A Road Map to the Oslo Cul-de-Sac

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

*****   A Road Map to the Oslo Cul-de-Sac

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

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* 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>
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