Oslo Peace Accords Provide Cautionary Tale 20 Years Later. By Edmund Sanders.

Oslo peace accords provide cautionary tale 20 years later. By Edmund Sanders. Los Angeles Times, September 13, 2013.

Sanders:

Former Israeli peace negotiator Yossi Alpher, who worked on the failed 2000 Camp David talks, said the issues are too divisive to be tackled under a single accord, as the Oslo process attempted to do.

 

He said Oslo ultimately collapsed under the weight of those issues, including borders, refugees, Jerusalem and security.

 

He said Oslo’s failure shows that a better approach would be to separate issues that arose from Israel's creation in 1948 — such as the right of return for Palestinian refugees — from those that emerged after Israel seized control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967, such as borders and Jerusalem's status.

 

“Oslo mixed post-1967 issues with pre-1967 issues,” Alpher said. “But while you saw some progress with post-’67 issues, like security, borders and Jerusalem, you see zero progress on pre-’67 issues, like holy places and the right of return.”

 

Another mistake that he said arose from the Oslo process was the negotiating-table principle that nothing would be agreed to until everything was agreed to. The concept was intended to allow both sides to take risks and to encourage creative horse-trading. But the principle made talks an all-or-nothing process.

 

“So with Oslo, not only did you lump undoable issues with doable issues, you declared that they would all be held hostage to the most intractable issue,” Alpher said.

 

Not surprisingly, each side tends to blame the other for Oslo’s collapse.

 

“The Oslo process failed because the Palestinian leadership, and especially the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, never intended for it to succeed,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

 

He said Arafat used Oslo as a ruse to extract as much as possible before launching the 2000 Palestinian uprising.

 

“The attitude toward Oslo among Israelis today can be summed up in the words of the song by ’60s band The Who: We ‘won't get fooled again,’” Halevi said.