Book Review: From the River to the Sea: Palestine and Israel in the Shadow of “Peace.”

From the River to the Sea: Palestine and Israel in the Shadow of “Peace,” edited by Mandy Turner, offers a detailed account of the effects of the “colonial peace” (Turner 10) of the 1993 Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, commonly referred to as “the Oslo Accords,” the “Oslo Agreements,” or simply “Oslo.” Oslo came at the heels of a six-year Palestinian grassroots, anticolonial uprising and culminated a series of secret negotiations between the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s chairmen, Yasser Arafat, and Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin. Represented as the first major step in a “peace process” mediated by the United States, Oslo was endorsed, supported, and funded by the international community and sold to Palestinians as a means to the ontological goal of a liberated Palestine vis-à-vis adiplomatic process; the idea was that if Oslo was properly implemented, therein would manifest the conditions for Palestinian self-determination.

For Palestinians, the so-called peace process set into motion a series of political, economic, social, and colonial realities that have continued to confound the Palestinian national movement for nearly three decades. The collection of 11 essays entitled From the River to the Sea: Palestine and Israel in the Shadow of “Peace” offers a comprehensive account of how and why Oslo proved to be so catastrophic for Palestinians residing from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, as well as in the shatat, or diaspora. Written by expert scholars engaging Palestinian politics in a grounded way, the book shows how Oslo accelerated and normalized Israeli settler colonialism, and its concomitant discourses, and institutions, with profound consequences for a coherent national movement. At the same time, the book goes beyond tired. Instead, it emphasizes the ongoingness of the Oslo framework (in spite of its official shelf life of five years), its ubiquitous consequences, and contradictory manifestations on the ground. Through the text’s meticulous layout, refreshing accessibility, compelling analyses, and comprehensive geographic representation, the book provokes us to think about the deep and protracted impact of colonialism when it is disguised as international diplimacy. It would benefit i scholars, activists, students, humanitarians, organizers, nongovernmental organization workers, political historians, and others concerned with Palestinian and Israeli contemporary history. It is also a timely example of a critical approach to diplomacy and development that will become increasingly valuable in the wake of a historic U.S. election and at the heels of U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Deal of the Century.”

The first chapter by Diana Buttu entitled “The Oslo Agreements—What Happened?” lays out the ideological, sociopolitical, and colonial underpinnings wrought by Oslo and its impacts on Palestinian nationalist aspirations until today. Buttu eloquently highlights key “agreements” from 1993 through 1998 that have stunted Palestinian national aspirations, fragmenting a viable “Palestine” and promising years of subordination. In her meticulously cited analysis, Buttu outlines four primary principles that continue to color Palestinian aspirations for unification of land and polity: (1) the politics of recognition, (2) policies and structures of containment in the West Bank and Gaza, (3) the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) emergence as a security subcontractor for the state of Israel and, (4) the entrenchment of the two-state framework (enabled through a system of “negotiations”) as the only permissible means to end a violent settler-colonial rule.

An emergent theme across the first chapters is the PA’s cooptation of the Palestinian national movement into a state-building project. According to Jamil Hilal (Chapter 2), the PA’s emergence “radically altered the geography, demography, composition, and trajectory of the Palestinian national political field” (50). Tariq Dana’s beautifully composed and probing third chapter “Lost in Transition: The Palestinian National Movement After Oslo” hones in on this further. Dana argues that the emergent structures, functions, perceptions, discourse, and practices of various political actors deeply altered the Palestinian struggle from an anti-colonial movement to one that centered the nation-state. He writes:

After decades of acting as a leading anti-colonial movement in the world—with success in building influential organizational structures characterized by ideological and political pluralism, and a revolutionary transnational reach that inspired and attracted supporters from distant parts of the world—the [Palestinian national] struggle and countless sacrifices that were made have ended in catastrophic failure. (P. 64)

To Dana, Oslo ultimately stripped the Palestinian national movement of the “vital features” of the anti-colonial liberation movements it emerged from. With Oslo, the emergent political forces and factions failed to present alternative strategies to rebuild the national movement in ways that centered Palestinian liberation as the ontological goal; rather, discourses of state-building and thinly concealed “peacebuilding” came in its place, suggesting a far more dismal projection of the future than his coauthor Jamil Hilal. Dana’s discussion ends with biting directness about what’s at stake: “If Palestinians do not begin by rebuilding their national movement beyond the Oslo framework, what remains of the national movement will likely suffer further fragmentation, disintegration, and degeneration” (p. 87).

It is perhaps this intensive layering that makes this book both unique and exhaustive. Raja Khalidi’s essay “The Structural Transformation of the Palestinian Economy after Oslo” adds yet another dimension to the devastating impacts wrought by Oslo’s “colonial peace” through a macro-social examination of the post-Oslo Palestinian political economy. Khalidi compellingly argues that, beneath the guise of peace-building and development, Israel’s policies of colonialism and occupation, along with the Palestinian leadership’s embrace of globalization and neoliberal capitalism consolidated and sedimented Israeli control. Detailing the inexorable rise in the service economy (and the concomitant collapse of Palestinian agriculture), the channels of dependency that constitute Israeli–Palestinian relations, and the extraction of Palestinian labor, land, and natural resources, Khalidi points to an ambivalence about the future: “it is hard to discern what, if anything, may unmake what has been wrought” (p. 119). However, according to Khalidi, one thing is certain:

just as permits, curfews, checkpoints, walls, closed military zones and prisons serve to operate and valorize the complex matrix of colonial control, so do economic facilitation, promises of material enrichment and the basic human instinct of self-preservation and seeking a normal life play an essential role in keeping the peace. Hence, to view the economic outcomes of Oslo as somehow separate from its political and security arrangements misses the point of why the Palestinian people face today one of the greatest predicaments of the modern Palestinian national movement. (P. 119)

Khalidi’s sobering account of the economic predicaments wrought by Oslo point to what might be extrapolated as another pertinent thematic: The conditions fed and fueled by Oslo are not sustainable; not only have they failed Palestinian national aspirations; they have also enabled, manufactured, and facilitated Israeli settler colonialism. The remaining five chapters in From the River to the Sea evidence this with attention to locality and context. Mansour Nasasra’s chapter “The Politics of Exclusion of Palestinians in Israel Since Oslo” focuses on Palestinians residing within the state of Israel, arguing that Oslo’s neglect of Palestinians in Israel propelled them to seek justice through the mechanisms of the settler colonial state by campaigning for equal rights as an indigenous minority. This process effectively severed them from the broader Palestinian national movement while also making their demands particularly difficult to ascertain in the ongoing declaration of Israel as a Jewish state and the passing of such measures as the 2018 Nation-State Law. What is particularly refreshing about this chapter is that it engages voices of Palestinian political leaders and activists in Israel who continue to identify with the broader national struggle in spite of their eclipsed position. Yonatan Mendel continues the analysis of Oslo’s effects within the “Green Line,” but through an emphasis on popular perceptions among Jewish-Israelis who consider Oslo an act of Israeli sacrifice for the sake of diplomacy, despite hard facts to the contrary. Mendel’s chapter “A New Nationalistic Political Grammar” provides an analysis of how these popular perceptions work in tandem with right-wing and extremist Jewish-Israeli groups who continue to normalize the representation of Palestinians as a threat. His analysis of recent polls demonstrate that there exists overwhelming support for discriminatory practices against Palestinians in Israel, and that these perceptions have become a social fact for many Israelis.

Chapters 7, 8, and 9 focus on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and Jordan, respectively. Toufic Haddad’s chapter “From Singapore to the Stone Age: The Gaza Strip and the Political Economy of Crisis” focuses on the impacts of Oslo in the Gaza Strip, specifically the geopolitical fragmentation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and the isolation of Gaza. Here, Haddad argues that Oslo's language of “peacebuilding,” “development,” “reform,” “state-building,” and “reconstruction” have been exploited by the state of Israel to enhance its control over the OPT. While demonstrations like the Great March of Return of 2018 have mobilized grassroots efforts, Haddaddetails the perpetual state of crisis in Gaza across three key time periods: the Oslo years, the Second Intifada, and the emergence of Hamas as the local government entity. His analysis suggests the need for a further examination of the political economy of crisis and how to resist the further escalation and devastation against Gaza’s Palestinians.

Chapter 8: “Occupied East Jerusalem Since the Oslo Accords: Isolation and Evisceration” also written by Mansour Nasasra focuses on the impacts of Oslo for Palestinians residing in East Jerusalem through extensive field research, including interviews with political officials, providing yet another methodological dimension to the book. Nasasra articulates East Jerusalem as submerged in an impasse between Israeli settler colonial aspirations, its official amputation from Palestinian lands and people in the West Bank, the rapid and systemic processes of Judaization taking place there, and the absence of Palestinian leadership there, effectively causing “the evisceration of the Palestinian body politic in East Jerusalem” (pp. 216, 232). As such, Palestinian members of the Knesset (MKs) have mobilized their efforts for Jerusalem. According to Nasasra, “Despite Palestinian Arab MKs having different political agendas, they have acted as a unified body when it comes to protecting the Old City” (p. 229). This chapter details acts of refusal by Palestinians in East Jerusalem and their insistence on joint struggle. It leads the reader to wonder how other forms of subversion and refusal have emerged as a result of Oslo that may not be encapsulated by macrosocial and structural accounts of its afterlife.

Luigi Achilli’s chapter “The Politics of Being ‘Ordinary’” moves to the East Bank, that is, to Palestinian refugees in Jordanian camps, emphasizing how Oslo’s neglect of refugees undermined their hopes for a return and “triggered among refugees a profound rethinking of their status in Jordan” (p. 262). According to Achilli, in spite of their sizable population there, Oslo led to a profound disengagement of refugees from politics, with the national project difficult to imagine and even painful to remember. The final chapter written by editor Mandy Turner is entitled “No ‘Plan B’ Because ‘Plan A’ Cannot Fail” turns to Western donors and multilateral aid agencies and their role in sustaining the Oslo framework. Based on extensive interviews with high-ranking aid officers, Turner analyzes how the notion of Oslo’s failure is inconceivable to these international actors, even when the “peace process” it promised is dead. The book ends with Cherine Hussein’s chapter “The Single-state Solution.” Hussein interviews activists and intellectuals who support the idea of a single, democratic Palestinian state as an alternative to the failed two-state solution. She shows that while the vision of a single state has gained traction as a means to “de-Zionize Israel/Palestine” (p. 317) and as a mechanism of cohering Palestinian land and polity, its actualization is faced with the profound absence of unified leadership as well as the lingering question of how to translate this vision into a popular resistance movement.

While the tone of the book is often cheerless, Jamil Hilal is careful to remind us that the fragmentation of the Palestinian national field “has not and does not entail the demise of Palestinian national identity” (55). With a nod to the future, his chapter “The Localization of the Palestinian National Political Field” provides useful insights for new political movements focused on Palestinian self-determination and emancipation including reclaiming a united Palestinian history; new, democratic institutions attentive to gender and class; and a new framework that allows for representations from diversified conditions of repression. These insights not only offer a gleam of optimism, they also allow space for some degree of practicality in re/thinking and re/imagining the role of popular nationalist movements, which are often addressed with ambivalence or dismissed as out of vogue, in spite of their continued meaning for many Palestinians.

From the River to the Sea: Palestine and Israel in the Shadow of “Peace” delivers what it promises: a tightly focused, multilayered, and comprehensive account of the continued effects of Oslo on Palestinian national aspirations. It offers an exceptionally thorough, critical approach to diplomacy, one that recognizes with dogged clarity how a “peace process” can actually serve the colonial state of Israel and its institutions. It is a point of entry for interdisciplinary scholars engaging a critical approach to diplomacy, especially as they are attentive to indigeneity, race, class, gender, sexuality, religion. On a more philosophical note, I am left with some lingering questions: What are the im/possibilities of “returning” to the political national field in a way that retains anti-colonial aspirations of the pre-Oslo context? What does “colonial peace” mean in the context of Trump’s “Deal of the Century” and how will this exacerbate the destructive “peace” caused by Oslo? And,finally, how do Palestinian national aspirations continue today in spite of the seeming failures of Oslo?