Oslo’s Legacy: De Facto Annexation and an International Mandate for Subjugation

The Oslo Accords were never a peace process. They were distractions, a scam to neutralize the Palestinian movement and give reactionary Arab dictators a fig leaf to normalize with Israel. They were a political deception, aimed at ending the Palestinian civil uprising (Intifada), dismantling the armed struggle, and granting Israel time, space, and international cover to quietly complete its colonization of Palestine. Israel’s recent security cabinet decisions advancing de facto annexation across the West Bank thus constitute the logical culmination of the real Israeli strategic objectives to undermine the very foundations for any future Palestinian entity.

From the outset, Oslo demanded upfront concessions from Palestinians whilst imposing no commitments on Israel. Palestinians were forced to recognize Israel, renounce armed resistance, surrender fundamental rights, and police their own society. Israel, by contrast, was never bound to define borders, halt the expansion of Jewish-only colonies, or recognize Palestinian sovereignty. This was not an omission; it was the very fabric of colonial domination, in which the “power” extracted immediate renditions while deferring, renegotiating, and discarding its obligations at will, leaving the occupied to wither, perpetually subordinated to colonial occupation.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump outpaced Joe Biden only in his fealty to Israel. His vow to block West Bank annexation is a worthless sop tossed to assuage impotent Arab leaders as he enables Israel to advance its Jewish supremacist agenda. Trump reduced Palestinian rights, dignity, and lives to expendable debris in Gaza, and across the West Bank and Jerusalem. At the same time, he gutted all American aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and UNRWA, depriving the PA of both capacity and relevance.

The PA was never meant to be a transitional state. Israel conceived it to be no more than a security subcontractor and a bureaucratic counterinsurgency project. A role which the PA dutifully demonstrated to the satisfaction of the U.S. and EU. The EU financial support for the PA, tamed and transformed yesteryear’s revolutionaries into obedient bureaucrats. Leaders who became more invested in the privilege of Israeli-issued VIP permits than defending their people from racist Jewish mobs. Israel used Oslo as a mechanism of population control, buying time to complete its formal annexation of all of Palestine. Shielded by U.S. diplomatic immunity, Israel advanced incrementally, consolidating control step by step, stripping Palestinian agency and leaving the PA a hollow web of contractors serving the occupying power.

The U.S. was presumably Oslo’s guarantor. In reality, it guaranteed only Israel’s interpretation of Oslo. A task devised and continuedly revised by Israel-first loyalists who came to dominate key legislative committees and the executive branch across successive U.S. administrations. Under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, this impunity hardened into open collusion. For instance, when Israeli governing parties or ministers openly declare that there will never be a Palestinian state, Washington attributes such pronouncements as expressions of a “vibrant Israeli democracy.” Yet when Palestinian leaders seek an advisory legal opinion from the International Court of Justice, or long-overdue international recognition of their own state, they are sanctioned, branded a threat to peace, and an existential danger to Israel.

Europe’s role is no less cynical. Germany—soaking in guilt over the Jewish Holocaust— empowers Israel to carry out its own genocide. The UK and the EU issue ritualistic statements of “concern” as they continue the preferential trade relationship, and supply Israel with the weapons needed to execute the very policies they claim to condemn.

Gaza exposed this structure in its most brutal form. The U.S. and Europe not only failed to stop genocide, they armed it, justified it, and normalized it. They watched hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and entire families pulverized. They watched starvation used as a weapon. They watched tens of thousands die while ascribing the genocide as Israel’s “right to self-defense.”

Gaza today is Oslo stripped of its lies. First comes the genocide. Then talk of “reconstruction,” “reform,” and “new governance arrangements.” Palestinians are told rights will come—later—after compliance, after disarmament, after submission. The same bargain Palestinians were duped to accept under Oslo in the West Bank. They disarmed. They cooperated. They co-opted. They received future promises. In return, and since the Oslo Accords were signed, Israel increased the illegal Jewish colonists in the areas reserved for the supposed future Palestinian state by 360%—from 250,000 to 900,00.

In Gaza, Trump insists the resistance must be “demilitarized,” even as he arms Israel with the weapons of mass slaughter. Europe echoes similar language organizing donor conferences conditioned on Palestinian capitulation. Concurrently, Israel is granted impunity for the genocide and the destruction of Gaza, yet, reconstruction is dangled as a conditional privilege for the victims, just as the mirage of statehood was tantalized during the Oslo Accords.

In the meantime, the blazing genocide slows when politically inconvenient to pursue openly. The bombs may sound less loudly, but death marches on in silence: Israeli bureaucratic permits choke shelters, medicine, and food, turning Gaza into an open cemetery without tombstones. The West Bank follows the same script, minus the spectacle, as Israel expropriates land for Jewish-only use and the West issues meaningless statements of disapproval, and the world averts its eyes.

Israeli history books will one day record the Oslo Accords as a quintessential act of colonial Zionist chicanery—facilitated by the West, enforced by racist Zionist Youth mobs, and consummated through genocide, some televised, the rest carried out quietly with bureaucratic precision and international apathy.

The U.S., UK, and the EU are not bystanders in all this. They armed the genocide and shielded Israel from accountability. Now they watch Israel erase the Palestinian people culturally and politically. Oslo was a classic Zionist scam. Palestinian leadership advanced their obligations for promises Israel never planned to keep and the world never intended to enforce. Under the cover of international indifference, Israel continued expanding the Jewish-only colonies, fragmenting Palestinian life, entrenching Jewish apartheid and turning the so-called “peace” into an international mandate for subjugation.

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