The Israel-PLO Accord Is Dead
Article Summary and Author Biography
The Oslo accord has failed. Battered by a wave of fundamentalist terrorism, Israelis are ready to elect a hard-line Likud government, while many frustrated Palestinians are spurning the PLO in favor of the Islamic extremists of Hamas. Locked in a political embrace, PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin are dragging each other down. The process may stagger on, but it will never yield peace.
Amos Perlmutter is Professor of Political Science at American University and Editor of The Journal of Strategic Studies.
THE FAILURE OF OSLO
The Declaration of Principles signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) at the White House on September 13, 1993, is for all intents and purposes dead. The repeated atrocities by Palestinian suicide bombers, including the grisly death of 20 Israeli soldiers in Beit Lid and the murder of 22 civilians in downtown Tel Aviv, serve only as dramatic illustrations of just how ineffectual the so-called Oslo accord has become. As it stands now, the whole Oslo process is unraveling, jolted by a wave of fundamentalist terrorism that deepens the prevailing pessimism among even dovish Israelis.
The original treaty -- not to mention the high hopes behind it -- has been so altered by both the PLO and Israel as to have become barely recognizable. Israeli plans for limited but continued West Bank settlement caused an international outcry after the expansion of Efrat, a settlement near Bethlehem. Israel has so far refused to withdraw the Israeli Defense Forces from the West Bank's major cities before the Palestinian elections for their autonomy authority, which should have been held months ago. Fifty-nine Israelis have been killed in the past nine months by suicide bombers from Islamic Jihad and Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement. For their part, many Palestinians bitterly complain that Israel has not given up anything and call the IDF's withdrawal from the turbulent Gaza Strip a blessing for Israel. They excoriate Israel's Labor-led government for refusing even to clear the handful of militant settlers out of downtown Hebron after one American-born fanatic massacred 29 worshipers in Hebron's Ibrahimi mosque. The Declaration of Principles has increasingly become a document that reflects neither reality nor probability.
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