The famous handshake on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, that iconically marked the start of the 1993 Oslo Accords gave observers the vision that Israeli-Palestinian peace was just around the corner.
It set Israelis and Palestinians on the road to a two-state resolution to the conflict and created the first-ever Palestinian government. It also put in place an interim management system for the West Bank and Gaza that was meant to be phased out but held for 30 years.
Three decades later, the conflict continues to claim innocent lives, peace seems to be a pipe dream, and the vision of two states seems more elusive than it was on that bright fall day.
One of the architects of the Oslo Accords, Yossi Beilin, and former US special Middle East coordinator Dennis Ross said that time has not dimmed their belief in a two-state resolution even as they reflected on the pitfalls of the process that marked one of the more pivotal moments in Israeli history.
Beilin, who at the time was a Labor Party politician and the deputy foreign minister, was among the Israelis who stood on the White House lawn.
“It was very exciting, but I was a little bit worried that it was kind of a peace treaty ceremony rather than [one for] an interim agreement,” he said.
Thirty years later Beilin reflected for The Jerusalem Post on the accords which set Israelis and Palestinians on the road for a two-state resolution to the conflict.
Beilin thought it highly likely a permanent arrangement could be reached in five years.
He had some concerns about the phased process of the accords, fearing the timetable was too protracted and that it might have been best to have jumped to a permanent agreement.
Still, “I was sure that the issue is solvable and negotiable, and that in five years we could really find a solution,” he said.
Why did the Olso Accords fall apart?
When he thinks of how and why it all fell apart, he points to flaws within the accords themselves and to events that occurred in their aftermath.
In retrospect the Oslo Accords should have clearly stated the need to stop settlement building, Beilin said, explaining that the omission of such language “was a very big mistake.”
“The Palestinians demanded it” but former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin feared the political fallout of including it if it appeared as “Israeli consent to the Palestinian demand,” Beilin recalled. “He [Rabin] asked us to convince the Palestinians not to insist upon such a phrase.”
Instead, “what appears in the agreement is that the two sides will not take steps that will have an impact on the permanent agreement,” Beilin explained. “That was the hint about the stopping of settlements.”
Then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won the 1996 election on a campaign that included a pledge to abolish the 1993 and subsequent 1995 Oslo Accords. He backtracked after taking office, “understanding that the best thing for him is to keep it.”
But he “renewed the building in the territories for settlements. When we criticized him for doing it [explaining that he] was breaking the Oslo agreement, he said, ‘Show me where it is written.’”
In the end, Beilin said, “We were mistaken to ask the Palestinians not to mention it, because we could have been in another place had we agreed to [a freeze], and they were mistaken to accept our request.”
When the Oslo Accords were first drawn up, there were just over 90,000 settlers in the West Bank. Today, he said, there are close to half a million.
“The number of settlers became a major obstacle on the way of peace,” Beilin said, explaining that “evacuating them would be very difficult if not impossible.”
“If you take off the table the problem of the settlers, I think that we know how to solve the other issues, including Jerusalem,” Beilin said.
BUT THERE were a number of what he termed “lethal events” that occurred in the aftermath of the accords, which doomed them in the first decade.
The first, Beilin said, was on February 25, 1994, when Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli-American physician from the Kiryat Arba settlement, walked into the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs and killed 29 Muslim worshipers.
It was an event, Beilin said, he could not have imagined until it happened. At worst, he had expected opposition to the Oslo Accords to focus on demonstrations, roadblocks, and general public disorder. “I did not imagine that something like Baruch Goldstein would happen,” Beilin said. “I understood that it would harm the [Oslo] process. I could not say to myself that it was over,” but Beilin said he understood “that it would be very difficult to get back” to where things had been prior to the massacre.
Forty days later terrorist attacks began, Beilin said, as he pointed to the April 8 attack in Afula.
“In a way, it gave a kind of legitimacy to the lunatics on the other [Palestinian] side,” he said, adding that Goldstein “opened the doors of hell.”
The next blow to Oslo, he said, was Yigal Amir’s assassination of Rabin on November 4, 1995.
“There is no question that Yigal Amir succeeded,” Beilin said. “He killed the person who was ready to go further and who had the legitimacy of more than half the people.”
Israelis and Palestinians “believed that Rabin would be strong enough to continue the process,” Beilin explained. “His assassination [destroyed] the optimism of our camp.”
Palestinian terrorism, particularly the Second Intifada, which broke out in 2000 after the Camp David Summit fell apart, also undermined the accords, Beilin said.
The First intifada in 1987 “was the result of 20 years of relative silence, Beilin explained. “The Second Intifada [in 2000] happened against the background of the moderate government in Israel who wanted to have peace after the failure of Camp David,” Beilin said. The high death toll strengthened those in Israel who believed that peace was not possible; the Palestinians would always resort to violence, he added. As such, it was also a “huge blow to the peace camp.”
The Palestinian Authority’s corruption and its failure to develop good governance were also a factor in the dissolution of Oslo, Beilin said.
“The PA is a failure. It is corrupt. It is incapacitated in many areas and totally dependent on the world, so it did not become the state that people expected,” Beilin said.
“Speaking with young Palestinians, you can sometimes hear from them that if this is going to be” their government, then better to be part of Israel.
The outcome could have been different, he said, if former prime ministers Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert and Yair Lapid had been able to stay in office. Similarly, he blamed Netanyahu, now in his 16th year in office, for thwarting Oslo.
“He is the person who stopped the Oslo process on the Israeli side,” Beilin said.
“The current government is not a partner and it does not try to portray itself as a partner,” he added, although he does believe that PA President Mahmoud Abbas could still be a negotiating partner for Israel as well as his potential successor, despite the fact that the latter is serving time in jail for his involvement in terrorist attacks in which Israelis were killed.
“We will not have much better counterparts than Abu Mazen himself, who is against violence and believes in peace. I believe his successor, who apparently will be Marwan Barghouti, from jail or from outside of the jail, is committed to the two-state solution,” Beilin said.
Beilin is among those who have not given up on the possibility of a two-state resolution to the conflict, because he continues to view it as a path to ensure that Israel remains a viable Jewish and democratic state.
“If we do not have a Jewish majority, the whole Zionist story is over,” he explained.
Beilin’s vision of two states was based largely on the pre-1967 lines, including an Israeli withdrawal from most of the West Bank, with land swaps for territory that would be placed under Israeli sovereignty. “But not necessarily [withdrawal] to the Green Line itself, so that part of the settlements, especially the densely populated ones, would be under Israeli sovereignty,” Beilin said.
He imagined that the Temple Mount “should be handled by the Palestinians” and the Western Wall would be under Israeli control. “The solution for the [Palestinian] refugees would be symbolic and financial,” he said.
“Without peace with the Palestinians, we are doomed to the continuation of the current situation if not [something] worse,” he said.
ROSS, WHO was appointed to his post by former US president Bill Clinton in the summer of 1993, said that “the concept of Oslo was right. You had to create a structure of coexistence where each side developed a stake” in the outcome.
But one has to recall that Israelis and Palestinians “were going from a situation where there was complete mutual rejection and denial, so the idea that you could suddenly create mutual understanding and a set of common ground rules was pretty ambitious,” he said.
Early on, Ross said, he had understood how there was a narrative gap between the two sides.
“The Palestinians believed they were getting a state-in-waiting, and the purpose was to produce it as quickly as possible,” he said. “They wanted immediate symbols of independence. The Israeli view was completely different. We are going to devolve our authority to you, gradually, only if you can show you can fulfill your responsibilities. The Palestinian expectation was that they would see manifestations of independence very quickly, but for Israel, this raised red flags because they could pose security issues and challenges.”
Even the question of how to interpret the declaration of understanding was in dispute, Ross noted, pointing to the part that prohibits unilateral changes to the status of the territories.
For Israel, this meant Palestinians should not unilaterally declare statehood, Ross said. Palestinians, in contrast, see it as a directive to halt settlement activity, he added.
The logic of Oslo was that Israelis and Palestinians would build a network of cooperation over time, “so that the idea of living together becomes so natural, so organic,” that they could then tackle final-status negotiating issues.
“That network of cooperation was never made,” Ross said, adding that instead rejectionists on both sides were able to subvert and discredit the process.
There were steps the US could have taken, such as placing clearer constraints on settlement activity and pushing back more forcibly against Palestinian terrorism.
“We should have been more mindful of the fact that you threatened the process itself if there was not the kind of credible action against terror that was required,” Ross said.
Despite the flaws in the process, Ross said, it’s misleading to imagine, in light of the First Intifada, that the situation on the ground as it existed in the early 1990s could have remained.
Rabin, he said, had become convinced that there was no military solution to the Palestinian conflict, and that it was turning the army into a police force.
Israel, he said, also reaped many positive benefits from the Oslo process.
The accords “opened Israel to the world,” allowing for the expansion of the country’s diplomatic ties and economic potential, Ross said, adding that that helped foster its “role as a Start-Up Nation.”
The 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, for example, he said, was a direct result of the Oslo Accords.
“If it was OK for the PLO to deal with the Israelis, then why wasn’t it OK for everyone else? The PLO was the embodiment of the Palestinian national movement that was now recognizing Israel, so you could as well,” Ross explained.
In that same vein, Ross said, the Abraham Accords would not have been possible without Oslo.
Ross said he understands that the Israeli and Palestinian political reality does not allow for a two-state resolution at this time, but that it still remains the best option on the table, particularly when compared with a one-state reality.
It’s not feasible to have two national identities that coexist in one state,” he said. “A one-state outcome is a guarantee of perpetual conflict.” •
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