Abstract
During the Oslo process from 1993, Israel continued to expand settlements in the occupied territories. The important question in this regard is; how one should relate within the Israeli history the political, economic, social and cultural forces, which led Israel to the Oslo process, and those which kept it expanding its settlements. This paper seeks the answer by examining the previous research, looking at how they evaluate the relations between the issue of the settlements and the Oslo process. They are categorized into three groups; the works focusing on “the narrowly defined settlement issue,” the works emphasizing “the widely defined settlement issue” and “the third paradigm,” which tries to combine the former two paradigms. This paper argues that even though scholars adopt the third paradigm, unless they recognize the widely defined settlement issue as a root cause of the conflict and distance themselves from the decolonization myth of the Oslo process, they cannot solve the contradiction between their research framework and proposal for the solution. This paper concludes that while the Green Line ceased to exist as a material boundary, it still functions as an imagined boundary and ideological devise to maintain the premise that Israel can be democratic while defining itself as the Jewish state despite the continuing colonization, creeping apartheid and the demand of the Palestine refugees.
