4/6/2023 0 Comments Ozzle accordsTwenty-five years after that hopeful Oslo moment, there is no need to rethink the end goal-but we need a new path to get there. Israeli leaders continued to peddle the lie of a “united Jerusalem,” failing to prepare Israelis for the necessary partition of Jerusalem into an Israeli capital and a Palestinian one, and Palestinian leaders extended their decades-long rejection of the idea that Jews have any historical, cultural, national, or religious connection to Jerusalem. Jerusalem, too, fell prey to destructive ambiguity. These two grand obstacles to peace-Israeli settlements and the Right of Return-each representing a form of territorial maximalism and the ideological negation of the other people’s right to self-determination in the land, grew ever larger under the umbrella of constructive ambiguity. Like settlement building, this undermined the notion that Arab Palestinians had finally made their peace with the presence of a sovereign Jewish people in any part of the land. Palestinian leaders never dared face their people to tell them that as part of a final peace agreement, just as Jews would be expected to vacate their settlements east of the pre-1967 lines, Arab Palestinians be expected to renounce their claim to settle west of those lines. There were nearly 3 million Palestinians registered with UNRWA as refugees in 1993, a number that increased to 3.8 million in 2000, and which stands at 5.3 million today. Palestinian leaders, meanwhile, continued pursuing what they referred to as the “Right of Return,” their demand that ever-growing numbers of Palestinians be allowed to settle within the territory of pre-1967 Israel, which would render Jews a minority in an Arab state. That increase seriously undermined the notion that Israel was sincere about making way for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Throughout the interim years of the Oslo Accords, Israeli settlement activity was allowed to continue unhampered, with the number of settlers increasing from 110,000 on the eve of the Accords in 1993 to 185,000 in 2000, during the negotiations over a final status, to 430,000 today. And so, when the time came, a few short years later, to settle the core issues, the ensuing failure was all but inevitable. Instead of building trust and allowing the parties to adjust to the reality of the inevitable compromises which were necessary for peace, it merely allowed each side to persist in its own self-serving interpretation of what the Accords implied and to continue the very behavior which destroyed trust on the other side. This constructive ambiguity, imbued in each element of the Accords, proved to be utterly destructive. It was better to remain ambiguous about the core issues which needed to be resolved, the negotiators assumed, rather than force the sides to adopt positions and make concessions which they might not be ready to make. Given decades of war and bloodshed, the theory went, the two sides could not be expected to immediately settle their core disputes an interim period of trust-building was required. What doomed the Oslo Accords is also what made them possible in the first place: constructive ambiguity. The more constructive question is not who, but rather what, to blame. Most observers, trying to understand what went wrong, fight over who to blame. In retrospect, the Accords seem less a triumph than an abject failure. It hardly seems possible that it’s been 25 years since the signing of the Oslo Accords, that hopeful moment when peace between Palestinians and Israelis seemed at hand.
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