Strategic Assessment

• Book: Why Peace? The Political Motives of PLO Engaging with [the] Oslo Process
• By: Shimon Karmi
• Publisher: Resling Publishing
• Year: 2020
• pp: 563

In Why Peace? Shimon Carmi explores the causes and processes that led the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to turn to a peace process that culminated in the signing of the Oslo Accords. The author examines the issue on the basis of political science theories dealing with the abandonment of the military option by terrorist organizations or resistance movements and their moving toward political processes. These theories are reviewed at length, and through them he seeks to answer the central question in the book.

The first half of the book, which deals with questions of background, contains two sections: one theoretical and one empirical. In the theoretical section, the author contends with the motives spurring terrorist organizations to act, and those that lead them to pursue peace or a settlement that ends such acts. He considers a wide range of motives, characteristics, sources of power, and authorities of the organizations included in this category.

In the empirical section, the author cites a series of conflicts within countries that ended with the signing of agreements settling the relations between the hostile parties, or with the victory of one of them. Inter alia, he cites as an example the conflict in Burundi between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes, which ended in a ceasefire following intervention by many actors in the international theater. He also cites conflicts between organizations and governments in northern Uganda, Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast, and Nepal.

At the end of this section, the author divides the factors that motivated the groups to enter a negotiating process into categories: internal factors, such as weakening of the group and damage to its public stature; external factors, such as aid that encourages movement in one direction or another; and political motives, such as a wish to obtain representation and recognition, survival, and integration in politics. These factors are the parameters whereby the author seeks to assess the process the PLO underwent before signing the Oslo Accords, which he discusses in the second part of the book.

The book constitutes a useful and credible source of information and education for readers interested in the roots and development of the conflict.

This is unquestionably a very clear and informative book that goes into great detail about many events that occurred in the Fatah movement, which led the PLO since Egypt and other Arab countries lost control of it; the changes that took place in the organization as a result of its clashes with Israel, as well as with Arab countries; the internal disputes that emerged; and the sacred need, as perceived by most of the Palestinians, to preserve its status as the sole representative of the Palestinian people.

The book constitutes a useful and credible source of information and education for readers interested in the roots and development of the conflict. It can help verify or compare different accounts of similar events. The wealth of sources used by the author (although an imbalance exists between the small number of sources in Arabic and those in Hebrew and English) as a basis for his arguments also enhances the book's reliability.

The great detail provided on the events covered by the author, however, and his commitment to the theoretical background leaves readers interested in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a sense of a missed opportunity. The assortment of factors that he cites as an explanation for the motives that led the PLO to abandon the armed struggle and adopt the peace negotiations format does not provide a clear answer.

The questions that the author presents at the beginning include (p. 12): what brought the Palestinian leadership to turn to peace; how was the armed struggle transformed into political negotiations; what made the PLO leadership want to enter the Oslo process; and more. However, the answers to these questions provided in the rest of the book are partial and not sufficiently clear.

It seems that the uncertainty left by the author is a result of his attempt to utilize tools from political science in order to conduct what is essentially a historical analysis. These tools examine events through models, parameters, formulas, and paradigms that restrict the author to the comparative perspective. This sometimes makes it difficult to give proper weight to the dimensions of time and space and the concrete context of the events described in the book, or the declarations, announcements, and statements published by important people in the organization.

For example, at the outset (p. 12), the author wonders how the Palestinian leadership turned to the peace process when the Palestinian National Covenant, which negates the existence of Israel and states that the only way to liberate Palestine is through armed struggle, had not yet been changed. Does every practical change require denial of the old ideology, or does history almost always show us that the new is destined to supplant the old, particularly as political movements by nature are in no hurry to repeal their seminal ideological document as this would constitute a confession of failure? In these circumstances, it is preferable to accept the constraints of reality that impose the change.

Similarly, the author does not attempt to specify the events and does not state their identifying characteristics. Nor does he order them according to the extent of their influence on the changes that occurred in the PLO leadership's thinking about the obligatory adjustments and revisions needed in its concept of the conflict with Israel and ways of dealing with it. Much has been spoken and written about the changes in the views of the Palestinians and the PLO in the post-1967 era. It appears that it is difficult to deny the centrality of three events in the changes that occurred in the PLO leadership's concept during this period.

The first event was the expulsion of PLO members from all of the organization's factions from Jordan in September 1970, referred to by Palestinians as "Black September." This deprived the Palestinians of any contact with the Israeli border, and highlighted the questionable reliability of Arab countries and the use of their territory as a base for conducting the armed struggle against Israel. Is there a connection between the first changes that occurred in the PLO's stance on the struggle against Israel in the early 1970s and the events of Black September? The answer is probably yes, but the author does not consider this question.

The second event was the PLO's expulsion from Lebanon following the First Lebanon War in 1982, after having become established there and having gained control over parts of Lebanon's territory for use as a base to continue the armed struggle against Israel. This expulsion removed the PLO from the conflict area, dispersed its forces throughout the Middle East, and highlighted the unreliability of the Arab countries. Egypt, which signed peace agreements with Israel in 1979, maintained its commitment to these agreements. Syria, which was then Lebanon's patron, tried to take the PLO under its wing, and created a rift with it in the process. The PLO was left weakened and its institutions dismantled. Its search for a political crutch to help it escape the pit into which it had fallen was largely fruitless.

The author does address the results of the expulsion and analyzes the PLO's weakness, but does not give it sufficient weight as an influence on the changes that occurred in Palestinian thinking and in the PLO, and on the PLO's opting for political negotiations. In one of his speeches in January 2018 in response to President Trump's "deal of the century," Abu Mazen described what the PLO experienced following its expulsion from Lebanon, which he said was worse than Trump's term in office. He tried to encourage his listeners by saying that in the years following the expulsion from Lebanon, the situation was more desperate. Even holding conferences of PLO institutions was impossible, because their members had given up and refused to participate.

The third event, and that which possibly shaped the Palestinian stance in this context, was the outbreak of the first intifada in late 1987. Many scholars, among them Moshe Shemesh (Shemesh, 1999), Avraham Sela (Sela, 2019), Matti Steinberg (Steinberg, 2008), and others, assigned considerable weight to the first intifada and the change that it caused among the Palestinians. On the one hand, the intifada was initiated by those living in the territories, most of whom were under Israeli control. It indicated a change taking place from below, which Israelis like to call bottom-up. On the other hand, it threatened the hegemony of the already weakened Palestinian leadership, which was languishing in Tunisia, and was looking for an opportunity to escape the dead end in which it was mired. This was an opportunity that played into the hands of the moderates in the PLO leadership and bolstered the pressure exerted by the population of the territories. They remained loyal to the PLO, regarding it as their sole legitimate representative, but pressured it to make a decision that would change the nature of the conflict. They delivered messages and sent petitions of the residents in support of these demands.

Expressions of this can be seen in many stories by journalists during this period following the new messages formulated by the perpetrators of the intifada, and in books such as From Beirut to Jerusalem (Friedman, 1989, chapter 14), and Intifada (Schiff & Yaari, 1990, pp. 106-126), and others. This process, combined with King Hussein's disengagement from the West Bank a few months after the intifada began and the pressure exerted on the PLO by the United States and other actors in the international theater, culminated in the Palestinian declaration of independence in November 1988, which substantially changed the nature of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

The author does address the results of the expulsion and analyzes the PLO's weakness, but does not give it sufficient weight as an influence on the changes that occurred in Palestinian thinking and in the PLO, and on the PLO's opting for political negotiations.

This declaration contained acceptance of the principle of a partition into two states, one Jewish and one Arab (UN Resolution 181), and a commitment to respect all of the UN resolutions, without citing their numbers. The declaration thereby in effect determined that the conflict was no longer an existential one, and had become a conflict over borders. It was clear to both the Palestinians and Israel that Israel would not be able to begin any political process whatsoever without such a declaration. The author takes note of the declaration, but minimizes its contribution to the change in the PLO's stance, writing, “There was therefore nothing new in the declaration; it was a withdrawal of willingness to accept an international conference under UN sponsorship for a solution to the question of Palestine" (p. 358).

In other words, in the author's view, willingness to accept an international conference, which is nothing more than willingness to sit at a table, is more far-reaching than a new starting position that the Palestinian institution at the highest level created, which redefined the character of the conflict. Furthermore, the rhetoric of the Fatah and the PLO leadership accompanying the declaration, which was also stated many years later, enhanced this direction, and left no room for doubt about the significance of this declaration.

The author cites most of these factors: the PLO's exile in Tunisia, Arafat's public support for Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War, the strengthening of the internal leadership in the territories, the desire for survival and to remain relevant, international pressure, and more (pp. 484-486), but does not comment on the weight of each of these factors.

An examination of the internal Palestinian dialogue at the time would have made the weight of each of these factors very clear. This is a parameter that reflects the mood: whether the declaration of independence inspired the masses, whether they regarded it a new hope, and how they dealt with opposition movements like Hamas, which took an aggressive line and accused its opponents of treason and surrendering the important principles of the Palestinian people.

In fact, the public strongly supported the declaration, and regarded it as an innovative measure giving hope and heralding a change. In the Gaza Strip, this rivalry led to violent clashes between Fatah and Hamas members throughout the intifada, both before and after the declaration. In all of the clashes, Hamas was the Palestinian underdog. The majority looked to the new hope created following the declaration, which was actually the result of an effort in which the local residents played a respectable role.

Such an examination could also have indicated the weight of each of the events that took place in the years preceding the signing of the Oslo Accords. It could have shown that the internal Palestinian division dated back to the beginning of the first intifada. Its roots lay in the discovery revealed by Hamas when it was first founded that the perpetrators of the intifada, members of Fatah and the national movement, had no intention of persisting in the old demand for a country that would supplant Israel; they were demanding a country next to Israel. For Hamas, the declaration of independence was proof of its many public arguments and proclamations during the first intifada. It was also one of the main reasons why Hamas did not join the united national headquarters of the intifada.

Except for perusal by the author (p. 476) of issues of the more independent East Jerusalem newspaper al-Quds in 1991-2005, through which he tries to clarify the extent to which the PLO's leadership was speaking in positive terms about peace, the book does not comment on the internal dialogue.

In the concluding chapter, the author adheres to the comparative dimension of the study. He weighs the explanations cited above against the parameters raised in the theoretical section, and considers how his findings fit in with these parameters. This is a kind of integration and adaptation job, whose contribution to the important question of what motivated the PLO to embark on the Oslo process, or in the author's language, “why peace,” is large, but inadequate.

It appears that the continued evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will continue to enrich the disputes between various scholars about the changes in the conflict, its nature, and its development. In this respect, the book is a large contribution to the discussion’s enrichment. The influence of the external factors, above all Israel, on the internal events on the Palestinian side is sizable. The processes taking place within the Palestinian side, however, such as the Palestinian declaration of independence, are also significant catalysts.

References

Friedman, T. (1989). From Beirut to Jerusalem. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Schiff, Z., & Yaari, E. (1990). Intifada: The Palestinian uprising—Israel's third front. Simon & Schuster. 

Sela, A. (2019). The crisis in the Palestinian national movement, and the day after. Hazman Hazeh, Van Leer Institute, https://hazmanhazeh.org.il/plo/ [in Hebrew].

Shemesh, M. (1999). The PLO road to Oslo: 1988 as a turning point in the history of the Palestinian national movement. Iyunim 9, 186-245.

Steinberg, M. (2008). Rising to their destiny: Palestinian national consciousness 1967-2007. Yediot Books [in Hebrew].

Additional Reading

Brown, N. J. (2010). The Hamas-Fatah conflict: Shallow but wide. Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, 34(2), 36-50.

Tzoreff, Y. (2019). The internal Palestinian split: Thinking differently about the conflict with Israel. Strategic Assessment, 21(4), 15-27, https://bit.ly/3A94Ocn 

Shaban, A. (n.d.). Effects of the split on the national project and its regional resuscitation. Studies, PLO Research Center, https://bit.ly/3sGoYY6 [in Arabic].