The years after the dream: Bethlehem’s view of Oslo
Occasional publication
October 2013
By Akram Atallah Alayasa
Executive summary
On a typical day at Bethlehem’s busiest intersection, four Israeli armoured personnel carriers brought traffic to a halt. Normally, this happens when Israeli army personnel or Israeli settlers clash with protesters near the check- points separating the district from Jerusalem to the north or the town of Al-Khader to the south. However, no such clashes were reported that day. This was but one in a long and endless series of violations of the Palestinian Author- ity’s control of the city, an organisation established in 1995 in accordance with the 1993 Oslo Accords. Twenty years ago, in this very place, dozens of Palestinian youths threw rocks at Israeli Defence Forces troops – or Israeli occupa- tion forces, as they were called by Palestinians – in what they thought was a farewell to the occupation. Some also threw olive branches to celebrate the long-awaited peace.
However, the demonstrators were not throwing their last stones that day, nor did peace reward the olive branches.
The Accords may have changed much of the dynamics of the Palestinian people’s daily lives in the last 20 years, but they are yet to improve anything.
In many ways, Oslo reaffirmed Palestinian identity and national constants. The Declaration of Principles carried with it an Israeli and international recognition of the Palestinians’ rights and, more importantly, their very existence. With Oslo, the Palestinians began building their own state structure, the Palestinian Authority. Through the imperfect Accords, Palestinians were able to establish a new reference point in history that united the majority of the people around a road map for the dream of statehood.
However, the application of the Accords fell short of their high aspirations. Although the broad strokes of a future were put on paper, no real plan to achieve that future was laid out. The result, as history has revealed, is that the Accords were used to formalise the Palestinian position and legalise an occupation that made the proposed two-state solution more unattainable by the day.
After countless failures since the mid-1990s, the
Palestinian and Israeli leaderships are currently busy with yet another round of negotiations. The Israeli military gives them little weight, and the Palestinian public pays them even less attention. Most Palestinians do not believe in
Twenty years after the Oslo Accords, Palestinians are disillusioned with their promise. Oslo was meant to set the blueprint for two secure sovereign neighbouring states. Unfortunately, the vagueness of the agree- ment led to a dependent and derivative Palestinian shadow state and a predatory Israeli neighbour. This history casts doubt on the current negotiations and the initiative of U.S. secretary of state John Kerry.
This is most evident in the state of Palestinian cities, especially Bethlehem. Bethlehem, like other Palestinian cities, is surrounded on all sides by settlements, walls and checkpoints. This has limited the city’s ability to expand and has separated it from Jerusalem.
On the other hand, Bethlehem is special. Because of its historical and religious significance, the small
city has managed to survive and even prosper, despite all odds. Tourism has provided it with revenues that
allow for at least some economic development. But like the rest of Palestine, tourism is still hostage to
political stability. Thus, as Bethlehem’s business people bravely invest in the town, their economic futures
are still tied to the volatile Palestinian/Israeli reality. While Oslo has changed much in Palestine, it has yet
to improve things to a similar degree.
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Noref occasional Publication – october 2013 a positive outcome. One of Oslo’s unfortunate legacies is
that no future agreement can be reached without the fear of yet another failure.
Neither of the two sides on the ground can differentiate between a liberated town and the occupation. Incidents like the one mentioned at the outset of this paper only weaken the Palestinian Authority’s legitimacy in the eyes of Palestinians, Israelis and the world at large. As former Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad said: “the constant small invasions of Area A will only undermine the real authority of the Palestinian Authority.”
The story of Bethlehem is a part of this crumbling whole, but it is also a unique case study. The city is historic and central to the religious beliefs of hundreds of millions of people, not to mention that it is the closest city in the West Bank to Jerusalem. In short, its destiny is inseparable from the fate of Jerusalem, which emphasises its uniqueness. As a result, over the last 20 years Israel has focused its efforts on establishing a barrier, literally and figuratively, between the two cities. The northern entrance to Bethlehem (on the road from Jerusalem) is now blocked by a massive checkpoint that resembles a border crossing point between two coun- tries. Moreover, Israel’s separation wall is set so close to the centre of Bethlehem that the two cities have become in effect two different worlds. Bethlehem is surrounded with walls and checkpoints on all sides. Even the cities’ natural points of expansion have been filled with Israeli settlements that in turn rob Palestinians of the land they so badly need.
This process was only allowed to take place because of Oslo.
Its side effect is a city that has grown gradually more isolated and different from the rest of Palestine.
Palestinians, myself included, are fond of comparing the current lifestyle to the one before the Oslo Accords.
Sentences tend to start with: “before Oslo I could drive my car to Jerusalem”, or “I could go to the far side of my own vineyard”. A farmer in Beit Jala (a small town near Bethlehem), Abu George, said to me once: “before Oslo I could care for my olive trees without noticing the over-hill menace of settlements. They did not move towards me.
Now, I fear that I may lose my olive trees to the ‘segrega- tion wall’ that follows me around Bethlehem.” In principle, Oslo may have confirmed the existence of the Palestinian Abu George and verified the existence of his Palestinian land, but the many negotiations since 1993 have not firmly established his right to his land, nor have they limited Israel’s ability to confiscate it when it see fit.
A letter from the Palestinian Christians in Beit Jala to Pope Francis last April read: “Israel wants to separate
Bethlehem from Jerusalem and our other holy places. We are now left to stand alone in the face of the continuous Israeli assault against our defenceless people. But as we always have, we stand up for and we stay on our beloved land.” An activist commenting on the letter expressed an alarmingly similar concern to that of Abu George:
before Oslo we suffered from the silent infringement of settlements on our land. Today, the wall has only given this suffering a louder and more jarring voice.
Before Oslo we used to think that we will get a state and defined borders. Now we live in small island cities surrounded on all sides by walls and checkpoints.
The one thing these statements have in common is the rosy, if in many ways utterly false, memory of the pre-Oslo West Bank. Yet it was a time when uncertainty smelled of the promise of a breakthrough. Now uncertainty is only that – uncertainty.
Bethlehem, however counterintuitive it may seem, has grown because of its peculiar position after Oslo. Over the last five years Bethlehem and the neighbouring towns of Beit Jala and Beit Sahour have become centres of economic investment and development, especially in tourism. More than ten new hotels were built and dozens of others rebuilt or renovated. This happened despite the lack of any serious Palestinian-Israeli political or security settlement. Why did the state of no peace and no war not slow down these developments, but instead brought a state of unprecedented development, especially after the autumn of 2011?
An owner of a Bethlehem hotel describes the altered dynamic of tourism in terms of the change in tourists themselves:
There are two kinds of tourists who visit Bethlehem.
One kind is rich and is not particularly interested in the city itself. Bethlehem just happens to be in the neighbourhood of other Middle Eastern destinations and is affected by regional stability. On the other hand, the second kind of tourists – the less wealthy ones – visit the city because of its religious and historical significance. They sleep in Bethlehem, eat in Bethlehem and become emotionally connected to Bethlehem.
It is the latter kind of tourists that have made the economy of Bethlehem grow after the lean years of the second intifada.
However, even the most optimistic business people in Bethlehem remain cynical about the current situation. Will the most recent round of negotiations produce the same short-lived peace that followed Oslo? Will this new U.S.- sponsored initiative turn into another adventure that they will regret, like the years after Oslo? This remains to be seen.
Bethlehem remains a special case in the Palestinian national context. Other small cities like Jenin, Qalqilia and Toulkarm have been smothered and turned into ghost towns by the occupation. In contrast, larger cities like Nablus and Khalil (Hebron) have become overcrowded.
Ramallah only survives because it is the de facto centre of
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Palestinian economic and political life. Bethlehem has survived because it is different.
The city’s Christian population has been under siege. The Israelis have used the post-Oslo period to confiscate lands these people have owned and farmed for 2,000 years. The hardships of life in Palestine have forced many to look abroad for a better life. Aggressive occupation is altering the demographics of Bethlehem and the city risks losing its
special identity. This may be the ultimate legacy of Oslo for the birthplace of Christ. Bethlehem is a city that is denied its natural growth and now exists removed from Palestine and, most importantly, from Jerusalem. This is the real symptom of the incompleteness of Oslo. The good inten- tions in the Oslo Accords were not followed up and imple- mented. While Bethlehem wishes to prosper, it is chained, like the rest of Palestine, to the false promises of the Oslo dream.
Akram Atallah Alayasa worked at the Fafo Palestine Office for 20 years. Since then he has worked on different projects in Palestine and other Middle East countries and in Africa in the field of political and social economic research and opinion polls. He is active in Palestinian civic society and is an ex-political prisoner.
He writes regular op eds on political and social issues for the Palestinian media.
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