September 13, 1993—The Mideast peace process appeared to take its first important step since the Camp David agreements 15 years before, as Israeli and Palestinian representatives signed a “Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements.”
But the Oslo Accords (so named for the neutral site of the secret negotiations between the two sides) merely inaugurated a peace process as uneasy as the handshake between Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (who, as you can tell from this photo, is clearly unnerved at the prospect of even touching the hand of the man responsible for ordering the deaths of so many of his countrymen).
This attempt to make peace doomed Rabin, just as 72 years earlier in Ireland, Michael Collins, assenting to a peace agreement with Britain that compromised on partition and the loss of six Ulster counties in exchange for a measure of self-government, correctly predicted that he had signed his own death warrant.
Three years after this White House ceremony, presided over by Bill Clinton, Rabin had been cut down by a Jewish law student who said he wanted to halt the peace process, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party came to power, establishing settlements deeper in Palestinian territory.
What had happened on the Palestinian side veered between tragedy and something more like comic opera, as Arafat, his days as a rouser of grievance over and his time as a bureaucrat and diplomat just begun, visibly struggled as head of the new Palestine National Authority—a government that, in the words of the late great columnist Michael Kelly in his book of collected writings, Things Worth Fighting For, “doesn’t entirely exist or not exist, but in Cheshire cat fashion, fades in and out of reality depending on the angle and the time at which it is viewed.”
The Oslo Accords represented an interim step only toward peace. The projected permanent agreement was never settled. In the summer of 2000, desiring, like Ronald Reagan, a final-year treaty that would constitute his major foreign-policy achievement, Clinton pressed the Israelis and the Palestinians to settle their differences at Camp David peace talks. Unable to come to terms with his new role except for the access it provided him to massive amounts of money, Arafat opted for intransigence. When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered 91% of the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip, even Palestinian control of Eastern Jerusalem—all in exchange for dismantling the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure—Arafat balked. The intifada ensued that fall.
The road to peace is hard. Photo ops are well and good, but the settlement of differences lies as much in the hands of someone willing to lay everything down, even his life—like Rabin—not in someone who won’t take a chance to build a better life for his people—like Arafat.
But the Oslo Accords (so named for the neutral site of the secret negotiations between the two sides) merely inaugurated a peace process as uneasy as the handshake between Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (who, as you can tell from this photo, is clearly unnerved at the prospect of even touching the hand of the man responsible for ordering the deaths of so many of his countrymen).
This attempt to make peace doomed Rabin, just as 72 years earlier in Ireland, Michael Collins, assenting to a peace agreement with Britain that compromised on partition and the loss of six Ulster counties in exchange for a measure of self-government, correctly predicted that he had signed his own death warrant.
Three years after this White House ceremony, presided over by Bill Clinton, Rabin had been cut down by a Jewish law student who said he wanted to halt the peace process, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party came to power, establishing settlements deeper in Palestinian territory.
What had happened on the Palestinian side veered between tragedy and something more like comic opera, as Arafat, his days as a rouser of grievance over and his time as a bureaucrat and diplomat just begun, visibly struggled as head of the new Palestine National Authority—a government that, in the words of the late great columnist Michael Kelly in his book of collected writings, Things Worth Fighting For, “doesn’t entirely exist or not exist, but in Cheshire cat fashion, fades in and out of reality depending on the angle and the time at which it is viewed.”
The Oslo Accords represented an interim step only toward peace. The projected permanent agreement was never settled. In the summer of 2000, desiring, like Ronald Reagan, a final-year treaty that would constitute his major foreign-policy achievement, Clinton pressed the Israelis and the Palestinians to settle their differences at Camp David peace talks. Unable to come to terms with his new role except for the access it provided him to massive amounts of money, Arafat opted for intransigence. When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered 91% of the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip, even Palestinian control of Eastern Jerusalem—all in exchange for dismantling the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure—Arafat balked. The intifada ensued that fall.
The road to peace is hard. Photo ops are well and good, but the settlement of differences lies as much in the hands of someone willing to lay everything down, even his life—like Rabin—not in someone who won’t take a chance to build a better life for his people—like Arafat.
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