Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 2000, pages 50-51, 79

Special Report

CESR Research Project Calls Oslo “Peace Process” Boon to Israelis and Disaster for Palestinians

By Jane Adas

The Oslo “peace process” has been a boon for Israelis and a disaster for Palestinians. This is the conclusion of a three-year research project conducted by the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR). To inaugurate the second phase of its program, moving from research to public advocacy, CESR held a conference entitled “Great Expectations, Bitter Realities: Economic Decline and Human Rights Abuse under the Oslo Process” at Columbia University in New York City on April 18.

In the first of three panels, “Declining Living Conditions in Palestine,” CESR’s London-based research coordinator, Ghasan Abu-Sitta, demonstrated that by every standard of measurement—GDP, core unemployment, trade imbalance, indebtedness—Palestinians are worse off today than they were six years ago when the Oslo process was set in motion.

This is not the way it was supposed to work. In 1993, the occupied territories had suffered 26 years of Israeli occupation policies of de-development through, for example, restrictions on building infrastructure and appropriation of land and water. “The economy of the occupied territories was reduced to being a marketplace for Israeli products by day and a dormitory of low-cost labor for Israeli employers by night,” Abu-Sitta said. “Oslo was sold to Palestinians, in spite of its failure to address their most basic grievances, because they hoped it might end Israeli domination of the Palestinian economy.”

But the peace dividend was subordinated to Israeli security concerns. On March 30, 1993, when negotiations were taking place in Oslo and well before the suicide bombings, Israel imposed a policy of permanent closure on Gaza and the West Bank. Israel enforces the closure through a system of checkpoints and restrictive passes that curtail the freedom of movement of Palestinian, but not Israeli, people and goods. This has effectively divided the territories into four distinct regions that are cut off from each other as well as from Israel.

The closure is the major reason for the devastation of the Palestinian economy. The World Bank estimates the costs of closure to Palestinians at over $5 million per day, losses far greater than the total amount of donor aid, Abu-Sitta said. In addition, the pace of Israeli confiscation of land and water has actually accelerated since the “peace process” began.

Ruchama Marton, founder of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, characterized the Oslo process as the “agreement of the rich” instead of the “peace of the brave.” When the Palestinian Authority (PA) assumed the responsibility for health and education without gaining control of resources, it took on an impossible mission and laid the ground for corruption, she charged.

Noman Kanafani of the Royal Agricultural University of Denmark pointed to contradictions between economic and political policies. Zionist and Israeli policies have forced Palestinians to choose between collective national rights and individual economic prosperity, yet have never delivered on the latter. The resulting moral dilemma is that the correct political solution—an independent Palestinian state—corresponds to worsened economic conditions and would only create a buffer between Israel and the Palestinian people, Kanafani concluded.

In the second panel, “The Abandonment of International Law and Human Rights,” Roger Normand, CESR’s policy director, said Oslo had proved to be not a peace process but rather a Trojan horse designed to maintain and justify Israel’s rule of force and human rights abuses.

Prior to Oslo, Israel was viewed by much of the international community as a pariah because of its violations of Palestinian rights, which hindered Israel’s full integration into the global economy and the international system. But as a result of the Oslo agreement, Palestinian recognition of Israel opened the door to diplomatic and economic relations with the international community, producing unprecedented economic growth.

Since Oslo, Israel has increased the number of Jewish settlers in Israeli-occupied territories by 50 percent and has continued to dispossess Palestinians from their homes and land, but is no longer viewed with censure by the international community. Normand said that language shapes perception, and perception shapes action or, in this case, inaction.

Thus the Oslo process, which is doublespeak for Palestinian acceptance of permanent pauperization, is promoted as the only road to peace in public discourse. In reality, it has replaced international law and human rights with a hegemonic U.S. supporting a dominant Israel within a fragmented Arab world without addressing legitimate grievances, Normand said.

Professor Richard Falk of Princeton University said that an unjust process cannot produce a just outcome. There must be an alternative view, but it will not come from political or economic elites. Rather, we should look to civil social activism, the subject of the third panel.

Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies identified two areas for activism: discredit the notion that opposition to the Oslo process is to be against peace, and reclaim the U.N. as the closest existing thing to “we the peoples” rather than “we the governments.” A new process is needed to ensure Palestinian rights and Israeli security. This could be best achieved through returning to the earlier demand for an international peace conference, Bennis maintained.

A summary of the conference as well as excellent detailed reports of CESR’s research is available on the CESR Web site at <www.cesr.org>.

“Iraq Under Siege”

To inaugurate the publication of Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions (South End Press, 2000), a collection of essays documenting the tragedy in Iraq, the book’s editor and three of its authors appeared on a panel at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York on April 10.

Howard Zinn, author and professor emeritus at Boston University, asked what reasons are powerful enough to justify the death of half a million children from sanctions. He said history counsels skepticism of the stated reasons of governments. The U.S. says Iraqi President Saddam Hussain is a tyrant, yet the U.S. has had friendly relations with some of the greatest tyrants.

Saddam is condemned for building weapons of mass destruction, but no country in the world possesses more such weapons than the U.S., which is not subject to inspections. Saddam is a dangerous aggressor, but the U.S. said nothing when Indonesia invaded East Timor or when Israel invaded Lebanon.

The reasons, according to Zinn, are economic and geopolitical (oil) rather than humane, and are marked by U.S. triumphalism, where other people’s children don’t count as much as ours.

According to editor Anthony Arnove, who recently visited Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness, few issues of U.S. foreign policy have been more distorted in the media than 1990s Iraq. He said that in Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, he saw an entire neighborhood in rubble after U.S. aircraft cluster-bombed it in January. He talked to a mother who saw one son killed instantly and who has another son with shrapnelwounds over his whole body.

Ali Abunimah of the Chicago-based Arab-American Action Network said the media has become complicit in what former U.N. relief administrator in Iraq Denis Halliday has characterized as “genocidal sanctions” and routine bombing. Typically, the media downplay the effects of sanctions or shifts the blame to Saddam Hussain, who is treated as a synonym for Iraq.

Abunimah said that each time the U.N. has investigated Iraqi news agency claims about civilian victims of bombing, the investigators have found the claims to be accurate. Yet the U.S. media either ignore the claims or report them as “unconfirmed.”

Rania Masri, coordinator of the Iraq Action Coalition, said that sanctions seem gentle in contrast to bombing. But because these sanctions are empowered by military might, they actually constitute a blockade, technically an act of war, which causes the deaths of 200 children under five each day.

The impact of sanctions on the Iraqi economy is starkly evident in the fact that before the war, one Iraqi dinar was worth $3. Today 1,700 Iraqi dinars are worth $1.00. The media were quick to report that in order to improve the oil-for-food program, $111 million was freed. But the media did not mention that at the same time the U.S. blocked $1.6 billion worth of contracts.

Masri said people owe it to the bereaved mothers of Iraq to protest the sanctions regime. One way of doing this is for Americans to ask their representatives in Congress to support the Humanitarian Exports Leading to Peace Act (H.R. 3825), which would remove the legal obstacles to the U.S. export of food and medical supplies to Iraq. The number of the congressional switchboard, for both the Senate and the House, is (800) 505-0145.

Artist Samia Halaby

Samia Halaby is a Palestinian artist whose works have been exhibited internationally and are included in many museum collections, including the Guggenheim Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. She recently had a show called “Places and Spaces: Olives of Palestine” in the Skoto Gallery in New York.

Halaby was born in Jerusalem in 1936. Her father was a self-made man who built up a successful importing business. In 1948, the family was living in the Palestinian Arab city of Jaffa when Jewish militia attacked. She recalls finding bullet holes in the balcony of their home. The Halabys lost everything when they fled to Lebanon. A Jewish man who had wanted to buy her father’s dealership wrote her father that all the stock had been looted, the safe robbed, and, in the living quarters above the store, their personal possessions plundered.

The Halabys stayed three years in Lebanon, then moved to Cincinnati, and from there to Indiana, where her father began a business all over again. When the Halabys returned to Jaffa in 1966, she found that their building had been turned into a shopping mall. On the floor where the family lived was a restaurant called “The Israeli Experience.” The building has since been turned into condominiums.

While in Palestine in 1999, Samia Halaby began a series of drawings and paintings of olive trees. Some of her paintings are representational, others abstract, representing the shadows, textures and changing colors of the foliage and soil.

In November, while painting an ancient olive tree in the Garden of Gethsamane, two priests asked her if she was related to Sophia Halaby—her great-grandmother. They had a painting by Sophia Halaby in which her great-grandmother had chosen the same view that Samia Halaby herself was painting. The discovery gave her a rush of confidence that she was as rooted in Jerusalem as the olive trees.

At Hebrew University, Samia Halaby began sketching the many tree stumps in the garden park. She learned that they were olive trees that had been freshly uprooted, heavily pruned, and replanted in the formal European style. Halaby described her experiences drawing olive trees in these words from a diary that accompanies the photos:

“Olive trees are significant in the history of Palestine because they are primary parts of its economy. As I studied them I saw great character in them. Their rugged beauty and their usefulness has affected many others and especially those peasants who tend these trees...both are part of the essence of Palestine. Oh if it were possible for olive trees to know how to brace themselves against the Israeli settlers’ bulldozers.”

Halaby currently is preparing for a show entitled “Textures of Palestine” that will open in June at the Sakakini Art Center in Ramallah. Her exhibition at the Skoto Galllery was curated by Osama Abusitta. Her paintings can be seen on his Arab Art Web-site at <www.abu-ali.com>.

Jane Adas is a free-lance writer based in New Jersey.