The 1993 Oslo Accords are put forward as proof that peace with Israel is impossible in every debate on war and peace. These accords tested Israel's desire for peace, and Israel failed; put the same test, Palestinians (and Arabs) passed and affirmed the sincerity of their desire for peace.
Accordingly, we must look back on this agreement to reassess a few convenient fundamental assumptions that have underpinned conclusions about war and peace, thereby justifying the avoidance of any critical reexamination.
The urgency of our need for such a re-examination stems from another, practical aim. Across the Levant, we no longer have the luxury of claiming that we do not want peace- even if it is exceedingly difficult and even on the grounds that Israel cannot move forward with it.
Oslo was the apex of what could be achieved through a plausible peace. However, the fact that it was “plausible” does not negate the shortcomings of this peace. While those shortcomings could partly be attributed to the fact that stumbles are inherent to beginnings, the agreement’s flaws were compounded by a profoundly unequal power dynamic and a history of absolute mutual suspicion.
Even with Oslo’s major shortcomings- chief among them the deferral of “final status” issues to an uncertain time in the future and leaping over core questions that resist delay- the Palestinians would have received far less than Osla had offered if the outcome of the talks had been determined by the sheer balance of power. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) came to the negotiating table with nothing left in the tank. The PLO entered the process after the Lebanese Civil War, the Israeli invasion that led to the its expulsion from Lebanon to Tunisia, Syria’s relentless and brutal campaign that was not satisfied with severely weakening the PLO, pushing it, under the pressure of violent rivalry with Hafez al-Assad, to one of its worst mistakes: siding with Saddam Hussein as he invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990.
The consequences of this support were nothing short of disastrous: the PLO lost the substantial financial and political support it had received from the Gulf states up until then. Internationally, the collapse of the Soviet Union, “our great ally,” worsened what had already been a massive disparity. On the other hand, Israel not only benefited from its membership in the alliance that had won the Cold War, it also benefited from the arrival of one million immigrants following the Soviet collapse.
For all of its significance, the Palestinians’ only asset at the time, the First Intifada of 1987, was far too modest to present a counterweight to all of those sweeping geopolitical shifts.
Coupled with profound and chronic mutual distrust, and the fact that Israeli politics has been closely influenced by hysteria over security, this power imbalance rendered the political process paternalistic, nasty, and alienating, as the powerful Israelis never stopped scrutinizing and testing the weak Palestinians.
Even so, Oslo offered a new beginning that, at least in principle, made betting on a happy ending tenable. It offered Palestinians an identity card and passport, a governing authority theoretically destined to become a state, and the right of return of tens to thousands of Palestinians, whose numbers never stopped growing. Between 1993 and the Second Intifada of 2000, Palestinians enjoyed greater autonomy in areas identified in the agreement. Moreover, the United States, the European Union, and even Israel recognized the PLO as the “legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people. And, for his part, Yasser Arafat had recognized the State of Israel and condemned terrorism.
As for Gaza, it was always in the thick of things. In fact, the implementation phase of the Oslo process for Palestinian self-rule partly began with Gaza and Jericho, as per what became known as the “Cairo Agreement” of 1994. In late 1998, US President Bill Clinton visited Gaza to attend the opening of an airport planned for construction in Rafah (southern Gaza) that was meant to offer an alternative to Egypt’s El Arish Airport and the Israeli airports that Palestinians had been forced to use. Clinton’s presence, along with the funding that several countries (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands) had offered for the construction of the airport, reflected political support meant to push back against Israel’s excessive restrictions and obstruction.
This new political direction taken by the Jewish state, and the broad popular support that its “peace camp” had attained, did not emerge in a vacuum. They cannot be understood in isolation from the cultural and intellectual shifts in Israel that began in the 1980s. The “New Historians,” a term coined in 1988 by one of its members, Benny Morris, emerged during this decade, and it also included Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, Shlomo Sand, and Simha Flapan. They reexamined the foundational narratives of their state and exposed attempts to erase the atrocities inflicted on Palestinians in 1948. This was also when we saw the emergence of critical approaches to Zionism and its colonial dimension in sociology and the humanities, with the works of Baruch Kimmerling, Uri Ram, Gershon Shafir, and others. More broadly, a phenomenon that came to be known as “post-Zionism” became part of the Israeli cultural mainstream, constituting the intellectual wing of the peace process.
On a global and ideological level, the Oslo Accords seemed to fit into the post–Cold War climate and the global wave of demands for democratization and conflict resolution. Thus, Palestinian and Arab engagement with Oslo, swam with the tide of a global shift, which is far from typical in modern Arab history.
But where did things go from there?
