Land and land conflict in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process:1990-1999

This thesis examines the importance of the debates and struggle over land in the Oslo Accord and immediately post-Oslo. It does this by first situating the conflict
over land in the historical context of the spread of Zionism from the 1880s, culminating in the establishment of the State of Israel in Palestine in 1948. It then reviews and contrasts the policies on land and settlement of the Israeli Labour and Likud parties. The focus of the thesis is an assessment of Israeli settlement policy on the West Bank and Gaza-Strip after the Oslo Agreement of 1993. It examines the sequences of Israeli-Palestinian agreements that have divided Palestinian land into different categories and argues that these categories and the problems they have created have ignored the historical importance of land in the conflict between Israel
and Palestine.

The thesis argues that the classification of land is intended to further subjugate Palestine to the political and economic dominance of Israel, and that the
formulation for discussing land issues undermines the possibility for the establishment of a strong and economically independent Palestinian state. The thesis submits that the persistence of Israeli settlement policy and the manner of Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank has not encouraged the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) to conduct a comprehensive land survey and registration
procedure. Moreover. Israeli strategy in the post-Oslo period has been to promote the cantonisation of Palestine to ensure that any future Palestinian state will remain
economically weak and politically disjointed.