[Salon] You can’t see the forest for the trees: How the Oslo Accords became Israel’s greatest strategic victory



https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250918-you-cant-see-the-forest-for-the-trees-how-the-oslo-accords-became-israels-greatest-strategic-victory/

You can’t see the forest for the trees: How the Oslo Accords became Israel’s greatest strategic victory

by Jasim Al-Azzawi     9/18/25 
US President Bill Clinton (C) stands between PLO leader Yasser Arafat (R) and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzahk Rabin (L) as they shake hands for the first time, at the White House in Washington DC on September 13, 1993  [Photo by J. DAVID AKE/AFP via Getty Images]

They say that hindsight is 20/20. It is more than three decades now since that historic handshake on the White House lawn in September 1993, when Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands under President Bill Clinton’s smiling supervision.

The Oslo Accords were hailed as a breakthrough in Middle East peace. But it was all theatre. The flags, the applause, the lofty rhetoric, all designed to conceal the truth: Oslo was a trap, and Arafat walked right into it. It was a masterpiece of strategic deception.

Arafat’s original sin was not betrayal but delusion, a catastrophic miscalculation that would spawn all his future strategic blunders. The guerrilla fighter who had spent his life escaping from Jordan to Lebanon to Tunisia had belatedly recognised an unpleasant reality: he could never match Israel’s military strength. In the early 1990s, as Israeli settlements were proliferating with lightning speed across occupied territories, he was convinced he was running out of time.

That moment required clear-eyed realism and the courage to walk away from any deal that reeked of deception and disaster. Instead, Arafat’s default position was wishful thinking. Perhaps Israel would come through for him. Maybe they would meet him halfway. Indeed, the United States would stand by him—or so he hoped. That was his first sin: choosing desperate hope over tactical wisdom, clinging to the illusion of good faith when every sign screamed it was a trap. Rather than abandoning negotiations contrived to fail, he doubled down on a fantasy that would cost his people their homeland. His uncontrolled dash led to Oslo’s first sin: Arafat’s naivety about the nature of the negotiation itself.

A veteran revolutionary turned reluctant diplomat. He was essentially unqualified for the chess game of international diplomacy. While Israel brought lawyers, cartographers, historians, and veteran politicians, Arafat’s team lacked the technical expertise to deal with the byzantine details of border borders, water rights, and legal frameworks that would determine Palestine’s future. Arafat failed to understand that the negotiating table itself was rigged, and he was on the menu. Most significantly, Arafat misjudged America’s role. He counted on the United States as an “honest broker,” not realizing that American foreign policy has never treated Israel and Palestine as equals. The two State Department officials, Dennis Ross and Aaron Miller, assigned to guide the process, were hardly impartial mediators—a reality the Palestinians perceived and complained about repeatedly, to no avail. But Arafat’s greatest strategic mistake was to accept an open-ended timetable for implementation.

He should instead have insisted on an ironclad, irreversible countdown to statehood—one that tolerated no delays, guaranteed by both the US and Russia, with automatic sanctions and loud international condemnation for any Israeli breach of obligations.

Israeli Prime Minister Rabin was not ambiguous about his objectives, having gone on record saying he would grant Palestinians “something less than a sovereign state and more than autonomy.” Time was Israel’s best instrument to annex more land. The spectacle of the White House ceremony and courting of world leaders, high-minded rhetoric of peace, and the intoxicating prospect of Palestinian passports blinded Arafat to the forest for the trees. He was blinded by the pomp and legitimacy of signing accords with world leaders and did not realize that he had just signed his people’s death warrant as an independent nation. The Oslo Accords were not a road to peace—they were a detour into paralysis. Arafat and Abbas were too close to the trees, blinded by the trappings of statehood, and were unable to view the forest of geopolitical manipulation far beyond their horizon. The pomp, ceremony, and the semblance of progress mesmerized them.

The truth is stark: Oslo was a deception. A beautiful, lethal lie that allowed Israel to consolidate its power while Palestinians waited for a future that never came. Over thirty-two years later, the evidence is indisputable. Israel had no intention of going back to the 4 June 1967, borders or relinquishing control over Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. The United States never pressured Israel to enforce Oslo’s stipulations. The peace process had been transformed into a sophisticated smoke screen for the largest land theft in modern history, with international sanction and Palestinian consent. The human cost of this strategic shortsightedness is personified in the fates of Palestinian leadership itself. When Arafat finally awoke to Oslo’s deception and began to speak out against the accords, he was mysteriously poisoned.

His successor, Mahmoud Abbas, remains holed up in his little office in Ramallah, with negative approval ratings, despised by many of his people for his obsequiousness and for still clinging to the idea that peaceful negotiation is possible with a state that operates on the principle: “If you cannot get something by force, then you can get it by more force.”

The Oslo disaster is not just its collapse, but its success as an Israeli strategic instrument. It provided international legitimacy for a status quo that allowed systematic colonisation to continue while fostering the illusion of a “peace process.” Every settlement expansion could be justified as a temporary necessity awaiting final negotiations. Every restriction on Palestinian movement became a security imperative in the interim stage.

Today, with agonizing 20/20 hindsight, Abu Mazen tardily realizes that everything he took for granted since early PLO days was a catastrophic mistake. He has a heavy burden of responsibility for advocating the very policy that destroyed Palestinian hopes. The bitter irony is crushing: the man who spent decades arguing for peaceful settlement now realises he helped plan his people’s perpetual subjugation. The forest unseen by Arafat was Israel’s long game: use the peace process to buy time, change facts on the ground, and create irreversible realities that would exclude Palestinian statehood while still enlisting international support through the spectacle of ongoing negotiations. 

Gazing too hard at the trees of ceremony, recognition, and diplomatic legitimacy, Palestinian leaders missed the systematic deforestation of their national aspirations. Thirty years on, the verdict is in. The handshake was not the beginning of Palestinian liberation. It was its funeral, celebrated with full honours while the patient was still breathing. Oslo did not fail. It was a massive success for Israel. It legitimised the occupation. It disarmed resistance. It gave cover for the biggest land heist in modern history. The myth lives on. The lie endures. The suffering endures. The illusion endures. And all the while, the forest burns.


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