Shimon Peres and the legacy of the Oslo Accords

The accords also created an interim government for the Palestinians, the Palestinian National Authority, which would take over responsibilities in education, social welfare, health care, direct taxation and tourism. Within nine months, elections were to be held.

The accords allowed for Arafat to return to Gaza after years in exile; Israel was also supposed to withdraw from Gaza and Jericho within four months. In return, the PLO would also remove chapters in its charter referring to the destruction of Israel, which would be given guarantees that its people had the right to live in peace and security.

The stalled process
Proponents of Oslo at the time claimed that the accords helped encourage a peaceful approach to the conflict, and constituted the first step to getting the peace process started in earnest. But as is all too evident today, and despite Peres’s lifelong optimism, the peace the accords planned for was never achieved.

Oslo failed to address the key issues of the conflict: the status of Jerusalem, right of return for the 1948 Palestinian refugees, the status of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and the borders of the Palestinian territory. There was also no promise of an independent Palestinian state. It was assumed that these issues would be negotiated at the end of the five-year transition period the accords provided for. For many critics, the Oslo was just a litany of empty promises.

Part of the problem was that the accords were not actually a peace treaty, but only a first step to peace and a framework for facilitating negotiations for a final treaty intended to be negotiated in 1998.

When the accords were signed in September 1993, the criticism was sharp and immediate. Palestinian scholar Edward Said decried them as a “Palestinian surrender,” and claimed that the plan would throw the Palestinian leadership into complete disarray.

There was also anger on the Israeli side. Peres’s fellow negotiator Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli extremist in November 1995, an event which in turn led to the election of the right-wing Likud Party in 1996. Led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who today serves as Israel’s prime minister again, the new government was openly antagonistic towards Oslo.

Dashed hopes
So why did Oslo fail? As ever, it depends which voices on which side you listen to.

Many Israelis blame Palestinian violence for wrecking the peace process. After the Camp David Accords collapsed in July 2000, the Second Intifada broke out and ran until 2005. The militant Islamist group Hamas won legislative elections in 2006, further deepening a rift among Palestinians and making the Palestinian Authority more irrelevant than ever.

In contrast, many Palestinians claim that it was the Israelis who have reneged on their side of the deal. Highly contentious is the issue of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories: in 1993, there were 115,700 Israeli settlers living there, whereas today there are more than 350,000 in the West Bank and another 300,000 living within East Jerusalem’s pre-1967 borders. No settlement freezes have taken place, and this constant encroachment has made the two-state solution more difficult.

A 2013 poll examining the effects of Oslo on public opinion twenty years later found both sides have been dissatisfied. Palestinians maintained that the Israelis were the big winners, with 49 percent claiming that the accords damaged their interests. On the Israeli side, 68 percent of Israelis felt that the main beneficiaries were the Palestinians, and 64 percent felt that they themselves had been harmed by the accords.

And yet a 2015 poll revealed that while 90 percent of Palestinians don’t think Israel has abided by the Oslo Agreement, 68 percent still want to support the agreement. So for all that the Oslo framework is resented criticized, any new peace process for peace in the region will almost certainly have to stick to it in some form.

Although the two sides are far apart, Peres died an optimist, still hopeful that the day would come when the Israeli Defense Forces’ soldiers would serve purely for peace. As he famously put it: “Impossibility is only a product of our prejudice.”

Natasha Ezrow is Senior Lecturer, University of Essex. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution / No derivative).