I have never heard of a Nobel Prize laureate who relinquished that award or asked it to be withdrawn because he realised in a fit of conscience that he did not merit it or that the cause for which it had been awarded to him had never been realised. I've imagined, for example, Shimon Peres, at this late stage in his life, appearing before a microphone to announce that he had decided to return the prize that he had won jointly with Yasser Arafat for having signed the Oslo Accords, because this accord has reached a dead end. But then, it could be that the two leaders had been rewarded for what they accomplished for Israel rather than for the cause of peace. Oslo has done nothing of significance to restore Palestinian rights. But it did give Israel the perfect cover to step up settlement expansion in the West Bank. Both Avi Shlaim and Edward Said expressed their views on this accord, just after it was signed, in the highly reputable London Review of Books. Edward Said was against the agreement; Shlaim was in favour. In Said's opinion, Oslo was merely an instrument for Palestinian surrender because it repudiated the Palestinian people's basic rights and circumvented international law. Shlaim argued that the agreement put the Palestinian cause on the road to peace for the first time. It was a road on which there could be no turning back, he said. He also stressed that it affirmed the principle of Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and paved the way for the creation of a Palestinian state. Twenty years down the line, the anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords falls amidst the mediating efforts being undertaken by US Secretary of State John Kerry. It is as though he is telling the world that, yes, the Americans admit that Oslo fell through but this should not keep them from pressing ahead to reach another agreement, even if it achieves nothing for the Palestinians. Like Oslo. What matters is that talks are held, that an accord is reached, and that the two parties to this relationship come together on the White House lawn with Barack Obama standing in-between, asking Binyamin Netanyahu to shake hands with Mahmoud Abbas in front of the television cameras. Long ago I, too, wrote my opinion on the accord. My view was closer to Said's, which incurred Arafat's anger against me, just as it had against Said. A friend we have in common conveyed to me a message expressing Arafat's disappointment. He had expected us to appreciate his circumstances and those of the Palestinian people against the backdrop of the conditions in the Arab world. He had hoped that we would trust him enough to let him try an option that would bring the Palestinian people closer to the hope of a state of their own and force Israel to commit, if only once, to the principle of withdrawal from the occupied territories. I also recall the concerted PR campaign orchestrated by the US, Europe and certain Arab parties that boasted of Oslo as an important and serious step towards a peaceful solution to the Palestinian cause. Thanks to Oslo, according to the logic of this discourse, the first ever direct negotiations between the two sides were held and this, in its own right, was a great achievement brought about by the persistent pressures asserted by US diplomacy on Israel to agree to sit with “terrorists”. It was also said that the accord obtained the Palestinian authority's recognition of Israel and Israel's recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organisation as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and that it won a pledge by both sides to refrain from recourse to violence and to commit themselves to peaceful means. This was the first time in the history of this conflict in which mutual recognition superseded mutual rejection and in which the two sides relinquished violence. As a consequence, the Palestinian Authority (PA) had been given the chance to exercise autonomous rule, which is to say the Palestinians could govern themselves for the first time in the history of this people. So went the media drive to market the great benefits of Oslo. What Palestinian negotiators had not realised at the time was the danger of the rule established by the first agreement they reached with the Israelis. I refer to the deferment of negotiations on the future of Jerusalem, Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied territories and final borders. Peres — now president of Israel, then supervisor of the Israeli negotiating team in his capacity as foreign minister — clearly stated what Oslo had achieved for Israel when he revealed that, before Oslo was signed, Arafat had expressed his willingness to shift from his commitment to the 1947 map (based on the UN resolution on the partition of Palestine and which allocated 44 per cent of the land of historic Palestine to a Palestinian state) to the 1967 map. Through Oslo, Arafat conceded 22 per cent of the West Bank. “Would any other Arab leader have agreed to concede even two or three per cent of the West Bank, let alone 22 per cent?” Peres asked. In effect, in Oslo Arafat conceded more than 22 per cent. He conceded 50 per cent of the land that the UN had recognised as the Palestinian people's territorial right under the partition resolution. Shlaim later observed that the Oslo Accords reached a reverberating dead end with the breakdown of the talks that Bill Clinton brokered in Camp David in 2000, after which the second Intifada erupted. However, many analysts believe that the accord collapsed well before this, with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, which is to say two years after Oslo was signed. That was when Binyamin Netanyahu came to power. Netanyahu was vehemently hostile to Oslo and upon becoming prime minister he set to work and persisted over the course of the next three years in reneging on all of Israel's commitments and generating a climate adverse to the provisions of Oslo both in Israel and the occupied territories. It is strange that in spite of the train of failures in American attempts to broker a peace between Israel and the Palestinians, every successive president dreams of being the one to go down in history as the president who brought peace in the Middle East. Obama clearly entertained this dream during his first term. He came to a rude awakening to the din of the savage attacks by Israeli and Jewish lobbies against him and his administration. When he resumed this dream after beginning his second term he realised he had to be more cautious, which meant that he had to placate the Israelis first, before calling for new talks. In this context, he dispatched John Kerry to do all he could to get the two sides to agree to a new round of negotiations and to generate an artificial climate of optimism marked by the earnestness and determination to reach tangible results none of which will have any bearing on the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. Many commentators have defended their optimism towards this new round. Most rest their case on the shuttle trips undertaken by Kerry and the preparations in which US military officials took part in order to reassure their Israeli counterparts that Israeli security would take priority over all other points in the talks. Otherwise put, there were extensive discussions on the best ways to prevent “the terrorist” from reaching the Israeli state from the Palestinian state that is supposed to be created only metres away and in spite of some overlap in the territories and peoples of the two states. Their optimism is also fed by the fact that Kerry managed to convince the two sides that their talks should last nine months on the outside and be held in total secrecy, isolated from the media and the diplomatic corps of other countries. It has been said that the reason previous rounds had failed was because they hadn't lasted long enough and were affected by public opinion. Indeed, this is precisely what occurred in the Camp David talks hosted by Clinton. These lasted only two weeks and the pressure was compounded by the fact that Clinton was approaching the end of his term. In 2007 and 2008, another round of talks concluded abruptly upon the resignation of Ehud Olmert who was facing charges of corruption. As the current round has started early in Obama's second term, this leaves two years or longer to conclude the negotiations and then to monitor the follow-through on their results. It has been reported that Kerry was firm and unwavering in his instance on a nine-month deadline for the talks. Nevertheless, there is legitimate cause to doubt that the US could penalise either of the two sides if the talks failed to conclude by the deadline. It has been rumoured that the EU hinted that it could punish the Palestinians for stalling by withholding economic aid and the Israelis by imposing sanctions. The recent EU resolution regarding goods originating from Israeli settlements is an example of what it could do to penalise Israel for obstructing talks. The US, for its part, is counting on the fact that PA President Mahmoud Abbas is now 78 and that this would probably be the last time in his life that he could try to realise some of the hopes of his people. Abbas knows that Kerry was unable to compel Israel to freeze settlement construction during the nine months and that Israel will therefore continue to greedily gnaw away at the land on which a Palestinian state is ostensibly to be created. He also knows that if he fails in these negotiations, Hamas will gain ground in the West Bank and jeopardise the security and stability of the PA. Meanwhile, the Palestinians and some US negotiators are counting on the fact that Israelis understand, at some level or other, that the demographic scale is tipped in favour of the Palestinians, which would ultimately jeopardise the notion of the “Jewishness” of the Israeli state, which is Netanyahu's sacred vision. On the other hand, if the Americans think that their constant reminders to Netanyahu that Arab patience is running out are having any effect, they are wasting their time. The Israelis have complete confidence that Arab rulers have stopped being a party to the equation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in its current form, and given their current state. The Arab Peace Initiative, which the Americans have been working to modify in Israel's favour, had no value to the Israelis from the outset. Israeli officials made this perfectly clear when the initiative was first adopted in the Arab Summit in Beirut, and they reiterate that stance today, 10 years later. I believe that John Kerry will not give up the role he has chosen for himself, in spite of the fact that he had probably not factored in developments in the Syrian crisis. Perhaps, too, he has discovered that Martin Indyk was not the wisest choice as special envoy to the Middle East, and it is likely that he underestimated the abilities of Dennis Ross and others to sabotage his efforts, to mobilise factions of the Jewish American community to pressure Congress and to undermine Indyk when necessary. Equally likely is that none of the three parties — the US, Israel and the Palestinians — had anticipated certain complicating factors. Among these are Russia's growing profile in Middle Eastern affairs, especially during the past few months, and domestic developments in Egypt, especially in security-related matters.
The writer is director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research.
