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A little over a decade ago all eyes were set on Gaza City which in September 1994 jubilantly celebrated the arrival of Yassir Arafat, PLO Chairman, and his comrades in the top PLO leadership after so many years of exile.

In accordance with the Oslo agreement, signed a year earlier between the PLO and Israel in a pompous U.S. hosted ceremony on the White House lawn, Arafat had come to lead the recently created Palestinian National Authority (PNA) whose role in accordance with the peace agreement was to attend to the domestic municipal needs of the Palestinian population under Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank but more importantly secure Israel and Jewish settlements throughout the 1967-Israeli occupied territories from attacks by Palestinian resistance groups or individuals. Although an overwhelming majority of the Palestinian refugees in camps scattered across the region (ten camps in Jordan, twelve in Lebanon, ten in Syria, 19 in the West Bank and eight in the Gaza Strip) and in various other countries around the world where they have become known as the Palestinian Diaspora, a sizable proportion of the Palestinian population under occupation sincerely thought and hoped that the creation of an Authority in their name as part of a deal with Israel was the beginning of the end of their suffering and the beginning of the materialization of their dream in freedom and independence.

The Oslo deal had come as part of the search for an exit out of the predicament in which Israel found itself having failed to extinguish the flames of the Palestinian popular uprising, referred to now as the first Intifada, that were ignited on 8 December 1987 after two decades of humiliation under oppressive Israeli occupation. The peace making process had also been in fulfillment of a promise pledged by the U.S. George Bush (senior) Administration to the Arab countries that had joined the U.S.-led alliance to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991. Both the U.S. and its Arab allies saw a real danger in the Intifada which could, potentially, have inflamed the entire region and led to spillovers if not brought under control. As for the PLO, it had already been significantly weakened by failure to deliver on its promise to lead the Palestinian people toward emancipation and to deliver them from their misery and had been suffering serious financial difficulties on the one hand due to corruption and on the other due to punitive measures taken against it by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as a result of Yassir Arafat’s open support for Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. Hence, the peace process, which started in Madrid and ended in Oslo, amounted to a ‘kiss of life’ for the PLO; it resuscitated it and restored its self-claimed position as ‘sole legitimate representative’ of the Palestinian people endowing an international recognition of such a status since both Israel and the United States have accepted it.

However, as the late Edward Said always contended, Oslo amounted to no more than a security arrangement in which the U.S. and Israel had employed the PLO leadership to do on behalf of Israel what its troops had failed to accomplish, namely maintain control over the Palestinian population so that Israeli troops can be spared the hellish task of suppressing the Intifada. The PNA was allowed to have a lightly armed police force of about forty thousand men so as to provide the Jewish colonizers with the safety and security that may enable them to have a long-term worry-free occupation of Palestine.

The public euphoria soon subsided as more and more Palestinians discovered that the new reality had turned to be anything but what they dreamed of or where promised. The peace Israel agreed to make stipulated security measures that necessitated the confiscation of large areas of Palestinian lands to allow for the construction of express highways for the exclusive use of Jewish settlers between their settlements (colonies) and Israeli coastal towns as well as for the expansion of existing Israeli settlements for what was alleged to be essential security needs. An extremely inefficient and corrupt PNA only augmented the suffering of the Palestinians; some of the most senior PNA officials had cashed on Israeli settlement expansion programmes by acting as contractors and middlemen importing cement and providing other more menial services to the Israelis. For seven years Palestinians saw their economic conditions worsen by the day and whatever freedom they had erode by the hour.

As their suffering continued, Palestinians watched as Israel withdrew its troops in disgrace and humiliation from South Lebanon, both unilaterally and unconditionally, under the hammer of Hizbollah-led Lebanese resistance. For more than seventeen years successive Israeli and U.S. administrations flouted international law and all UN resolutions insisting on Israel’s need to maintain a military presence in the Israeli-occupied and self-proclaimed ‘security zone’ along Lebanon’s southern borders with Palestine. Pressure building within Israel – thanks primarily to the campaigns staged by mothers of young soldiers serving in the Israeli army – was the key factor that ended the Israeli intransigence over Lebanon; it brought about what had previously been unthinkable: a unilateral withdrawal in the darkness of the night. This was an important lesson for the Palestinians who too were longing for freedom. But it took another factor to trigger the second Intifada in late September 2000. That was the insolent political-scoring intrusion into Islam’s third holiest mosque – the Al-Qasa in Jerusalem – by the then leader of the opposition Ariel Sharon. His desecration of one of Islam’s most venerated shrines was interpreted at the time as a message to the Palestinians that nothing in Palestine belonged to them and a gesture to the Israeli right that were he to be voted into power he would accomplish for them the dream of seizing the Islamic mosque, which they claim to be the site of their mythical ‘temple’.

The second Intifada brought all peace-making to a grinding halt. Not a single Palestinian faction, including Fatah – the backbone of the PNA and the PLO, believed anymore in the viability of peace making with the Israelis. The brutality of the Israeli troops prompted the Palestinians to resort to force more than ever before. The cost to the Palestinians has been enormous but so has it also been to the Israelis. For the first time since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 the gap in the ‘ratio of death’ has been narrowed down to one Israeli to slightly less than three Palestinians. Just before the Intifada erupted the ratio was one Israeli to nearly a hundred Palestinians. Sharon, who promised to deliver security to those who elected him, had become Israel’s most costly prime minister.

The more brutal he became the more he drove the Palestinians into the innovation and adoption of new unprecedented means of resistance so much so that even his eight meter high segregation wall has, technically speaking, proven to be futile. Furthermore, the movement he sought to destroy, Hamas, has had the opportunity to reap the fruits of the sacrifices it has been forced to make in terms of a sharp rise in popularity and an influx of recruits. As an exit out of this predicament Sharon, who was known for many years to champion the cause of Jewish settlers, finds no alternative to withdrawing from the Gaza Strip. His real problem is that he cannot afford to do it unilaterally as former Prime Minister Barak did in South Lebanon. He needs both Egypt and a loyal Palestinian authority. To pave the ground for such a project Sharon has wreaked havoc in the Gaza Strip creating several buffer zones and hunting down field commanders and political leaders of the active Palestinian military organizations, especially Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and the PFLP.

By killing so many Palestinians and destroying so many houses, Sharon hopes to convince his critics in Israel that his withdrawal plan is foolproof, that it is the best that Israel can have under the prevalent circumstances, and that all the necessary measures to guarantee its success have been taken including, most importantly, the destruction of Palestinian resistance groups. Placing himself in the wider global picture Sharon boasted of waging the war against the Palestinians as part of the overall ‘war on terrorism’ that is being conducted by the U.S. Administration of his loyal friend George W. Bush.

* The author is the Director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought, London