A Colonial Peace
Part II — Oslo, Its Afterlife, and the Collapse of the Illusion
(This article follows Part I, “Peace and Its Instruments,” which examined the ongoing effort to re-engineer “peace” into an evolving system of colonial control in Gaza.)
October 7 did not begin a new war; it revealed one that had never ended—a war sustained through accords, “peace” plans, and the rituals of a so-called peace process.
The uprising was not only a military operation but a rejection of the order institutionalized by the Oslo Accords and the culture of defeat they inaugurated in 1993, when occupation was rebranded as peace and a national struggle was reduced to a project of self-administration under Israeli rule.
It ended, abruptly, a belief embraced by regimes and elites across the Arab world: that history had concluded, that freedom could be negotiated within occupation, and that Palestinians could secure only a semblance of rights within Israel’s terms of domination.
For thirty years that illusion—the conviction that subordination could be mistaken for peace—set the limits of the possible.
Oslo, “A Palestinian Versailles”
The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization after the First Intifada (1987–1991), were presented as the beginning of peace and coexistence. In practice, they created a system of limited Palestinian autonomy under continued Israeli occupation.
The First Intifada had transformed the Palestinian struggle from a local revolt into a global cause. Through mass protest, strikes, and civil disobedience, it forced the world to confront the legitimacy of Palestinian demands. As pressure mounted, Israel and the U.S. devised a political framework to contain the uprising rather than address its causes.
They found a willing counterpart in Yasser Arafat and the PLO, exiled in Tunis since 1982. Detached from the movement inside Palestine and estranged from its people, Arafat’s leadership entered secret negotiations in Oslo—undermining the official Palestinian delegation then negotiating in Madrid.
Arafat and a handful of subordinates faced an entire corps of Israeli Foreign Ministry experts—without legal counsel and negotiating in English, a language they barely knew. What followed was a capitulation: unilateral concessions that entrenched Israel’s control over borders, resources, and security, transforming occupation into a system of managed Palestinian autonomy.
Arafat’s recognition of Israel’s “right to exist” carried with it renunciations of the PLO Charter, of armed struggle, and of UN resolutions affirming the Palestinians’ right of return—a surrender that alienated many Palestinians, especially in Gaza, where three-quarters of the population are refugees or their descendants. Israel, by contrast, conceded nothing, offering only a token acknowledgment of the PLO as representative of the Palestinian people.
Israel dictated the terms and preserved the architecture of domination. The Oslo framework gave that system its institutional form: the Palestinian Authority—created by Oslo—became the occupier’s subcontractor, managing life under occupation instead of ending it, dependent on foreign aid, constrained by Israeli approval, and accountable not to its people but to its patrons. The framework made Israeli security the organizing principle of Palestinian governance—an assurance granted to Israel even as its violations of Palestinian security went unchecked.
In this way, the gains of the First Intifada were undone. Half a century of struggle and sacrifice was buried beneath a “peace process” that redefined occupation as self-rule and subjugation as compromise.
The Oslo Accords established a precedent—the notion that progress and stability could be achieved only through collaboration with Israel, guaranteed by U.S. power. From Oslo to the Abraham Accords, successive concessions were made under the illusion that accommodation would appease Israeli power. It did not.
Over time, a sense of inevitability took hold—the conviction that the U.S. alone defined the terms of progress and decline, and that history itself moved within its orbit. Across the Arab world, voices that once spoke the language of liberation began to echo the rhetoric of pragmatism, presenting accommodation as realism and dependence as reform. Resistance gave way to reliance, and the collective will to struggle was slowly extinguished.
Bound by their dependence on U.S. economic and political support, Arab governments signed treaties and normalization deals that aligned them with the very order they once opposed. Through shared security frameworks, surveillance cooperation, and trade corridors, they were integrated into a colonial system organized around Israeli supremacy.
Unlike earlier peace efforts that at least gestured toward Palestinian inclusion, the 2020 Abraham Accords abandoned even the pretense. They bypassed Palestinians entirely, offering no remedy for occupation, settlements, or refugees—and no mention of repatriation and compensation. Both had been dismissed as impossible.
By late 2023, the normalization project reached its zenith. At the UN General Assembly that September, Netanyahu unveiled a map of a “New Middle East”: a vision of regional integration from which Palestine had vanished. For three decades, that illusion—the belief that peace could be achieved through subordination and accommodation—defined the regional order. It ended on October 7.
There is no peace between the occupier and the occupied, only the struggle of one to end the other.
— Ghassan Kanafani
The Morning After
In October 1993, Edward Said published The Morning After, his first response to the Oslo Accords. His warning was unsparing: a people who accepted subordination as the price of recognition would inherit neither freedom nor independence.
Thirty years later, in October 2023, history came full circle. The myth he exposed in The Morning After collapsed, and the moral and political language of resistance he kept alive now defines the region’s horizon—the terms through which justice, liberation, and legitimacy are once again being measured. The struggle he feared was slipping away has returned to the center of political life.
Out of that collapse has come a renewed sense of political agency. Palestinian negotiators representing today’s resistance factions have risen above the posture of submission that shaped the Oslo years. They have rejected the logic that underpinned those agreements, insisting instead on terms that reflect national, not administrative, aspirations—speaking from a position of strength rather than dependence.
The Palestinian Authority, born of Oslo and still captive to its logic, remains bound by a different refrain—one that might as well be: we will accept anything so long as you recognize us. When a number of Western governments recently extended diplomatic recognition to a Palestinian state, the PA greeted it as triumph—as though recognition itself were liberation. Yet what matters more than recognition is sovereignty: what kind of state it is, and whom it serves. For all the recognition granted, Palestinian freedom remains confined within boundaries drawn by U.S. hegemony and Israeli design.
As Oslo’s illusion gave way, so too did Israel’s—each sustained by the same fiction that peace could be achieved through domination rather than equality. For Israel, October 7 was not only a military surprise but an existential crisis that revealed the fragility of the Zionist myth of permanence. What unraveled that day was not only a separation fence but a worldview. A settler society built on paranoia had lived its nightmare: the breach of its frontier, the failure of its army, the sight of its own vulnerability.
The October 7 operation collapsed a self-image built over seventy-five years. The myth of the fortress—of the army that never fails, the intelligence that never sleeps—died that morning. The moment carried the same undertone as 1973, when the October War made visible the vulnerability of Israeli power, only this time there was no comparable horizon of victory. The old methods—war, deterrence, occupation—no longer achieved their objectives, only destruction.
Out of the shock came a new logic of survival. The state sought to restore its authority through destruction, turning war into a project of political and mythical renewal—stability through domination, survival through conquest. Israel revived the founding ambition of Zionism itself: to reorder the land through the removal of its people, to recreate permanence through erasure. What began as a military response became an ideological restoration—the return of Zionism as both method and belief.
What was meant to reaffirm Israeli dominance instead revealed its limits—and with it, the fragility of the international system built to protect it. Two years of unconditional U.S. support achieved none of Israel’s military objectives. The U.S. and the wider West now fear the consequences of this war: the erosion of their institutions, the collapse of their narrative, the revelation of their complicity.
Israel’s defeat in Gaza exposed both the limits of its military power and the depth of its dependence on the U.S. The war revealed a state far weaker than it believed itself to be—without U.S. resupply, intelligence, and diplomatic protection, it could not sustain military operations.
This dependence has stripped Israel of autonomy. Having lost the capacity to act on its own, it now follows U.S. policy wherever it leads. Inside Israel, this reality has become the subject of open dispute; officers and ministers across the spectrum speak of decisions being made “in Washington, not Tel Aviv.” What was once whispered—that Israel’s war, its ceasefire terms, and even its internal politics are being managed from the White House—is now said aloud.
In strategic terms, Israel has ceased to be Washington’s outpost and has become its client. It no longer shapes events on behalf of the U.S.; it relies on the U.S. to shield it from the consequences of its own actions. The Gaza war made that hierarchy visible—the so-called regional power cannot wage war, end one, or even sustain its army without American approval, weapons, and money.
The myth of Israeli self-reliance dissolved with that revelation; the very dependency that sustained its dominance now defines its decline. The war has left Israel more isolated than at any point in its history. Its image, long protected by Western media and political patronage, has unraveled beyond repair. The distortions that once inverted victims and aggressors can no longer conceal what the world has seen. No amount of propaganda or control over digital platforms can restore what has been lost—the legitimacy of a state that has made permanent war its only language.
The genocide was broadcast to the world, and that visibility has globalized the Palestinian question. It is no longer a regional issue but a mirror of civilization itself. The revolt that began in Gaza has already transcended its geography.
What empire once controlled through narrative, it now confronts through exposure. Images once meant to be concealed have escaped censorship and created solidarity; the oppression of one people has revealed the structure of domination that governs all. Palestine has turned from the world’s forgotten question into its defining one, revealing the bankruptcy of those who speak of peace while practicing domination. Across continents and movements, it no longer stands as one cause among others—it has become the measure of justice itself.
This is not the hope of immediate victory—that Palestine will be free soon—but the hope born of restored vision, that after October 7 Palestinians can once again see freedom conceptually, morally, and spiritually. What makes this vision powerful is that it reclaims the terrain of imagination and meaning—the ground colonialism works hardest to occupy. To see freedom is to act toward it: to rebuild what was broken, to organize what was scattered, to give form to a future no longer defined by conditions set or denied by others.
Three decades after The Morning After, Said’s warning has turned inside out. A generation that inherited the ruins of Oslo has refused the logic of its defeat. What began as a collapse of illusion has become the recovery of history itself—a people who once fought to be seen are again shaping how the world sees. The struggle is not finished, but its direction is clear—and, for the first time since the First Intifada, that direction belongs to the Palestinians.
In every situation, however dominated, there is always an alternative. One must train oneself to think in terms of the alternative—not the accepted or the status quo—and to refuse the belief that the present is frozen.
— Edward Said
“… began as a collapse of illusion has become the recovery of history itself—a people who once fought to be seen are again shaping how the world sees. The struggle is not finished, but its direction is clear—and, for the first time since the First Intifada, that direction belongs to the Palestinians…”
Fantastic writing, Abu Alya! Absolutely grateful you share your writings.
Admire how you always seem to choose the most precise word to communicate a complex idea.
Thank you :)
History doesn’t end under occupation , it waits to be reclaimed.
Reading this felt like watching a people rise from the weight of decades, breaking the silence of a false peace, and reminding the world that even in devastation, the spirit of freedom still breathes.
Thank you Abu Alya for sharing the truth.