ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the Palestinian journey up to and through the Oslo process (1993-2000), wherein the state of Israel incorporated the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) into restructured governance arrangements for the indigenous population of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The terms of the Oslo framework, and the course of diplomacy conducted within it, are said to have signally failed to accommodate the PLO’s mandate. Institutional transformation has been sustained up to a point: the Palestinian Authority (PA) has remained technically, and at least in part physically, extant. Financial pledges following the 2007 Annapolis summit underlined international society’s readiness to sustain the project. However, accelerated Zionist colonization greatly hampered economic, social and political development, contributing to a failure to develop adequate foundations for stable incorporation. Proximate events in 2000 brought to crisis the dislocation between political form and colonial reality. Driven by conviction and a need to restore political capital, the al-Aqsa intifada marked a return to the field by nationalists nominally subject to PLO leadership, most prominently the Fatah tanzim, alongside non-PLO Islamists. The electoral triumph of Hamas in January 2006, and the subsequent division of the OPT into the West Bank under Fatah and Gaza Strip under Hamas, are logical, if not inevitable, consequences of a failure to accommodate the minimal requirements of the PLO’s secular-nationalist agenda.
