals, the ground had been prepared in advance for tarring them as the “rejectionists” and that Israel “had no partner”. The reality was, Israel and the US indeed did not have a partner willing to recognize and legitimize their conquest of Palestinian land, despite their long search for such a collaborator leadership.
Road Map
The Road Map was a process led by the US which sought to resurrect and re-impose the same “peace process” formulation, after its collapse with the eruption of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation in September 2000. It was then that the Intifada of 2000 had exploded as an unorganized spontaneous reaction to the frustration of the negotiated approach, and the continuation of the occupation that it facilitated. Israel had subsequently launched a scorched earth policy which aimed at total pacification of the Palestinian people, and the elimination of them as an organized national project. With a US green light, Israel’s policies continued, while the ground was prepared for the day when Israel would succeed in its pacification aims. The Road Map was thus the formulation designed by the US, in compliance with the Quartet (the UN, the EU and Russia) to re-institute the ‘day after’ scenario, once resistance to the Israeli occupation and its policies had been finally crushed. It resurrected even more stringent criteria that the Palestinians needed to abide by if a “peace process” was to be jump started again.
NGOisation
NGOisation is the term used to refer to the process that many Palestinian political actors and movements underwent during the 1990s which witnessed their transformation from grassroots political actors associated with civil and political movements during the first Intifada (in the medical, agricultural, student, women, worker related fields) into more bureaucratic formulations disassociated with a grassroots agenda. Many of these actors came from the Palestinian left political forces, who through the coded language of “professionalizing” their activities, resulted in a cascading series of negative affects. The move to becoming NGOs often initiated a process of isolating actors away from the grassroots, creating repositories for key activists self-aggrandizement, developing a rent-seeking relationship with western funding sources (many dubious), and the implementation of tailored photogenic programs that did little to change or strengthen Palestinian internal unity, capacity or resistance, but actively subverted this.