'Everybody Just Blew It': Key U.S. Diplomats Reflect on the Oslo Accords, 30 Years on." (Haaretz, 9/13/23.)
WASHINGTON – This Wednesday marks the 30th anniversary of perhaps the most significant photo op in Israeli history: Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands with PLO leader Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, formally establishing a framework to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The public signing ceremony for the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements – better known as the Oslo Accords – marked the first formal mutual recognition of official Israeli and Palestinian representatives after months of back-channel negotiations.
The declaration signed in Washington was meant to set a path toward a “final status agreement” to be reached in 1999, establishing the Palestinian Authority to govern Palestinians on an interim basis in pockets of the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli military control.
While the Clinton administration hosted the ceremony, it had no involvement in the Oslo process. In fact, then-President Bill Clinton’s peace team was divided on whether to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian deal or to focus on a separate track with Syria.
In the months, years and decades since September 13, 1993, the peace process has only backslid and Oslo has become a cautionary tale. When it comes to where and why things went wrong, the Americans closest to the peace process in the 1990s agree on some points – such as Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in November 1995, extremists on both sides derailing the process and the failure to hold both sides accountable.
Other points, however, remain deep points of contention: whether Oslo was structurally doomed from the beginning; whether America should have been more involved in the process from the get-go; and whether the U.S. should have focused on incremental confidence-building or taken bigger swings toward final-status issues.
Oslo seems further away than ever before on its 30th anniversary, yet remains deeply relevant – not only for everyday relations between Israel and the Palestinians, but as a framework that every future Israeli diplomatic initiative will be forced to consider.
Five key U.S. figures from the time look back at the historic agreement that blindsided the White House, and ask what more the United States could have done to keep Oslo alive…
Martin Indyk
Role in 1993: Senior member of U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s Middle East peace team
Key quote: “Once Israel and the PLO reached an agreement, the president decided very quickly that he only had one option: to get behind it and try to make it work.”
For Martin Indyk, Oslo’s failure did not originate in the agreements themselves but the failure of both sides to live up to their commitments.
“People look back at Oslo and consider it a disaster. I consider it a process that might have worked had Rabin not been assassinated – which was far more effective in destroying the process than anything else that came after,” says Indyk, who would go on to serve multiple stints as U.S. ambassador to Israel and as the Obama administration’s special envoy for Middle East peace.
In his mind, one of Oslo’s defining characteristics – both in its inception and eventual downfall – was the lack of U.S. involvement in its formation.
“It was negotiated behind our backs. We literally found out about it after the agreement was made,” he says, referring to then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres’ August 1993 visit to U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher at Point Mugu Naval Air Station in California.
“Once Israel and the PLO reached an agreement, the president decided very quickly that he only had one option: to get behind it and try to make it work,” Indyk says. “It was kind of a head-snapper, but we adjusted very quickly.”
He acknowledges, however, that the Clinton administration was largely acting in the dark.
“Oslo deferred all final status issues until later. People forget it said nothing about a Palestinian state, Jerusalem, refugees, borders. Everything was left up in the air.”
“We didn’t know what exactly we signed up for or the negotiating history. We could read the agreement, but it was a bare-bones framework. We were essentially signing up to support something with which we had no involvement in negotiating,” he says.
This put the Clinton administration at a disadvantage when it came to enforcing both sides’ commitments – precisely because they had been made to each other rather than to the Americans.
“Commitments which may have been made in good faith were not kept in good faith by either side. It was already difficult for us to hold their feet to the fire,” Indyk says.
He flags Oslo’s embrace of incremental steps, replete with three separate phases of Israeli withdrawal preceding a final-status agreement, as perhaps its most important feature.
“Oslo deferred all final status issues until later. People forget it said nothing about a Palestinian state, Jerusalem, refugees, borders. Everything was left up in the air,” he says, adding that Oslo’s logic of incrementalism was supposed to lead to greater trust between the sides.
This confidence-building was cut short, however, by Rabin’s 1995 assassination – which Indyk regards as the beginning of Oslo’s end.
“I thought at the time that the agreement had gone too far for it to be destroyed by this. I was completely wrong about that,” he says. For him, the process significantly rested upon the relationship of trust that had developed between Rabin, Peres and PLO leader Yasser Arafat – “much more than I understood at the time.”
He adds: “The assassination, the terror that followed and the way Benjamin Netanyahu distorted the process ahead of his [1996 prime ministerial] election – combined with Arafat’s unwillingness to crack down on terrorists – led to trust-destruction rather than trust-building.”
This deterioration continued despite the Clinton administration’s success in negotiating the 1998 Wye River Memorandum, which sought to resume implementing the Oslo Accords.
The Israeli government “came down before that agreement was implemented – precisely because Netanyahu gave up territory in the West Bank, which was unacceptable to the Israeli right. By the end of his first term [1999], the process was really in trouble.”
Indyk says the Syria peace track was prioritized after Ehud Barak’s election victory over Netanyahu, sidelining Oslo at a critical moment. When these efforts failed, Indyk says Barak pushed to abandon incrementalism in favor of final-status efforts.
“In retrospect, that decision to abandon the third redeployment and go for end-of-conflict talks at Camp David really destroyed what was left,” he says. “To try to end the conflict that way, instead of Rabin’s step-by-step effort, produced an all-or-nothing situation where we ended up with nothing.”
Close to zero
Indyk says no meaningful process followed the Camp David talks of July 2000, with the second intifada erupting soon after and destroying any further efforts. “Something fundamental had been destroyed in the trust. It’s never been possible to rebuild it,” he says, comparing later efforts to Humpty Dumpty.
Indyk acknowledges that when then-President Barack Obama relaunched final-status efforts in 2013, the chances of success were close to zero.
“I was quoted in The New York Times as saying the two sides were so far apart that the most Netanyahu would be prepared to offer was far less than [Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas] would possibly be willing to accept,” he says.
One month later, then-Secretary of State John Kerry asked him to run point on the efforts. “I felt a sense of duty to try, but it wasn’t because I thought it was possible to achieve a breakthrough. I don’t believe anyone on either side believed it either,” he says, noting that Kerry underestimated how badly things had deteriorated.
Despite this, Indyk says the Oslo process – not just the original framework, but everything agreed upon under its umbrella – remains the only pact in governance.
“It’s still the basic template. There isn’t another basis for negotiations,” he says, noting how Israel reasserted and accepted Oslo as the basis for its relationship with the Palestinians as recently as this year at the Aqaba and Sharm el-Sheikh summits(where the Israelis and Palestinians talked for the first time in over a decade).
Indyk describes Oslo as “dead in spirit but alive in structure,” pointing out its continued relevance for life in the occupied territories. “All you have is this basis for the relationship, which both sides observe when it suits them and ignore when it doesn’t. It’s a very unsatisfactory arrangement, but it’s all that we have,” he says.
He believes lessons from Oslo could still be utilized, despite the events of the past 30 years.
“I’m probably the only one in the world who believes this, but if we got both sides to adhere to Oslo and negotiate a third redeployment, that would be the best way to get the peace process back on track,” he says. “We have to go back to the idea of smaller incremental steps that start with the issue of territory.”
Daniel Kurtzer
Role in 1993: State Department official, liaising with Israeli and Norwegian counterparts involved in Oslo talks
Key quote: “Everybody just blew it.”
While the United States was formally distant from the Oslo negotiations, Daniel Kurtzer was the U.S. official closest to the talks from the outset.
Looking back on Oslo, he points to a consistent lack of U.S. engagement enabling bad behavior on all sides, along with a failed articulation of what a final-status agreement should resemble.
Kurtzer, who went on to serve as U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2001-2005, was a mid-level State Department official in 1993, responsible for staying updated on the Oslo talks from his Israeli and Norwegian counterparts (the latter was the unlikely facilitator of the negotiations).
He would update the U.S. peace team with memos, stressing that everyone was aware of what was occurring. These updates, according to Kurtzer, created a certain amount of internal tension between him and U.S. officials such as Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk.
“They believed the priority should be given to the Syrian track because they thought that’s what [Yitzhak] Rabin wanted. They were dismissive of these reports about discussions going on in Oslo,” he says.
“It was very frustrating for me personally. The critical issue in the Arab-Israeli conflict is the Palestinian issue. If there’s this thing happening in Oslo, maybe you ought to pay attention to it,” he recounts. “But that was never the case. We never invested in it.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres froze the Clinton administration out of the process in May 1993, concerned that the Americans would leak or somehow negatively impact the process.
“The folks who opposed Oslo, or didn’t pay attention, continued to not pay attention,” Kurtzer says.
Visiting Israel two months later, he received a three-hour briefing from chief Israeli negotiator Yossi Beilin explaining how the deal was essentially concluded. He briefed U.S. officials on the developments before Warren Christopher’s meeting with Rabin, but laments it still didn’t take their focus off Syria.
This was only bolstered by Rabin providing Christopher with a conditional acceptance of returning the Golan Heights in return for Syrian President Hafez Assad’s willingness to meet Israel’s requirements on normalization.
“They got very excited when they heard that, and the fact that Oslo was basically done had no impact on them,” he says of his colleagues. When U.S. officials were met with disappointment by Assad’s lack of seriousness during their next visit to Damascus, they took summer vacation.
Christopher traveled to Point Mugu, California, only compounding the surprise when Peres flew there to personally inform him about the breakthrough in Oslo.
In Kurtzer’s mind, the signing ceremony and the handshake between Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat one month later was “worth the price of admission alone,” and perhaps the most critical event of the entire process.
“The fact they reached this agreement with mutual recognition and the various elements in the declaration of principles was itself important, but the picture of the handshake legitimized Arafat as an interlocutor and partner,” he says.
Kurtzer highlights how U.S. officials mobilized several dozen countries to send senior delegations to Washington while raising billions of dollars for the prospective Israel-PLO peace process.
“Even though we were behind the eight ball leading up to Oslo, that first action was quite important,” he says, adding that it planted the seeds for the Israel-Jordan peace agreement over a year later. “There was a huge amount of latent potential built into that moment.”
Oslo began its downward trajectory, in his mind, because the United States “continued to not play the role that we were supposed to play.”
He describes the Oslo declaration of principles as “very, very weak,” failing to define final-status issues and mention settlements, nor delineating the Palestinian Authority’s future responsibilities in Oslo II.
“The fact they reached this agreement with mutual recognition and the various elements in the declaration of principles was itself important, but the picture of the handshake legitimized Arafat as an interlocutor and partner.”
“That should have motivated us to fill in the gaps and deal with the asymmetries, but we didn’t,” Kurtzer says. “So they went back to negotiating themselves.”
In May 1994, Kurtzer was dispatched to Cairo ahead of the Gaza-Jericho Agreement (a follow-up treaty to Oslo I), only to find a dramatic need for U.S. involvement to help get it across the finish line.
“They say nothing concentrates your mind so much as your imminent execution. We set a date so they would understand they had to finish this thing. When I arrived, it was clear they weren’t going to finish unless someone leaned on them,” he says.
“But again we went away,” Kurtzer says, noting the relatively insignificant U.S. role in the precursor Israel-Jordan agreement later that summer and Oslo II the next year.
“All this was happening while bad behaviors continued. Israel continued building settlements, Palestinians never stopped violence,” he says, describing it as “a schizophrenic approach to peace where these guys on top were negotiating but nothing was changing on the ground.”
Kurtzer also notes the consequences of the U.S.’ failure to monitor the agreements and hold the parties accountable. “Once the parties learn they don’t have to abide by agreements, they do settlements and violence. And if they later reach an agreement and don’t fulfill them, they don’t mean anything,” he says.
Posters memorializing the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. “Arafat always exaggerated his view of Rabin – ‘he was my partner and I loved him.’ He only said that stuff after Rabin was dead,” says Kurtzer.Credit: Tess Scheflan
All things considered, Kurtzer says the main dividing line occurred between Rabin’s assassination and Netanyahu’s election in 1996, where Peres attempted to move on the Syria track as Palestinian violence dramatically escalated.
“Arafat always exaggerated his view of Rabin – ‘he was my partner and I loved him.’ He only said that stuff after Rabin was dead. The fact is, he was the only person in Israel who could have made a decision about bringing an end to the conflict,” he says.
Oslo, as a defining issue in negotiations, ended with three events in Kurtzer’s mind: Ehud Barak’s positions at Camp David and the Clinton Parameters – both of which redefined where parties were starting from and where they needed to go – and 2002’s Arab Peace Initiative.
“We talk so much about Israel-Saudi Arabia these days, but it was waiting for us in the early 2000s. It basically said ‘If you do that, there’s peace waiting for you.’ Everybody just blew it,” he says.
Kurtzer believes Oslo’s place in history is secured as “having broken the taboo against Israel talking to the authorized representative of its enemy.”
“It’s not that Oslo is dead; Oslo is no longer relevant. What’s relevant today are the parameters of where the parties had gotten to,” he says, flagging the Clinton Parameters, then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s unprecedented starting positions during 2008 talks and John Kerry’s farewell speech.
These linger, even as the peace process remains in the ditch where it has lain for years. The question now is whether Israel and Palestinians can muster the political will to start from this place.
Aaron David Miller
Role in 1993: Deputy on the Middle East peace team
Key quote: “It was my judgment that we’d reached a point-of-no-return and that the peace process was now irreversible. It was a galactic transgression of common sense, history and even negotiating logic,”
Perhaps no other American diplomat has had such a close-up view of the various U.S. efforts at reaching an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement than Aaron David Miller.
He helped then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker plan the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, which was the first-ever peace conference attended by both Israeli and Palestinian officials.
“I thought I was over the moon when that happened,” Miller recalls, noting it was more about process than substance. In the time between Madrid and Oslo, Miller acknowledges his serious doubts about whether an agreement could be reached on either the Palestinian or Syrian track.
So, sitting on the White House lawn watching the Oslo signing ceremony two years later, Miller reveals: “I actually thought I was hallucinating.”
“Anything and everything seemed possible. I realized something quite transformative was taking place,” he recounts, describing a beaming PLO leader Yasser Arafat, an enthusiastic Bill Clinton and an “awkward but enthusiastic by his standards” Yitzhak Rabin. He describes U.S. officials being collectively caught up in this historic moment.
“It was my judgment that we’d reached a point-of-no-return and that the peace process was now irreversible. It was a galactic transgression of common sense, history and even negotiating logic,” he says.
Even when Oslo would find itself on life support, Miller says he peddled this “irreversibility notion” to the Clinton administration. “This was unwise: Oslo was a triumph of sheer will, but the seeds of its own demise were clear even then,” he reflects.
“Since Israelis and Palestinians had done this without our assistance, my faith in what they could and might continue to do was restored. I was not thinking clearly or analytically about the structure of the process they had created,” Miller adds.
Like his colleagues, Miller flags how the Oslo talks were done without U.S. involvement, noting how Israelis and Palestinians intentionally did not want to let the Americans into the process.
He disagrees, however, with the notion that the U.S. failed to involve itself, describing “intensive efforts” at keeping Oslo alive – albeit “three years too late” – as it looked as if it was going to “collapse under its own weight” following Rabin’s 1995 assassination, the spring 1996 terror wave and Netanyahu’s rise to power.
Miller credits the CIA under George Tenet for keeping Oslo on life support, not to mention what he deems intensive U.S. efforts at helping foster interim agreements at Hebron, Sharm el-Sheikh and Wye River.
“When you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. Without an identifiable end-state goal, it was going to be extremely difficult to manage this process.”
In his view, the Oslo process culminated with 2000’s Camp David failure, which he derides as “ill-advised, ill-conceived and not terribly well run.”
He adds: “This, combined with the ensuing second intifada, was a sort of coda that marked the end of the contemporary Oslo dynamic.”
Miller rejects the notion, though, that Oslo’s structural flaws led to its downfall. “When you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. Without an identifiable end-state goal, it was going to be extremely difficult to manage this process,” he says, noting that Arafat “acquiesced in a rudderless way” ahead of Oslo, aimed at bringing Rabin to the table.
“It would have killed the process immediately had the two sides focused on the end goal,” Miller acknowledges, while stressing that “some compelling political vision literally needed to be outlined in order to have any hope of keeping the process on track.”
This would have forced both parties’ behavior to be constrained, but the interim nature of Oslo’s confidence-building architecture led to precisely the opposite occurring – both due to Palestinian terror and Israeli settlement expansion. “We needed a credible third party willing to use honey and vinegar to make this work. And we had none of that,” he says.
With no end-state plan nor a political vision, Miller says it was left to both the negotiators, as well as Rabin and Arafat, to land the plane.
He believes Rabin viewed Arafat as an “investment trap” who presented a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma. Rabin only chose to pursue Oslo after Syrian President Hafez Assad failed to conclude the Israel-Syria talks with Warren Christopher in July 1993, Miller adds.
“As uncomfortable as Rabin was on September 13, he understood that Arafat made some very tough decisions,” he says.
In March 2002, Colin Powell dispatched Miller alongside Mideast Peace Envoy Anthony Zinni to negotiate a cease-fire between Israel and the Palestinians following a series of terror attacks and a major Israeli military operation in the territories. Miller describes meeting a beaming Arafat in his Ramallah headquarters, his office blacked out and lit by candles, talking about his own personal martyrdom.
“It became clear to me that not only did he fail to make the transition from his revolutionary concept of armed struggle to a more statesman-like diplomatic track – he’d never really given up violence,” he says.
Miller says he would change two things to try to alter the course of history: Rabin would not have been assassinated, and George H.W. Bush would have defeated Clinton in 1992.
“With James Baker remaining secretary of state,” he says, “he, Rabin and Bush could have landed one agreement – either with Assad or Arafat.”
“Clinton wanted to turn a new page with Israel. They changed the vocabulary. We weren’t allowed to even use the phrase that ‘settlements were an obstacle to peace,’” he notes.
An Israeli flag is painted on a wall surrounding the West Bank settlement of Migdalim, near the Palestinian city of Nablus. "We weren’t allowed to even use the phrase that ‘settlements were an obstacle to peace,’" says Miller.Credit: Ariel Schalit / AP
Miller finds it quite paradoxical, meanwhile, that one of the key Oslo concepts – the notions of Areas A, B and C in the West Bank – is more in vogue than it has been for decades amid U.S. efforts to potentially normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Any deal would have to include a significant concession to the Palestinians, with the possibility raised of converting additional territory from Area C into A or B, giving the Palestinians civilian and security control there.
“It’s quite an irony that even after the remnants of Oslo lie bruised, bloodied, battered and betrayed across the Israeli-Palestinian landscape, this one notion of Oslo survives,” he says.
The other two surviving elements that still inform the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic, according to Miller, are the mutual official Israeli-Palestinian recognition and the recentering of the Palestinian national movement.
“It moved from the diaspora and from a strictly propagandist military and terror struggle against Israel. The PLO – the organizational embodiment of Palestinian nationalism – was transplanted from Tunis, Beirut, Amman and Europe back to what would become the putative concept of a Palestinian state,” he says.
“Those two realities are permanent and are not going anywhere for the foreseeable future,” he says, “and they are direct products of Oslo.”
Dennis Ross
Role in 1993: Middle East envoy for the Clinton administration
Key quote: “I said to [Warren Christopher]: ‘The document is all aspirational. Its significance is that it exists. This is a historic psychological breakthrough. We can’t say no to it. This is Israel and the PLO basically accepting each other,’”
Dennis Ross was then-President Bill Clinton’s most trusted adviser during the Mideast peace process. A holdover from the Bush administration and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker (for whom he spearheaded efforts at bringing Israelis and Palestinians to the 1991 Madrid conference), he was named Mideast envoy shortly before Oslo’s emergence.
Today, he acknowledges Oslo’s poor standing and how it has become “a dirty name for everybody – on the left and the right.”
“I wish Oslo had a better legacy. To have a real enduring legacy, it has to have more intrinsic credibility,” he says. “If you look at it today, Palestinians believe it’s a process that discredited the idea of negotiations; and Israelis, for the most part, see it as something that exposed the Palestinians as never serious as a partner.”
At the time, though, he stresses Oslo was “a psychological breakthrough.”
“You had two national movements competing for the same space that had lived in a world of mutual denial and rejection – suddenly that ended,” he says. “I said to [Warren Christopher]: ‘The document is all aspirational. Its significance is that it exists. This is a historic psychological breakthrough. We can’t say no to it. This is Israel and the PLO basically accepting each other,’” he says.
For Ross, “Oslo’s greatest flaws were built into it, in the sense that the expectations and perceptions on each side were completely different.” He notes how both parties approached all the relevant risks with dueling sets of expectations.
This led to one of the U.S.’ biggest mistakes, in Ross’ view: failing to create accountability on either side. “On the Palestinian side, we should have been prepared to bring up all these things and be very public about it until Palestinians lived with their responsibilities on the issue of security and fighting terror,” he says.
On the flip side, Ross admits the United States cut Rabin a lot of slack due to right-wing opposition within Israel. “We should have called them out more on the issue of settlements and how we saw that as being inconsistent with being able to build this process,” he says.
This failure pointed to a bigger issue of U.S. hesitancy to take actions that could potentially threaten that process. “It’s always easier to see everything in retrospect. At the time, there can be little doubt we got caught up the process that was historic and there was hesitancy in doing anything that might threaten it,” he says. “On the contrary, we became very motivated to protect it every time it faced a profound challenge.
“Our hesitancy to be tougher was this concern that we might grind the whole process to a halt, and we worried violence would replace it,” he says. “And wouldn’t that just make things worse? It’s not like it wasn’t considered, but it was easy to rationalize not being tougher.”
Ross recalls toying with these issues, with Clinton asking him what if Arafat found it too hard to deliver and it built up Palestinian resistance, or if Rabin lost the political ability to do anything.
Dennis Ross, right, briefing Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in January 1994, after talks between U.S. President Bill Clinton and Syrian President Hafez Assad earlier that day in Geneva.Credit: Associated Press
“There were these high-level political predicaments and difficulties on each side. To say I raised these things is true. To say that I pushed them hard would be untrue. It’s easy to say when the context is totally different what you should have done,” he says. “In retrospect, I see it. At the time, I felt it was much more complicated.”
Ross acknowledges the debate between Oslo’s small-scale incrementalism versus final-status swings, calling the presumption of Oslo’s confidence-building worldview “good in theory” but flawed.
“It meant that the progress that was being made had to be fast enough, and that people had to feel the fruits of it directly enough, to fulfill the concept. The problem was the slower the pace of progress, the more the space for opponents to act in ways that discredited the whole process and its promise,” he says.
The first profound challenge presented by opponents, in Ross’ mind, was Baruch Goldstein – the Israeli American behind the February 1994 massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers at Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs. “The acts of terror really begin after that. The spoilers were there. We had to be much tougher. We had to hold both sides more accountable,” the former envoy says.
Ross, however, rejects the claims of right-wing Israelis who dismissed Oslo as naive, as well as Palestinians who said it cemented Israeli occupation. “Neither side has offered an alternative that promised something more,” he says. “I want to hear the critics offer a credible alternative – not a slogan but an alternative.”
Regarding the Israeli critics, Ross says: “It is as if they believe nothing had to be done and the Palestinians would have just acquiesced and given up their identity and their national movement,” stressing how the first intifada proved the opposite.
“Oslo made it okay for the Arabs to start dealing with Israel – that is something that’s profoundly overlooked.”
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas shaking hands with then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in Ramallah, March 2016. “So long as there is a PA, it is still the product of Oslo,” says Ross.Credit: Debbie Hill, Pool via AP
On the other side, Ross notes the Palestinian national movement was based on symbols that it never succeeded in translating. “The first intifada came from the fact that nothing was changing on the ground, the PLO from Tunis offered nothing and the frustration of those within the territories built up to produce this uprising,” he says.
“The right lives in an illusion that the Palestinians will simply submit, give up their identity and accept limited status and autonomy. The left thinks we can have a Palestinian state at a time when a Palestinian state would be a failed state,” he says. “And the region does not need one more failed state – something Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas help to produce and to exploit.”
Despite the flaws, Ross still views the idea of creating a government on the ground that holds responsibility for parts of the territory of historic Palestine as an achievement. “Palestinians never achieved even minimal governance before,” he notes. “This is not the legacy that those of us who were there from 1993 on would have hoped for, but it is not one that can be simply dismissed.
“So long as there is a PA, it is still the product of Oslo,” he says. “There is something to the PA that gives both sides a reason for its existence.”
Ross also notes an important, disregarded legacy of the accords: “Oslo made it okay for the Arabs to start dealing with Israel – that is something that’s profoundly overlooked.”
Gamal Helal, center, acting as interpreter between Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and U.S. President Bill Clinton in the White House, September 1998.
Gamal Helal
Role in 1993: Interpreter and adviser to Dennis Ross and Bill Clinton
Key quote: “In diplomacy, they call it constructive ambiguity. Gamal Helal calls it destructive ambiguity. No matter how long it takes, the truth will come back to haunt you.”
When you ask those closest to the Oslo peace process who was the closest thing to an unsung American hero, one name is consistently cited: Gamal Helal.
An Egyptian-American interpreter who served in every administration from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, Helal interpreted for and advised Ross and Clinton. He was even tasked with meeting one-on-one with PLO leader Arafat in a last-ditch effort to save the peace process.
His decades of hands-on experience, combined with his unique vantage point into understanding the greater Arab perspective, give him perhaps unparalleled insight into Oslo and the greater Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
“When I look at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – the whole idea of finding peace agreements between Israel and the Arab countries came about with the signing of the Egypt deal, which was based on a very simple foundation: land for peace,” Helal says.
This principle was roundly rejected by the Arab world before the Israel-Egypt peace treaty. The Arab world largely came around to this concept, based mainly on the ever-present fear of how the Palestinian issue would resolve itself.
“With that principle, when it came to the Palestinians, everybody was trying to be too clever by half. The Israeli definition never was ‘I will give you the West Bank and Gaza, and you give me peace,’” Helal says.
On Oslo, he acknowledges the lack of U.S. involvement in the process despite inheriting the results. “We were not part of it, we just hosted the party. Rabin concluded that Arafat made the hard decisions while [Syrian President Hafez] Assad didn’t show any signs that he was willing to deal,” he says, adding that no Israeli prime minister can or will ever be able to compromise on two tracks.
“Who were we to propose any fixes or changes? We were just so glad they agreed to it: ‘Let’s work out what we have.’ That’s what practical diplomacy is all about,” he says.
Gamal Helal, center, during a crisis meeting in the White House with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu and his adviser, Isaac Molho in 1996.Credit: Ho New / Reuters
“The Arab mind-set is: ‘If I can’t liberate Palestine now, I will wait for another 100 years. Maybe future generations will, but I will never give up that right.’”
Helal, however, laments the vagueness of the Oslo Accords. “In diplomacy, they call it constructive ambiguity. Gamal Helal calls it destructive ambiguity. No matter how long it takes, the truth will come back to haunt you.”
He says that while the U.S. failed to succeed with the peace process in the 1990s, “that doesn’t mean the principle and the core conviction, at least on the part of the Palestinians and Arabs, have changed.
“The Arab mind-set is: ‘If I can’t liberate Palestine now, I will wait for another 100 years. Maybe future generations will, but I will never give up that right,’” he explains.
On the Israeli side, Helal credits Rabin’s deep respect among Arab leaders for helping evolve the conversations. “Quite often, we would meet with Arab leaders and say something, and the leaders would say: ‘That’s not true, Rabin told me so.’ His word was his bond, and that played very well. He was highly respected,” Helal says.
At the same time, though, he says Israel’s biggest mistake was approaching Oslo as if it were doing the Palestinians a favor: “The two-state solution is a favor you’re doing for yourselves, not the Palestinians. You are the one facing a bigger dilemma. The Palestinians are living in hardship – so what? They can live in hardship for another few decades,” he says.
Meanwhile, Helal says the deep politicization present today – particularly in Israel – means there will be no solution in the indefinite future. “The Palestinian-Israeli conflict will never be solved if you play politics. You need leaders able to see beyond today’s circumstances, to go for a cure and not a painkiller,” he laments. “You can’t do it on the cheap. You can’t give Palestinians some bread crumbs, then everyone will live happily ever after. It’s not going to happen.”
He also says Israel fails to recognize how deeply entrenched the Palestinian cause remains in the greater Arab psyche.
“There are Arab countries that have never dealt with Israel, yet they harbor the feeling that they cannot accept what they define as the injustice that’s been happening to the Palestinians,” he says. “It’s more about emotion, not rationality. It’s reality, whether you accept it or not.”
For Helal, Oslo is one “arrangement” to consider along with various bilateral efforts and the Abraham Accords that end up with the same fundamental truth: “These cannot last unless there is some kind of acceptable solution to the Palestinian issue.”
He also rejects the notion that Israel might be prepared to make peace but there is no Palestinian partner. “This is what I call ‘true facts intended for bad meaning.’ If you really wanted to have a Palestinian partner, let them have elections and give them a stake in their own future,” he says. “If you say no to everything, you’ll never have a partner but you’ll eventually have chaos.”
As for the failures of the Palestinian and Arab leaderships, Helal believes there is plenty of blame to be shared around: “Nobody has a monopoly on innocence – they’re all guilty. But guess who’s in the direst situation? It’s the Israelis, not the Palestinians.”
He adds: “The main principle of land-for-peace has not changed for the Palestinians. Various administrations continue to deal with Oslo as if it’s the Bible and the two-state solution as the only possible outcome. This is not a favor to the Palestinians; it is a lifesaver for the Israelis.”