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<h1 class="page__title title balance-text" id="page-title">Palestine
de-Osloized</h1>
<header class="node__header">
<p class="node__submitted">
<span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/haidar-eid"
typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel"
datatype="">Haidar Eid</a></span> <br>
<b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/palestine-de-osloized/14977">https://electronicintifada.net/content/palestine-de-osloized/14977</a></small></small></small></b><br>
<span class="field field-publication-date"><span
class="date-display-single" property="dc:date"
datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2015-11-09T16:28:00+00:00">9
November 2015</span></span> </p>
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<p>What is happening in Palestine? Is it a new intifada? If so, what
are its slogans?</p>
<p>Many compare the current situation in Palestine with apartheid <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/south-africa">South
Africa</a>. The tribal chiefs of the South African <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/bantustan">bantustans</a>
— the nominally independent Black-ruled “homelands” created by the
racist government — used to believe that they were heads of
sovereign states. The apartheid regime promoted the fiction of
Black independence under its overall control in an attempt to
legitimize and perpetuate white rule.</p>
<p>While the anti-apartheid movement and most of the world rejected
the idea of separation based on racial identity in South Africa,
the Palestinian leadership boasts of having laid the foundation
for its own bantustan, claiming it to be the “<a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/international-recognition-palestinian-state">State
of Palestine</a>.”</p>
<p>For <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/zionism">Zionism</a>
to survive in Palestine, the “other” — the indigenous Palestinian
people — must be assimilated and subjugated without being
conscious of that subjugation. This was the thinking behind
Israel’s decision to grant Palestinians “autonomy” under the
Palestinian Authority. It is the logic behind the 1993 <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/oslo-accords">Oslo
accords</a> between Israel and the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/plo">Palestine
Liberation Organization</a> that created that authority.</p>
<p>Oslo aimed to bring about the Palestinians’ surrender and create
among them a passive consciousness, but its architects did not
foresee that Israel created its antithesis — defiance and reaction
— as a result of decades of ethnic cleansing, settler-colonialism
and apartheid.</p>
<p>They did not account for the legacy of civil and political
resistance that has become a trademark of the Palestinian
struggle. The formation of the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/bnc">Boycott National
Committee</a> in 2007, two years after the boycott, divestment
and sanctions (BDS) <a href="http://www.bdsmovement.net/call">call</a>
made by more than 170 Palestinian civil society organizations and
around which there is an overwhelming consensus, the resistance to
Israel’s war machine in 2009, 2012 and 2014 in Gaza, and the
current uprising, all represent what I call a process of
de-Osloization.</p>
<h2>Statehood illusion</h2>
<p>Oslo held out the promise — illusory though it always was — that
one-third of the Palestinian people, those living in the Gaza
Strip and the West Bank, would realize their “national dream” of
statehood on no more than 22 percent of historic Palestine.</p>
<p>But the impossibility of realizing even that — as Israel has
entrenched its occupation and relentlessly expanded its
colonization in the West Bank, and placed Gaza under permanent
siege — ended up, ironically, reviving the embarrassing question
of the rights of the remaining two-thirds: the millions of
dispossessed refugees inside and outside historic Palestine and
the 1.5 million third-class <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/palestinians-israel">Palestinian
citizens of Israel</a>.</p>
<p>The Oslo accords paid lip service to the millions of Palestinian
refugees scattered all over the world as a result of the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/nakba">Nakba</a>, the
1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist militias.</p>
<p>But the Palestinian elites who signed Oslo more or less
explicitly <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/theres-nothing-new-mahmoud-abbas-and-plos-renunciation-palestinian-refugee-rights">reassured
Israel</a> that they were ready to sacrifice the rights of those
refugees in return for a state. The Palestinians in Israel were
not mentioned at all.</p>
<p>Oslo was designed — at best — to improve the conditions of
oppression (while making some Palestinians partners in the
occupation) and thus make Israel’s Palestinian “problem”
disappear. In the end, it did not even do that — save for a small
Palestinian elite that profited from economic deals with Israel.</p>
<h2>Oslo generation</h2>
<p>Most events that have taken place in Gaza since the 2006
Palestinian Legislative Council elections — won by Hamas, which
had opposed the 1993 accords — have represented a complete
rejection of Oslo and its consequences.</p>
<p>And noting that some 80 percent of Palestinians in Gaza are
refugees from other parts of Palestine, the results of the 2006
elections in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank become more
comprehensible as anti-colonial and anti-Oslo acts.</p>
<p>But this is deliberately hidden by the Oslo signatories and their
complicit sponsors.</p>
<p>Palestinians’ resistance depends, like that of Black South
Africans under the inhumane apartheid regime, and
African-Americans under Jim Crow laws, on the higher moral ground
that they occupy as a result of being dispossessed of their rights
and land.</p>
<p>Palestinian victory will be the inevitable result of their <em>sumoud</em>
— steadfastness on their land — that has not wavered, despite the
feeling that they are left to fight Israel on their own.</p>
<p>What has helped keep the Oslo regime alive for so long is the
ever fainter promise that redemption — in the form of “statehood”
and “self-determination” — lay at the end of it. But the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-scout-leader-became-martyr/14943">Oslo
generation</a>, Palestinians born after or around the time the
accords were signed, do not buy it. They are fed up and their
message is clear: the problem is not only with the occupation, but
also with settler colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and
Israel’s <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-incremental-genocide-gaza-ghetto/13562">genocidal
policies</a>.</p>
<p>The current uprising — whether one calls it an intifada or not —
may be the crucible where a new leadership is forged, one that can
understand the unity of the cause of all Palestinians, whether
inside or outside historic Palestine, whether refugees from today
or from long, painful decades ago.</p>
<p>This is a generation that is telling us that they are opposed to
all forms of collaboration with the occupier. This is a generation
that has seen nothing from Oslo but defeat and humiliation, and
they are throwing it off.</p>
<p>They are saying — and we should hear them — that coexistence
based on colonization and apartheid is no coexistence at all. It
is slavery and they will no longer accept it.</p>
<p>Palestine’s youth are saying: we want all our rights and will
accept nothing less.</p>
<p><em>Haidar Eid is an independent political commentator from the
Gaza Strip, Palestine.</em></p>
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