This ought to be interesting.
JP today published this article indicating that PA leader Mahmoud Abbas is asking Israel to reopen the Oslo Agreements as to economic matters. One door open could mean many doors open, especially the matters which had an interim status when it was thought that final agreement would occur within five years. And 'economic matters' can be a wide or narrow gate depending on what the parties make of it.
The current request arises, apparently, from the civil disturbances and protests in the WB concerning economic conditions and high prices there, and the request arises from those disturbances. The reporting is a bit uneven but it appears that there is at least a chance on various odds that Mr. Fayyad may leave or be asked to leave his post, since he carries serious weight on this sort of issues. For those of you who do not follow IP closely, Mr. Fayyad is the no. 2 in the WB government and a serious contender for the first leader of an independent government. He has serious international experience and credibility. So the economic unrest in WB is a material matter.
The request itself is quite interesting, for the basic reason noted above. One possibly unintended result of Oslo was that for the interim agreements to be for a limited time thought to be a five year interim period until final peace deals were done. The five years was not written in in a manner which terminated the deal if the peace were not done within the interim five years, and over twenty years have passed under the interim temporary arrangements.
In those supposely short term arrangements, Israel was given control rather than truly shared control, over a number of factors, including the imports and exports from WB, all of which run through Israel, control of PA taxes and duties, and the water allocation between the two sides of the floating border between WP and Israel Proper. It also had serious control, aided and abetted by a blockade supposed to protect against weapons but which also protected against cumin and medical supplies and Gaza fishermen in the Med, over Gaza, which has essentially eliminated much of that area's economy and helped create a situation where, this week in the Israeli papers, there were suggestions both that Israel might take back some of Gaza, and that Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020, arising from, among other things, a polluted water table, and the complete control by Israel of electricity in both Gaza and WB, for which Gaza and WB are behind on the bills, this being another interim problem as imports from outside Israel of electrical or the fuel to keep electrical plants operating are not on the permitted list in Gaza at least.
As to water, the result of Oslo has been vastly skewed in favor of Israel, where each Israeli person is allocated much more water, and Palestinians much less as the essential amount needed for survival, Israeli ag more and Palestinian much less, and even wells and cisterns in Palestine are reported to be destroyed because not permitted by an Israeli water authority which does not in practice allocate or permit water for Palestinians. Historically complaints about water have been met by the Israeli bland response that further adjustments are supposed to await final settlement, no matter when it was originally thought to be, and they have the right under Oslo in the interim to do as they choose. As they also do with WB Area C.
If there were inventive minds at work, this sugestion to reopening of Oslo for economic issues could be a form of half step toward a final resolution, as a sensible adjustment of the economics might conceivably decrease the aggregate pressure on both sides by reducing the huge number of horrendously difficult issues which would remain for the final deal if there is ever to be one and the pressure on pols from economic issues that produce street action, now a problem on both sides of the green line for different reasons. It might also make the various negotiators get used in fact to negotiating rather than posturing, and on issues that in fact matter.
Depending on what happens to it, it might also affect the relations of both parties at the UN, since another confrontation is on the way in a few weeks, probably after the US election, for admission of Palestine as a non member state, the 'state' part being the important one, and that vote is a General Assembly vote where the US has no veto, and they and Israel have reportedly been doing 'economic incentive' sorts of lobbying with blocks of the various voters on the issue.
It's the first interesting meta sort of move in some time and is therefore worth thinking about.
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Mon Sep 10, 2012 at 9:45 PM PT: Update: In today's JPost, Deputy FM Danny Ayalon replied to Abbas.
"Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon on Monday said that Israel will reject Palestinian requests to update the 1994 Paris Protocol, the framework that established economic relations between Israel and the PA, Israel Radio reported.
Palestinians have huge debts to Israel, and yet they are operating against it in international organizations, Ayalon said.
"There is no room to fix it when there is no progress in the political channel, and the Palestinians have huge debts to Israel for transferring gas and electricity, for example," he said."
It is the interesting of 'may you be cursed to live in interesting times' that Ayalon mentions the substantial debts which the Paris Protocol of the Oslo Accords has laid on PA because of the necessity of buying utilities from Israel, and that the Israeli deputy foreign minister ties what appears to be the extensions of credit to political good behavior by PA in his view.The diarist notes that there have in the last year or two been a not insubstantial number of occasions when utilities are made unavailable to civilians in Gaza, and the Israeli government has blocked or threatened to block the external funds, taxes and duties, which are due to PA but which under these accords are collected and sometimes withheld by the Israeli government then in power. Until Ayalon said this, it did not occur to me that Israel may as part either of this or the peace process present for payment a huge bill for services sort of rendered, a money issue.