Meeting beyond Oslo

By Faiza Rady

"This meeting is about international NGO commitment to the struggle of the Palestinian people," Egyptian-born Maria Gazi, vice-chair of the European Committee for NGOs on the Question of Palestine (ECCP), told Al-Ahram Weekly. "It is significant that as many as 350 delegates from 30 different countries are attending the conference."

The conference was organised by the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment (LAW).

Hanna Amireh, a conference organiser, felt the gathering was very important "because it has been a long time since we organised a meeting of this magnitude and multi-national dimension. And it is especially important since it is taking place in Jerusalem, the most contested area in Palestine that the Israelis are attempting to ethnically cleanse and where they are disrupting the Palestinian cultural, social and political infrastructure."

Amireh deplored the almost complete absence of Arab delegates, and called for greater regional solidarity with the Palestinians.

Baheieddin Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, was the only Egyptian speaker at the conference. Although the Israeli government has long called for greater "normalisation" of Israeli-Egyptian relations so as to transcend the "cold" peace between the two countries by promoting Egyptian tourism to Israel, the Egyptian delegate was initially denied entry at the Jordanian border. It took an emergency appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court to grant him an entry visa.

Amireh, however, criticised Egyptian intellectuals who refuse to attend solidarity meetings in Palestine. "They reject normalisation and hence refuse to cross Israeli borders, but by doing so they distance themselves from us and our reality," she told the Weekly. "In Egypt there is a tendency to vacillate between two extremes. On one hand you have groups who adopt a joint platform with [the Israeli] Peace Now, and on the other there are those who are more royalist than the king and refuse to meet us on our ground for the sake of principles."

Principles, albeit of a different kind, were high on the agenda of Felicia Langer, a prominent Israeli lawyer who has defended Palestinian political prisoners for 23 years. In 1990, Langer decided to leave Israel permanently as a form of personal protest. "During the Intifada, the Israeli judicial system had become a total travesty of justice," she told Al-Ahram Weekly. "Every day 40 to 50 Palestinians were herded into jail and slapped into administrative detention."

Langer said she was often forced to represent hundreds of clients with whom she could not even consult. "It became increasingly difficult to address the judge as 'your honour'," she said. "At that point I decided that I was going to stop working as a token lawyer and providing the Israeli government with a stamp of legitimacy."

Langer addressed the conference on Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights and denounced the institutionalised use of torture, the routine use of collective punishment and the policy of illegal settlement expansion.

Referring to the Palestinian Authority's agreement to postpone the issue of settlements until the final status negotiations, Langer described the Oslo Accords as a "formula for disaster". "It is clear that without any legal guarantee against further land confiscation and settlement activity, without abolition of the legal mechanism of dispossession, Israel [has been able] to create new facts on the ground and to cover them internationally with the cloak of the 'peace process'," she said.

Dr Mustafa Baghouti, head of the Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, partly agrees. He said that although the provisions of the Oslo agreement had been partially implemented in the different redeployment stages, thus changing the face of Palestinian reality, proliferating settlements will ultimately eliminate the physical possibility of establishing an independent Palestinian state.

"What you see now I would describe as a cease-fire on the Palestinian side and a continuation of war by the Israelis," Baghouti told the Weekly. "This is why I believe that the old peace process is dead. We have now moved beyond Oslo."

Where do the Palestinians go from here? According to Baghouti, it can only be to a new cycle of resistance, beyond the Oslo debacle, he said.