Edward Said

Edward Said   (academic, activist)
Born	1 November 1935 Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine
Died	24 September 2003 (Age 67) New York City, United States
Nationality	Palestine, US
Alma mater	Victoria College (Alexandria), Northfield Mount Hermon School, Princeton University, Harvard University

A large portion of the Palestinian population, including various Palestinian militant groups, staunchly opposed the Oslo Accords; Palestinian-American philosopher Edward Said described them as a "Palestinian Versailles":

So first of all let us call the agreement by its real name: an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles.

What makes it worse is that for at least the past fifteen years the PLO could have negotiated a better arrangement than this modified Allon Plan, one not requiring so many unilateral concessions to Israel. For reasons best known to the leadership it refused all previous overtures. To take one example of which I have personal knowledge: in the late Seventies, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance asked me to persuade Yasser Arafat to accept Resolution 242 with a reservation (accepted by the US) to be added by the PLO which would insist on the national rights of the Palestinian people as well as Palestinian self-determination.

Vance said that the US would immediately recognise the PLO and inaugurate negotiations between it and Israel. Yasser Arafat categorically turned the offer down, as he did similar offers. Then the Gulf War occurred, and because of the disastrous positions it took then, the PLO lost even more ground.

The gains of the intifada were squandered, and today advocates of the new document say: ‘We had no alternative.’ The correct way of phrasing that is: ‘We had no alternative because we either lost or threw away a lot of others, leaving us only this one.’

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