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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

25 years after Oslo, young Palestinians see little hope

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TEL AVIV: Abed Zughayer is like many young Palestinians when he considers the legacy of the Oslo accords, the first of which was signed 25 years ago this week. “The Oslo accords are wrong,” Zughayer, who was five when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin famously shook hands on the White House lawn to seal the first of the agreements on September 13, 1993. The 30-year-old, speaking at the counter of his clothing store on a busy Jerusalem street, says the accords are “preventing us from claiming our rights over this land.” Many young Palestinians who came of age after the Oslo accords see the landmark agreements which were supposed to lead to peace as a betrayal that has only consolidated Israel’s occupation.


For Zughayer, Israel will never allow a Palestinian state along its borders. What Israel wants is “all of the land,” he said, referring to calls on the Israeli right to annex most of the occupied West Bank, which would end any remaining hope of a two-state solution to the conflict. Chances of peace anytime soon are widely seen as remote. Since 1993, Palestinians have seen persistent Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank while both sides have endured a second Palestinian intifadha, or uprising, from 2000 to 2005. There have been three wars in the Gaza Strip, which has been under Israeli blockade for more than a decade and is run by Hamas.


The Palestinian Authority, the self-rule body put in place by the Oslo accords, is confined to the West Bank where in theory it has full control of just 17 per cent of the territory. Israel, which seized it in the Six-Day War of 1967, retains complete control over most of it.


The Israeli separation wall — a cursed symbol of the occupation for Palestinians — cuts the West Bank off from Israel and annexed Arab east Jerusalem.


In the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron, where several hundred Israeli settlers live under heavy military protection among some 200,000 Palestinians, “the Oslo accords have legalised the occupation,” said 27-year-old Abdallah, who works in the tourism sector. For him and other Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority’s security coordination with Israel is an example. Such coordination is seen as having helped prevent attacks against Israelis, but also as maintaining stability in the West Bank in favour of Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas. Some also accuse PA officials of corruption and of using the structures put in place by Oslo to benefit themselves. — AFP


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