We all saw the photograph: a handshake between Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon. We heard the happy interviews: Palestinians and Israelis, contemplating peace. But the optimism generated by new Palestinian leadership, the talk of Israeli army redeployments, the summit and even the truce amounts to little more than false hope.
In fact, except for the growing toll of shattered Palestinian communities, bulldozed Palestinian homes, obliterated Palestinian olive groves, expropriated Palestinian land and snuffed out Palestinian (and Israeli) lives, the situation today bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the summer of 1994. That was when Israel began redeploying its army during a similar thaw in relations with the Palestinians, the first implementation of the Oslo "peace" process.
But once the years of optimism and negotiation that followed that redeployment ran their course, Palestinians, enduring their third decade under Israeli military occupation, faced more -- not fewer -- obstacles to their everyday lives. Their freedom of movement and access to their own towns and cities, including Jerusalem, were severely limited. The population of Israel's illegal settlements in the West Bank and Gaza had essentially doubled. And Palestinians had gained a kind of control of only about 18% of the West Bank.
Had the so-called peace process of the 1990s been genuine, Israel would have withdrawn its army and its settlers from the territories it captured by force in 1967. Period. This is the bare minimum required by international law and U.N. Security Council resolutions that Israel has flouted for decades.
No such withdrawal was implemented. And, in hindsight, it ought to be clear that the most significant result of the Oslo negotiations was the consolidation of Israel's stranglehold on the land it conquered in 1967, little of which it has demonstrated any real interest in ever actually relinquishing.
Sharon's proposal to dismantle settlements in Gaza has received far more attention than the gains he hopes this seemingly magnanimous sacrifice will buy him in the infinitely more valuable West Bank: the permanent maintenance of large Israeli settlement blocs there; no withdrawal to the 1967 border; the ongoing spread of Israeli-controlled Jerusalem, whose boundaries are expanded by fiat and settlement; and the total rejection of the historic rights of Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes during the violent birth of the state of Israel in 1948.
