For Generation Oslo, ‘peace’ is an empty promise
I was nearly five years old and living in Jerusalem when the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993.
My memories from that time are hazy and I seem to remember the atmosphere more than distinct moments. There was a sense of shock and the grown-ups were glued to either their televisions or radios. I couldn’t tell whether someone had died or was getting married.
With the hindsight of several decades, I came to understand these wide polarity in feelings. Some Palestinians were in disbelief and maintained a cautious optimism: the sight of the PLO returning to the West Bank and Gaza, draped in Palestinian flags, was something they thought they would never live to see.
But many others were angry at a leadership who had never set foot in Palestine and had signed an agreement having never seen an Israeli settlement. Indeed Palestinians in Palestine, for the most part, were absent from the PLO committees formed for the negotiations.
Worse yet, the majority of refugees - the ones who brought Yasser Arafat and the PLO to power - were sidelined from the final agreement, their right of return bargained away and eventually disregarded.
Among those who felt this anger was Palestinian scholar Edward Said. A month after the Oslo Accords were signed, Said published his piece ‘The Morning After’ in which he offers a scathing critique not only of the Accords themselves but also of the PLO leadership.
He described the whole affair as a “degrading spectacle” and “an instrument of Palestinian surrender; a Palestinian Versaille”.
Said wrote with incredible foresight. He saw how Oslo would be used to further fragment Palestinian land and consolidate the Israeli regime’s occupation. He also saw what the PLO and the newly formed Palestinian Authority (PA) would become.
He poignantly warned that, “we should remind ourselves that much more important than having a state is the kind of state it is”.
I am from what is colloquially known in Palestine as jeel Oslo (generation Oslo) - those that grew up in the shadow of the accords. We have some memories of life before the Accords but the majority of our life has been defined by them.
