Israel’s Peace Process Was Always a Road To Nowhere
Two decades after the peace process expired between the Camp David and Taba summits, many look back with nostalgia at the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO. But historian Ilan Pappe argues that the failure of Oslo to deliver Palestinian sovereignty was baked into the process from the start.
Two women during the quarantine on the roof of their house in Jabalia refugee camp on August 28, 2020 in Gaza City. (Fatima Shbair / Getty Images)
On September 13, 1993, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Israeli government signed the Oslo Accords with great fanfare. The agreement was the brainchild of a group of Israelis who were part of the think tank Mashov, led by then deputy foreign minister, Yossi Beilin.
Their assumption was that a convergence of factors provided an opportune historical moment for imposing a solution on the Palestinian side: the success of the more dovish Labor Party in Israel’s 1992 elections on the one hand, the drastic erosion in the PLO’s international standing because of Yasser Arafat’s support for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait on the other.
The architects of the accords assumed that the Palestinians were in no position to resist an Israeli diktat which represented the maximum that the Jewish state was willing to concede at that time. The best these representatives of the “Israeli peace camp” could offer was two Bantustans — a reduced West Bank and an enclaved Gaza Strip — that would enjoy some of the symbolism of statehood while in practice remaining under Israeli control.
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