Five years have passed since the outbreak of the freedom and independence Intifada. During this period, many significant events took place that brought change after so many years of Oslo delusions warped the truth. The Oslo years dressed in lies the partial and fragmented solutions determined by an Israeli vision and supported by America. They were removed from solutions that would guarantee minimum national rights of the Palestinian people in an independent state established on all of the territories occupied in 1967 with Jerusalem as its capital and the right to self-determination and the return of refugees in accordance with United Nations General Assembly Resolution (UNGA) 194.
A result of this new Intifada is that the Palestinian problem has reached a state of ultimate atrophy. It is no longer possible for Israeli-American solutions proposed over the last decade to force themselves on the issue. They tried between Madrid and Oslo, and continued until reaching a dead end in May 1999. Then they tried again with the Camp David II negotiations in July 2000, which also led to a dead end. Likewise the proposals of US President Bill Clinton on 20 December 2000 led us back to the wall. All of these proposals failed because they overlooked the minimal national rights of the Palestinian people and the peoples of the Arab nation. These solutions were determined by an Israeli-American vision that sought to make permanent Israeli expansionist ambitions in the Palestinian territories on a wider scale than the Zionist colonialist project of 1948. These ambitions sought to underline the June 1967 defeat and occupy all Palestinian lands in addition to neighbouring Arab territory (Sinai and the Golan Heights) with the hope of forcing into reality a new map for the State of Israel in which a unified Jerusalem, or most of the city, would be the "eternal Jewish capital". This is what the Camp David II proposals provided for, the result of agreements between the government of Barak and the Clinton administration.
The Camp David II proposal gave Palestinians 14 per cent of Arab Jerusalem occupied in 1967, while Israel would have annexed the remaining 86 per cent. Israel would have also annexed a total of 11.5 per cent of Palestinian occupied territories on the West Bank. Palestinian refugees would not have been granted the right of return; not even the principle of the right of return would have been recognised. Instead, the problem of Palestinian refugees was deemed to have three solutions: family reunification, with no more than 100,000 individuals returning over 10 years to within the so-called "Green Line", in reference to Palestinian territories occupied in 1948; return to the promised Palestinian state for up to half a million over 10 years in accordance with Palestinian-Israeli-American agreement; and the remaining refugees, more than 3.5 million in Diaspora, would be addressed in the framework of an international conference to organise rehabilitation and settlement in Arab states or a new forced migration to distant exile.
All these Israeli solutions led to dead ends. They were rejected by the Palestinian people, its national and democratic currents, and its resistance movements. They were rejected in order to raise the ceiling of political solutions to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in accordance with international law. Such an approach would affirm the necessity of ending the occupation up to the 4 June 1967 lines in order to create a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and the return of the refugees in accordance with the UNGA Resolution 194. This new revival required 14 years of resistance and suffering by our people to occur. The Oslo Accords, and before them the foundation laid in Madrid, cemented the disengagement of the Palestinian cause from that of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Direct bilateral negotiations were repeated and all ties between various channels of negotiations were broken. Bilateral Jordanian, Syrian and Lebanese-Israeli negotiations were crammed into just two resolutions, United Nations Security Council (UNSC) 242 and 338.
On the Palestinian-Israeli front, Palestinian representation was limited to a delegation of residents from the West Bank and Gaza to the exclusion of Jerusalemites and refugees. This delegation was part of a larger Jordanian- Palestinian delegation. Negotiations took place in Washington and revolved around self-determination (for residents without sovereignty over land) while settlement construction continued without abatement. Behind the back of the Palestinian delegation negotiating in Washington, the secret Oslo negotiations resulted in the signing of the Oslo Accords and its derivative agreements on small, partial, fragmented steps. Following that, the Camp David II negotiations brought new and invasive delusions requiring extensive time to refute. During 14 years of struggling, not to drown amid the distortions of American-Israeli plans and solutions, our people were burned by experience and learned the necessity of international appeals in confronting the Israeli expansionist project.
So what has the Intifada offered that is new over its five years? The Intifada has provided extra spirit at home and in the Diaspora through its new national banner of freedom and independence within the framework of international resolutions. It has distanced itself from the partial deals of Oslo and the policy of small "step-by-step" developments, and Israeli- American solutions. The new equation has brought far further reaching results than the mere five years of the Intifada. This period has been a watershed for Palestine and Israel as well as for Arab and other countries.
One result has been the Israeli realisation among military and political generals that there is no solution to the Intifada offered by oppressive military measures, no matter how bloody. The last of the attempts at a military solution was when Sharon stood before Barak during the Camp David II negotiations and screamed "Barak is selling the land of Israel!" and raised the slogan "Let the army win", promising that if he were given the authority he would "defeat the Intifada and resistance in 100 days". It ended when he picked up the remains of his unsuccessful slogan and withdrew from the Gaza Strip.
The Cairo Declaration was significant because it crowned the third round of the Palestinian dialogue and drew an outline for reconsidering the role of a unified PLO and its institutions. The Cairo Declaration addressed the national requirements for the PLO's new birth under the banners of Intifada, resistance, freedom, independence and an end to settlement construction and occupation. During the period under consideration we should push for the generation of a unified national programme and a unified national leadership. We should strive for comprehensive democratic reform and the building of a new democratic parliamentary political system for the PA that would serve majority interests in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This system would restructure the PA institutions on new coalition-based legislative and executive rules and put an end to the organisational monopoly that has thrived over the last 15 years.
All of these transformations should take place in accordance with the Cairo Declaration and enable the PLO to undertake its role in the battle of national liberation already waged by our people. They would provide the necessary resilience to continue the Intifada and resistance, and would purge the PLO's institutions of corruption in all its forms. They would ensure justice and realism, the practice of pluralistic politics, and provide guarantees of peaceful rotation of power, respect for the rule of law, separation of powers, and respect for the judiciary and adherence to its rulings. They would also guarantee public and private freedoms including freedom of the press, publishing, expression, organisation, political affiliation, public assembly and demonstration within the framework of law.
Sharon came to the conclusion that "the occupation cannot continue forever," and for the first time this conclusion was political in nature. As Sharon is a leading figure in the mythological and ideological claim that all of historic Palestine is the land of Israel, and due to his continued use of the phrase "painful concessions" and belief that the land of Israel was torn from live Israeli flesh, he arrived at this conclusion very late. He did so only after seas of blood had been shed and massacres had been carried out, from the West Bank Qubya village massacre of 1953 to the slaying of Arab prisoners at Adwan in 1967 to the massacres of Jenin, Nablus's Old City, Bethlehem's refugee camps, Beit Sahour, Tulkarem refugee camps, Khan Younis, Jabalya, Beit Lahiya, Rafah, and the assassinations that took place under operations named "Defensive Shield", "Determined Path", and so on and so on.
Yet the reactions caused by the Intifada have not stopped at regional borders. They first reached abroad to the European Union when it devised the "roadmap" and then with Bush's vision of two states announced on 24 June 2002 -- a Palestinian state and an Israeli state on the land of historical Palestine, the Holy Land. This was followed by the first Security Council resolution since 1947 -- UNSC Resolution 1397 -- calling for two states on the land of Palestine. It called for a Palestinian state on the territories occupied in 1967, but did not provide for return to behind 4 June 1967 lines. All the same, for the first time in 57 years, it called for the right of the Palestinian people to an independent state, a sovereignty prevented since the beginning of the 20th century.
