Tearing Up the Oslo Accords

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

By now everyone — Arab officials foremost among them — has perhaps come to realize that the logic of history prevails in the end, and that the will of peoples must ultimately express itself. May this certainty be enough to persuade whoever has not yet been persuaded to come back to his senses, to abandon all oppressive, despotic, and monopolistic practices, and to make peace with his people on the basis of submission to the people’s will.

In Palestine, the Oslo Accords made us taste calamity: we fell to fighting one another and our ranks were torn apart, and the people were made to suffer humiliation and disgrace until security coordination with the enemy became an accepted daily affair for a broad segment of the population, and we handed over many of our affairs to the Americans and their agents, and so on. We reaped nothing from this agreement and its appendices but evils, harms, and sins, until brother turned against brother, and neighbor against neighbor. So shall we reconsider the state we are in?

I call on the Palestinian Authority to shorten the road for everyone, to cut short the distances and the suffering, and to resolve to abrogate the Oslo Accords and the agreements that flowed from them, and to halt everything that has followed from them in the way of measures and policies. The atmosphere across the Arab homeland is charged, and the wise man is the one who gets ahead of events rather than waiting for them, and the man of sound judgment is the one who admits his mistake before someone else points it out to him.

There is no need for further conflict, nor for more wasted time and verbal wrangling. We can return to ourselves to think about the situation we are in, and about what we must do after tearing up the Oslo Accords and everything that followed from it. We are fully aware that we are under occupation, and that we are not a free state with a decision of our own, but we can still be masters of our own decision in confronting the occupation if we resolve to remove this occupation from the calculus of our internal relations with one another. We know that some hardship of living will fall upon us temporarily, but peoples never lack a way to forge their path forward. Western money was never for the sake of Palestine but for the sake of empowering Israel, and accepting material hardship now is better than losing the homeland for good.

Let us tear up the Oslo Accords, the Taba Agreement, the Wye River Agreement, and others, and let us stand on our own two feet, heads held high, preferring hunger to submission. We are capable, God willing, and it is God’s covenant that He is the supporter of the patient believers.

All of us, toward a new Palestinian dawn embracing a new Arab dawn.

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Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “تمزيق اتفاقية أوسلو” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.