By Jennifer Moorehead
As Israeli bulldozers began destroying the wooded hillside of Abu Ghneim mountain, east of Jerusalem, in mid-March to make room for a new Jewish settlement, the Oslo agreements between the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the Israeli state disappeared under the dust of the construction. The new settlement is called Har Homa, a Hebrew name meaning Mount Wall.
The political backlash to this unilateral construction has revealed some fundamental truths about the Oslo agreements. The current stand-off is an inevitable result of the unbalanced agreement, which created a weak, dependent and ineffective Palestinian Authority (PA). The illegal construction should have strengthened the Palestinians' position in future negotiations, but the PA, lacking a coherent strategy, remains heavily reliant on Israeli and US aid and intelligence, and the Palestinian people are suffering the consequences.
A wall in their midst
Abu Ghneim mountain lies more than four kilometres from Jerusalem's old city. It stands within territory that Israel illegally annexed to West Jerusalem in 1967. But Abu Ghneim was not part of East Jerusalem before 1967. It is located outside Bethlehem, only 1000 metres from the Church of the Nativity. The hill is located strategically between Bethlehem and the West Bank villages of Beit Sahour, Um Tuba and Sur Baher.
Because Bethlehem is surrounded by Jewish settlements to the south, east and west, Abu Ghneim is the only area left for Bethlehem's expansion. Moreover, Har Homa will close the ring of settlements around Arab East Jerusalem, permanently isolating it from its natural hinterland in the West Bank.
The new settlement will not be just a Jewish residential enclave of 6500 units, but a sprawling tourist complex as well. It will connect with the Gilo settlement, closing off the north end of Bethlehem. The tourist area will include hotels, olive wood factories and souvenir shops to exploit the upcoming "Bethlehem 2000" celebrations. The development will undercut Bethlehem's only source of revenue, diverting a large part of its tourist trade and damaging the economy of the area.
Netanyahu's brinkmanship
For Palestinians, and for most of the rest of the world, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu's decision to build on Abu Ghneim reflects his total departure from the Oslo accords. He hopes to derail the Oslo negotiations in their current form and bring about a strategic rethinking of the process.
Netanyahu had pushed the situation to a crisis by undertaking a series of less sensational but equally significant moves, serving to solidify Israeli control over the West Bank and Jerusalem. While paying lip-service to the agreements, his government announced six new settlement plans for the Jerusalem area alone, approved the construction of 8000 new housing units, put 3000 new units up for sale and offered "preferred development status" to settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
The situation deteriorated further after he announced that the next phase of Israel's redeployment, scheduled to take place in early March, would include only an additional 9% of the West Bank — far less than the 20% which Palestinians expected.
Netanyahu does not notify his Palestinian partners before undertaking significant unilateral action. In contrast, the Labor government under Shimon Peres avoided taking PA President Yasser Arafat by surprise, thus keeping the Oslo process on track. Netanyahu has made it impossible to resume the Oslo negotiations in their previous form.
Shadow boxing
After the Israeli government announced the construction on the mountain, Palestinian leaders, with the blessing of the PA, organised a series of half-hearted demonstrations. But among the people, a new, cynical mood surfaced. On the al-Mahed television station in Bethlehem, callers to a live talk show expressed their disillusionment with the PA. Why, they asked, should people risk their lives when the PA would ultimately give their gains away in a compromise? When its security services arrest activists and violate their human rights? People connected their struggle against Israeli occupation and their disaffection with the PA.
Many Palestinians are convinced that the PA has already reached some compromise with Israel, after Netanyahu's promise to build more housing units for Arabs, presumably next to the Har Homa project. It is not known whether the offer is really part of a compromise deal, but it is what they have come to expect from the PA.
When the bulldozers first arrived on the site on March 18, the PA had to respond. In Beit Sahour, Palestinian Legislative Council member Salah Ta'ameri had already begun to lead a vigil against the project. Only one side of the mountain is visible from the vigil camp ground, symbolising the ineffectiveness of "authorised" Palestinian resistance.
While bulldozers steadily destroyed the other side of the hill, Ta'ameri asked, "How do we tell our people to just sit and watch it all happen again and again? Israel has to decide once and for all whether they want peace or our land — they can't have both." The bulldozing continues.
Two days later, however, violence erupted throughout the occupied territories, especially in Bethlehem and Hebron. The peaceful protests approved by Arafat quickly spiralled out of control as angry Palestinians poured into the streets. In Hebron, Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers killed four Palestinians. Seven people have died and more than 500 have been wounded since the start of construction.
Winners and losers
Officially, the construction and ensuing clashes have frozen the Oslo process. Unofficially, security contacts continue. Palestinian intelligence officers met with Israel's Shin Bet twice in the first two weeks of April. Arafat continues to receive money from Israel and Palestinian security services arrest Palestinians at Israel's behest.
While construction on Abu Ghneim continues, Arafat cannot afford to resume negotiations. He desperately needs help to counter Israel's accelerated expansion of settlements and the imminent loss of Jerusalem, both inevitable side effects of the Oslo agreements. But help seems remote, given Israel's success in freezing the European Union out of negotiations and in deflecting global criticism from the construction on the mountain and to a "war on terror".
The infamous "green light" that Arafat was alleged to have given (although he did not), allowing violent attacks against Israeli targets after construction began, provided Israel and the US with a pretext to focus on "terror" instead of the true roots of the crisis. Unswerving US support for Israel, displayed most recently by its veto of two UN Security Council resolutions condemning the Israeli construction, has strengthened Palestinian disillusionment with the "honest broker".
The US and parts of the international community have backed Netanyahu's suggestion of fast-track final status negotiations, to be completed within six months. Arafat has not come up with any credible plan to resolve the crisis, and is again on the defensive.
The crisis resulting from Netanyahu's determination to build on Abu Ghneim has given him room to manoeuvre to restructure the Oslo agreements, while pushing the PA into a corner. With little international support, a restive population and an economy reeling from continued closure, the PA has become its own repressive instrument. Stripped of any pretensions of a balanced agreement between equals, Oslo has proved not a peace process but a disaster.
Arafat will probably be forced to accept accelerated negotiations without a solid ally. This will mean a further deterioration of the political situation in the occupied territories. The question now is: How little can the Palestinian population be forced to accept? A weakened, demoralised population is the portent for a violent future.
[Abridged from the Jerusalem-based magazine Challenge. Jennifer Moorehead is a researcher at the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment.]