On the 30th anniversary of the Rabin-Arafat handshake, the ghost of Oslo still haunts Israel and the Palestinians

Thirty years ago, on Sept. 13, 1993, I sat on a folding chair in the sunshine on the White House lawn, along with 3,000 other witnesses, watching President Bill Clinton nudge a reluctant Israeli prime minister and the ebullient chief of the Palestine Liberation Organization into shaking hands.

The occasion for the world-famous clinch between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat capped the signing of the Oslo Accords. Secretly negotiated in Norway, they set out a declaration of principles that mapped a potential pathway to the end of conflict between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians, with self-determination for the latter.

People have been predicting Oslo’s failure since that handshake.

I think the accords still had a chance until about the year 2000. Since then, with brief resuscitations, Oslo has mostly been on life support — with deep wounds inflicted by both sides.

The coup de grace may have been delivered by the current Israeli government with its open policy of de facto annexation of the West Bank into one apartheid-like Israeli state — in which Palestinians are given minimal rights and are pressed to emigrate.

Yet, as I look back on decades of covering this story — and on my three weeks in Israel and the West Bank in April — I can recall why Oslo might have succeeded, why its prospects died, and why its ghost won’t disappear.

In the summer of 1995, a year after Arafat left his base in Tunisia and entered Gaza, as permitted by the Oslo Accords, I attended a meeting of so-called Fatah hawks in a large basement in Gaza City. I was the only journalist there, huddled in a corner, as my Palestinian interpreter, whom I knew well, whispered in my ear.

The Fatah hawks were Gazan members of Arafat’s Fatah party, not the PLO men he brought back from abroad. Most had served time in Israeli prisons, spoke Hebrew, and had some grasp of Israeli society. They were angered by Arafat’s refusal to crush Hamas and other Islamist groups that opposed Oslo. They believed this could undercut the agreement — and they spoke openly of wanting to end the conflict with two states, so they could start living normal lives.

I heard similar discussions at the time among West Bank and Gazan professional groups who were eager to trade an end to the Palestinian revolution for an end to occupation. Arafat never appeared to have made up his mind to do so, and never crushed the Islamists when it was still possible. (Instead, in 2007, Hamas drove Fatah forces out of Gaza, whose internal governance it still controls today.)

Then came Nov. 4, 1995. I was vacationing on Long Beach Island with my husband, Paul, when I turned on the radio and heard that Rabin had been assassinated by a messianic far-right Jewish terrorist. I remember looking at Paul and saying, “This may be the end of Oslo.”

I still believe that, even though Rabin had serious doubts about a Palestinian state, he was the only Israeli leader tough and farsighted enough to convince Arafat to face reality and conclude a deal. A brief, brave effort in 2008 by center-right Prime Minister Ehud Olmert came too late.

Over the following years, I watched both Arafat and Israeli leaders take steps that destroyed public confidence in the Oslo process.

With Arafat, it was his tolerance of terrorist attacks on civilians inside pre-1967 Israel as a tactic of warfare.

In 2000, after the failure of Camp David II, after a violent intifada (uprising) broke out on the West Bank, I interviewed Marwan Barghouti, who is now in an Israeli prison under several life sentences, but was then Arafat’s right-hand man. He told me the Palestinians would “talk and fight.” He mistakenly believed terror attacks would get the Palestinians better terms at the table.

But the 2000 Israeli presidential election brought the right-wing Likud candidate Ariel Sharon to power. Israeli voters in the liberal German Colony neighborhood whispered to me, as if afraid to let their friends hear, that they would vote for the right this one time because Sharon would stop the terror attacks. That was the start of a long-rightward trend (with brief exceptions) in Israeli presidential politics, during which Benjamin Netanyahu has served as prime minister for 15 years.

In other words, the “talk and fight” strategy failed.

However, during all those decades since the Oslo signing, I also watched the disastrous Israeli expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank. On annual tours of the area, I saw the endless construction of settler apartment buildings marching across hilltops and settlement roads dissecting the entire West Bank.

Perhaps the greatest error of Oslo was to permit Israeli settlement growth to continue unabated during negotiations (Israel insisted on it, and the Palestinians still believed they would have their own state soon.)

The number of Jewish settlers soared from 116,000 in 1995 to 465,000 in 2022. Settlement infrastructure gradually divided the West Bank into disconnected cantons, which became open Israeli policy.

Moreover, settler violence, uprooting Palestinian olive groves, and seizing Palestinian land and water, has grown over the years. On my recent trip to the West Bank, I saw the burned-out buildings in the town of Hawara, the work of violent settler gangs that are being egged on by people in Netanyahu’s cabinet. Settler violence has metastasized since April unchecked by the Israeli military, as Palestinian terrorist attacks on settlers have also increased.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whom Netanyahu has made the cabinet’s overlord of the West Bank, wants to double the number of settlers there to 1 million and de facto annex the West Bank even if there is no legal declaration.

Given the lack of leadership on both sides — as messianic radicals control Netanyahu and the 87-year-old, almost powerless Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas grows more incoherent — Smotrich may succeed.

Here is where the ghost of Oslo takes its revenge.

Thirty years ago, Yitzhak Rabin agreed to the Oslo Accords because he foresaw that Arabs would eventually outnumber Jews in a one-state Greater Israel. That would mean either the end of a Jewish homeland or Israelis ruling over Palestinians in an apartheid-style state.

Rabin’s nightmare apartheid scenario has arrived under the Netanyahu government.

No U.S.-brokered deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia — and I seriously doubt one will materialize, despite the current hoopla — will change that reality.

The demise of Oslo leaves Israel facing the death of its democracy (even if mass Israeli protests stop Netanyahu from destroying Israel’s Supreme Court).

That is the reality I observed firsthand in April. It overshadows my memories of that hopeful handshake on the White House lawn.