WHEN ISRAEL and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) signed the Oslo peace accords in 1993, it was hailed as a "historic achievement."

New York Times blowhard Thomas Friedman called the agreement "the Middle East equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall." In 1994, Yasser Arafat and Israeli leaders Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin won the Nobel Peace Prize.

But Oslo was never about a just peace. The agreement was a way for Israel to normalize its occupation--by subcontracting the policing of Palestinians to the new Palestinian Authority (PA).

In a classic colonial model, Israel wanted a section of the conquered people to act on behalf of the conquerors. As Rabin put it, the PA could repress Palestinians "without problems made by [the human rights organization] B'Tselem, and without problems from all sorts of bleeding hearts and mothers and fathers."

Oslo marked a historic compromise for the Palestinian movement after decades of the struggle for liberation.

The PA's security apparatus began actively collaborating with Israel's security forces--and those lovers of peace and justice, the CIA. Arafat's regime has been sharply criticized for a series of corruption scandals and heavy-handed repression against its opponents.

In return, Palestinians were given control of only a handful of regions in the West Bank and Gaza--all of them broken up by Israeli-controlled territory, bypass roads and settlements.

Why would Arafat sign such a rotten deal? By the early 1990s, Arafat found himself isolated.

The collapse of the ex-USSR in 1991 left the PLO without a major financial backer. And during the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, most Arab countries lined up behind the U.S.-- leaving the PLO as one of the few opponents of the war.

Israel recognized that it could press the advantage and convince Arafat to sign away more Palestinian rights than anyone had ever thought imaginable. That's why Oslo was doomed from the start.

By failing to address the real issues at the root of the conflict--land, refugees, civil rights and simple justice--Oslo was bound to fall short of Palestinians' legitimate aspirations.

List of stories from SW's eyewitness report from Palestine