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State-Building Excerpted from Building a Palestinian State (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), by Glenn E. Robinson, pp.175-176. “The Oslo Accords shaped the Palestinian state-building process—that is, provided the context for the ‘logic’ of Palestinian state-building—in three fundamental ways. First and most obviously, Oslo made the possibility of actual statehood much more likely. Indeed, one of the most consistent features of the Oslo process was recognition by both the political right and the left in Israel that a Palestinian state would be the end product (although they greeted that prospect in very different ways). Second, the Oslo process—including the Oslo, Cairo, and Oslo II Accords—focused exclusively on interim arrangements. All of the major contentious issues—Jerusalem, Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the area, and eventual Palestinian sovereignty—were left for future negotiations. By ignoring these key issues, Oslo increased Palestinian opposition to the process, not only by Hamas and [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] supporters, but also by mainstream politicians and former peace negotiators … Third and most important, Oslo revived a fiscally bankrupt and politically dying [Palestine Liberation Organization] in Tunis and put in power in Gaza and the West Bank a political elite quite removed from the realities of modern Palestine. At base, Palestinian state building after Oslo has been a process by which an outside political elite has tried to consolidate its political power in the West Bank and Gaza. The PLO’s self-defeating decision to back Iraq during the 1990-91 Gulf war led directly to its bankruptcy. Its major financial donors, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, cut off all financing of the PLO as a result of its Gulf war positions.” |
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