Walid Habbas is a researcher at the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies (MADAR) and a PhD candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Since first becoming prime minister of Israel in 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu has opposed the Oslo Accords, blocking progress towards a Palestinian state. But in return, he found himself “forced” to act under Israel’s obligations stemming from the agreement. The current war, and the unprecedented consequences of Hamas’ attack for Israel, provided an opportunity for Netanyahu to take his opposition to the Oslo Accords to another level of rhetoric. On the evening of Saturday, December 16, 2023, Netanyahu said: “I will not allow the State of Israel to return to the ominous mistake of Oslo.” This statement not only implies a rejection of the establishment of a Palestinian state, but also carries with it references to the end of the covenant in which Netanyahu sees himself “compelled” to act under the Oslo Accords, and to begin to impose amendments to the nature of the agreements concluded with the Palestinians unilaterally. This article provides a reading in these amendments that can be monitored between the two of Netanyahu’s speeches.
Oslo Accords in Light of the Oct. 7 Attacks: Back to the Start
If we combine all the statements related to the Oslo Accords since the October 7 attack, as well as official press releases from Israel’s high political levels, it will be possible to chart the new shift in Israeli discourse regarding the future of Oslo. We at the Madar Centre had on more than one occasion observed the erupsion of the rule of the Israeli Labour Party, which “expelled the Palestine Liberation Organisation from Tunisia and planted it in the heart of Judaea and Samaria,” in the words of Netanyahu himself. On the other hand, the right and the new right rose in Israel, and dominated the party political scene so that the variations within the Israeli-party political scene became limited between the parties of the right-wing itself (i.e.: a secular right, a religious right, a new right, a populist fascist right… Etc.). It should be noted that the presentation of the Oslo debate through the left-right dualism may not reflect the full features of the panel. In contrast, it may be appropriate to understand the shifts in Israeli discourse since October 7 when we look at the Oslo Accords from an Israeli security perspective.
This article may not be a space to return and define the concept of Israeli security in relation to the occupied territory, the Oslo Accords, and the concept of a Palestinian (demilitarised) state. But it is enough to return to the minutes of the session of the Israeli government chaired by Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister between 1992-1995, which is the session that preceded the signing of the agreement, where its features were presented at the time to the Israeli government and the leaders of the security services in preparation for its ratification and officially start the Oslo path. There are two important issues mentioned in this minute, and we must return to them now:
Although the first Oslo agreement (Gaza-Jericho phase) was made as an international agreement, Rabin presented it to members of the government for ratification as a test phase. Ehud Barak (then Chief of Staff) expressed his disfeaturement to the agreement because it would restrict the Israeli army’s ability to enter all areas that would be transferred to the Palestinians. Here, Rabin replied: “If we have a situation where the Palestinian police do not act against the saboteurs, it means a violation of the agreement. Therefore, we must start in Gaza [as an experiment] to see what happens… If there is no change, and they do not address it, we will say to the Palestinians: Gentlemen [your chance is over], we will return to take security.”
In that session, Rabin compared the path of negotiating with the Palestinians to the Oslo Accords with the path of negotiation with the Syrians at the time, which did not lead to a political agreement. In comparison, Rabin assumed that any agreement with the Syrians would be an agreement with another existing country, and therefore there might be no room to return it later, or cancel it. On the other hand, an agreement with the Palestinians is an agreement with a population that falls under the administrative and sovereign responsibility of Israeli military rule, and therefore this situation may provide a space for a return from the agreement, to cancel it, or modify it unilaterally – all of which are hypothetical scenarios but are applicable as long as it is not concluded with another country, but with a population under occupation.
Returning to the “feasibility” of the Oslo Accords from an Israeli security perspective, the political divide within Israel over it has been, since Rabin’s assassination in 1995, centred around whether the Oslo Accords provided security for Israel. At the heart of this debate, the Israelis recall Yahya Ayyash’s operations that shocked Israelis who had not previously committed fatal bombings in the heart of their cities, and then the second intifada (and the participation of elements of the Palestinian security services). At a session of the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee on December 12, 2023, Netanyahu announced that the Israeli death toll in the October 7 attack equals the number of Israeli deaths during the Oslo Accords that allowed Palestinians to take up arms. This comparison (between the Oslo deaths and the October 7 Israelis) suggests that for Netanyahu, the root of the problem is not the Israeli security and intelligence failure that accompanied the October 7 attack, but rather: 1) allowing the Palestinians to control swathes of land without having full Israeli security sovereignty over them, 2) allowing the Palestinians to carry weapons.
How does Israel want to change the Oslo Accords?
The main argument raised by the Israeli right for three decades concerns the security threat created by the Oslo Accords for Israel. When Netanyahu boasted at the press conference on Saturday evening that he had been credited with obstructing the establishment of a Palestinian state over the course of his years of rule, he avoided any political debate about the Palestinians’ right to establish a state, and viewed this state only from an Israeli security perspective. While all of Israeli society is still in the shock of the events of October 7, and Hamas’ military capabilities, this is a sufficient argument to reshape public opinion about the dangers of the Oslo Accords. At the same conference, Netanyahu also stated that “Fatah and Hamas agree to destroy Israel, but disagree on style,” and only that the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah has so far refused to condemn the Hamas attack.
At the beginning of this month, Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the Yisrael Beiteinu party currently in the opposition, laid out an initial vision of how the Oslo Agreement could be changed: “Areas A must be cancelled, and security responsibility for them must be handed over to Jordan in the case of the West Bank and to Egypt in the case of the Gaza Strip… This is an opportunity to turn the Oslo wheel back.” It is known that Lieberman is the head of an opposition party, and does not express the official discourse of the State of Israel in time of war, however, what matters in Lieberman’s proposal is not “Jordan or Egypt,” but rather cancelling the concept of “Palestinian security sovereignty over Areas A.”
Below, read in statements by Israeli officials about the fate of Oslo after the end of the war. The reading below is an analysis and reading of the content and meaning of these statements, and is not an official action plan. Thus, it must be noted that the current war is not yet over, and that what is mentioned below is more than just wishes and intentions, but also less than automatically turning into a formal plan of action for the Israeli government’s work in the coming period.
Transition from civil-security coordination to civilian security supervision
Security coordination usually takes place between two parties who wish to have channels of communication and coordination for consultation on security and civil affairs between them. In theory, this means that each party, i.e. the Palestinian Authority and Israel, is a relatively independent party from the other, and has its own agenda, so that security and civil coordination can continue, can be used as a pressure sheet, and can be suspended, or can be cancelled altogether. This theoretical understanding means that it is primarily the PA that decides its civil and security affairs, and therefore there may be coordination later with the Israeli Civil Administration.
Since the Israeli debate began about the next day after the end of the war, Netanyahu has made statements suggesting that he wants to replace this model with a new model in which a “civil administration” supervises the Gaza Strip (and also in his mind, albeit implicitly, supervision of Palestinian areas in the West Bank). Although the Civil Administration has not been dissolved or dismantled since the signing of the Oslo Accords until today, what Netanyahu is meant, apparently, is to rehabilitise the pivotal and supervisory role of the Civil Administration as it was in the pre-Oslo period. Netanyahu has made it clear that he does not want a Palestinian authority to supervise education, and graduate cohorts of Palestinians hostile to Israel. Only when the Civil Administration oversees Palestinian civil affairs (especially education) will Israel be able to produce a “new Palestinian” who does not oppose Israel’s right to exist, and does not repend the concepts of self-determination, armed struggle, and liberation, as he puts it.
Regardless of the PA’s manoeuvrability while it finds itself cumbled by the Oslo Accords, it remains, under the agreements, a sovereign authority with independent legislative, judicial, and executive capabilities. For this reason, the Palestinian Authority decided to legislate a law on the payment of salaries for families of prisoners and martyrs, which Israel considers a financing of terrorism, and evidence of the PA’s ability to “defy” Israel and legalise its laws in particular. The current Israeli interest in this issue may lie in how to force the Palestinian Authority to stop this “funding,” but the concept of the civil administration that will oversee the Gaza Strip the day after the war means, as can be read from Netanyahu’s statements, the existence of mechanisms that guarantee Israel’s right to supervise, approve, or reject any future Palestinian legislation.
Netanyahu’s announcement that the Palestinian Authority “will not return” to the Gaza Strip after the end of the war may not limit the discussion to the identity of the new authority that Netanyahu desires in the Strip, but also attention should be paid to the structures that Netanyahu intends to impose on the Strip so that this supervision will not only be administrative, but also educational. This may mean that bringing the civil administration back to governance more clearly would neutralise the PA’s “political and ideological identity” and re-rule Palestinians according to the agenda of the Israeli military and the Civil Administration.
The Gaza Strip is demilitarised
During regular press conferences in which Netanyahu appears, journalists have asked him more than once to stop saying “what he doesn’t want in the Gaza Strip” and move on to talking more clearly to “what he wants in the Gaza Strip.” The almost-only answer Netanyahu has given here is that he wants the “demilitarised” Gaza Strip. In his last statement, he said: “Now that we have seen the Palestinian mini-state in Gaza… Everyone understands what would have happened to us if we had surrendered to international pressure and allowed the establishment of such a state in Judaea and Samaria, around Jerusalem and on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.”
Apparently, Netanyahu symbolises two things: First, the new authority he wants to govern the Gaza Strip does not have to be an authority headed by a Palestinian political party. “We do not want to replace Hamastan (i.e. Hamas’s terrorist rule) with Fahtestan (i.e., the terrorist Fatah rule), and we do not want to replace Khan Younis (i.e. the rise of resistance under Hamas) with Jenin camp (i.e., the rise of the resistance under Fatah),” he said. Second, the new authority should not contain armed and trained security services as is the case today.
Regarding the disarmament of the Palestinian Authority, the matter involves two considerations as may be nominated from Netanyahu’s speeches since October 7. The first consideration is that the idea of the Palestinian Authority containing security services for the purpose of “law enforcement,” as described literally in the Oslo Accords, may need to be reconsidered to the nature of these security services, their capabilities, the quantity and quality of equipment and weapons they have, and the training they receive. IDF officers who belong to the “security” strategic thinking group point out that the Palestinian Authority’s agencies in the West Bank have “offensive” and “combat” capabilities, something that should sound the alarm Israel, which believes these skills have nothing to do with the concept of “law enforcement” inspired by the Oslo Accords. The second consideration is that the second Oslo Agreement (signed in 1995) allowed the existence of security powers for the Palestinian Authority over Areas A, and that the Palestinian Authority is the security supervisor of everything that happens within these areas. Israel unilaterally repealed this clause in 2002 (at the heyday of the Second Intifada) and allowed its military forces to enter all areas. However, the Gaza Strip formed an “anomaly” so that the Israeli withdrawal and thus the Palestinian division provided a circumstance in which Israel could not assume security and sovereignty itself within the Strip.
Madar Centre The Palestinian Centre for Israeli Studies “Madar”, is an independent research center specializing in Israeli affairs, based in the city of Ramallah. Founded in 2000
This article was published inArabic. English translation is by Apple
English
Arabic