You have to be well into your forties to have a firsthand recollection of it, but in the 1990s Palestinians and Israelis believed they had found a way to end their century of conflict. The flurry of hope was brief, and far from universal, but it was real. It is largely forgotten now, rejected as a sham, a deceitful illusion. Now, more than a year and a half into the bloodiest war in over a century of conflict between Arabs and Jews it is as hard as ever to watch the horrific pictures coming out of Gaza – even for those of us who do it for a living and would prefer to be there in person had Israel not sealed the territory and banned entry to foreign journalists, among many others. Another deluge of horror is coming, as Israel prepares a new offensive that its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, promised would be “an intense entry into Gaza”. In the news business we know our turbulent world produces so many distressing events that the only way some can cope is to stop looking.
Sometimes I get a flickering memory of the time when there was some hope, triggered by a name or a face on the road into Gaza that ends with concrete blocks and checkpoints that in the last two months Israel has closed to all aid. Tom Fletcher, the former British diplomat who is now the UN’s humanitarian chief, said the Israelis are “bracingly honest” that the renewed blockade is to pressurise Hamas. Israeli hostages still held by Hamas must be released, Fletcher stressed, but “blocking aid kills”, and he said Israel was in breach of international humanitarian law, inflicting “a cruel collective punishment”.
As matters stand, it is impossible to see how Palestinians and Israelis can drag themselves, or be dragged back, to a place where they might try again to find peace. Another generation is being swept up in war. In 1993, when there was hope, the crowning moment of the process was at the beginning, because the end was failure and bloodshed, as summer turned to autumn in Washington DC and old enemies shook hands in the sun on the lawn of the White House. This was made possible by secret negotiations starting at the turn of that year in Oslo, at first between Abu Ala from the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), representing its chairman, Yasser Arafat, and two Israeli professors who reported back to Yossi Beilin, their deputy foreign minister.
The Oslo meetings had to be secret because neither side wanted the political risk of talking until there was something worth announcing. The Israeli parliament had just lifted a law banning its citizens from contacting the PLO, but the government was, officially, still opposed to any direct negotiations with an organisation led by Arafat, the man Israel regarded as an unreconstructed terrorist. The Norwegians who brought the Oslo negotiators together in a sequestered country house later testified how hard it was to get them to agree. Mona Juul, a Norwegian diplomat, said it was “very emotional as they worked around the clock, sometimes bursting out in the middle of the night, yelling, ‘This is hopeless, I can’t stay here any more.’” If it was that hard for those committed to negotiation to produce a limited agreement – a framework for more talks that could lead to a peace deal – think how high the mountain would be now.
That is why it felt so remarkable, so unexpected, on 13 September 1993, to see a fresh-faced President Bill Clinton opening his arms like a benevolent nephew as Yasser Arafat shook hands with Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. Flaws in the agreement were already apparent. Israelis who believed the occupied territories were God-given Jewish lands were against the whole concept of swapping land for peace. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish resigned from the PLO in protest and wrote a poem that dismissed the ceremony at the White House as a “technicolour movie”. Resistance, he concluded, had to continue. But the world saw bitter enemies trying to break the curse of a conflict that lasted for generations. It felt historic to see Arafat standing alongside Rabin and Israel’s foreign minister Shimon Peres, three men who had been at the heart of the conflict for so long.
Rabin, a gruff prime minister in 1993, was the commanding general in the victory in six days in June 1967 over Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Israel captured the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan Heights, shaping the conflict as it is now. In 1948, in his twenties, Rabin had commanded an elite unit in Israel’s independence war and was seen by Israelis as a hero. Palestinians remember Rabin’s part in the forced deportation of more than 50,000 Arab civilians from the towns of Ramle and Lydda (later renamed by Israel as Ramla and Lod). Palestinians call the events before and after Israel’s declaration of independence “the catastrophe” (“al-Nakba”). More than 700,000 Palestinians either fled the Israeli advance or were expelled by force and almost all were never allowed back.
For Palestinians, Yasser Arafat was the personification of their struggle, the man who was so keen to fight Israel that more cautious colleagues called him “the madman” when he started attacks over the border from Lebanon in the early 1960s, ignoring what seemed to be hopeless odds. His moment came when Arab leaders were stunned, supine and humiliated after Israel’s victory in 1967. In defeat, Arafat took up the fight, moving around in disguise to pick up weapons from battlefields and organising hundreds of attacks. When Israel hit back in 1968 with a major assault on Karameh refugee camp in Jordan, stronghold of Arafat and his Fatah faction, the Palestinians were waiting. At least 28 Israelis, 60 Jordanians and 1oo Palestinians were killed in a day. Arafat claimed victory and established his legend. The leader of the PLO, with sunglasses, stubbly beard and his black and white keffiyeh, made the cover of Time magazine.
The trio was completed by Israel’s foreign minister, Peres. Like Rabin, he had been at the heart of events in his country since his twenties. In 1948, Peres was the young right-hand man of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. He was never in uniform and never trusted by Israelis in the way that Rabin, his long-time political rival, was, but his arms deals did much to turn Israel into the region’s great power and he led its secret and successful drive to get nuclear weapons.
These three men, for different reasons, were prepared to contemplate ending the conflict that had shaped and dominated their lives. In 1993 it took effort and bravery to embrace the new thinking necessary to try to end a war that neither side has been able to win. Then and now, sticking to familiar rituals of hatred and death can be easier, even as the conflict sank to new depths of hopelessness after Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023. In Gaza, Palestinians have at times taken a break from their daily fight to survive to demonstrate against Hamas. In Israel domestic critics of Netanyahu, who supplanted Ben-Gurion as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister in 2019, have condemned him as the herald of perpetual war, fighting not to rescue the remaining hostages for the safety of his people but to preserve and strengthen his own power, and delay a reckoning of his part in the security failings that allowed Hamas to attack with such deadly effect on 7 October 2023.
The document signed that day in Washington in 1993 by Rabin and the PLO negotiator, Mahmoud Abbas, now the elderly and ineffectual Palestinian president, had the cumbersome title of the “Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements”, a diplomatic mouthful better known as the Oslo Accords. Another way the world has changed: the Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev was also there, invited as a witness.
When they saw what was happening, millions of Israelis and Palestinians, though not all, believed everything was changing. In 1993 majorities on both sides were prepared to give the negotiators a chance, putting aside deep scepticism and distrust. The most significant reason to be optimistic was that the parties to the talks recognised that the other existed and had national rights. Palestinians conceded that Israel would take 78 per cent of the land between the river and the sea, the area they held on the eve of the 1967 war. Israel conceded the principle of Palestinian self-government on the 22 per cent that was left. The leading Oxford historian of the conflict, Avi Shlaim, now one of the sternest critics of Netanyahu and the government he leads – his latest book is called Genocide in Gaza – wrote early in 1994 that it was “one of the most momentous events in the 20th-century history of the Middle East. In one stunning move, the two leaders redrew the geopolitical map of the entire region.”
Arafat and the PLO were allowed to return to parts of the occupied Palestinian territories, at first only in Gaza and in Jericho, the dusty, ancient oasis in the Jordan Valley. The plan was to start by making deals on less critical issues, in the hope they would, somehow, create the momentum to solve the big issues. Deliberately, they were deferred in Oslo because any and all were potential deal-breakers, with the power to kill the fledgling peace process. The pending file of “final status” issues was politically radioactive: it included the question of dividing Jerusalem to create, somehow, a capital for both peoples; the future of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land occupied since 1967; the challenge of drawing the borders of a future Palestinian state; and the question of whether Palestinian refugees from the wars of 1948 and 1967 would ever be able to go home.
Around 18 months after the ceremony on the White House lawn, I moved to Jerusalem to become the BBC’s Middle East correspondent. I had spent much of the previous four years reporting on the wars created by the fall of Yugoslavia. One of my friends in Sarajevo, a star reporter from Spanish TV, was aghast when I told her I was going to Jerusalem. The story is over, she said. They’re making peace.
She was wrong and so were all those whose hopes were briefly raised. Peace became a mirage. Perhaps it was never possible. Leading Palestinian intellectuals condemned Arafat for selling out his people by agreeing to a deal that allowed Israel to expand settlements for Jews on the occupied land they wanted for a state. Edward Said, the Palestinian-American political scientist and essayist, called it capitulation. In the London Review of Books, he railed against “the fashion show vulgarities of the White House ceremony, the degrading spectacle of Yasser Arafat thanking everyone for the suspension of most of his peoples’ rights, and the fatuous solemnity of Bill Clinton’s performance, like a 20th-century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance”. In the end Said’s mighty rhetoric was eclipsed by the Palestinian armed groups founded in the 1980s, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who reminded Israelis not to believe in peace by sending suicide bombers to kill Israeli civilians in cafes and on buses.
Hardliners on both sides wanted to wreck the Oslo process. In February 1994 Baruch Goldstein, an American-born Jewish extremist, used an assault rifle to kill 29 Palestinians who were praying at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, a site also venerated by Israelis as the Cave of the Patriarchs, the place Jews, Muslims and Christians believe is the burial place of the prophet Abraham, his sons Isaac and Jacob and their wives Sarah, Rebekah and Leah. Goldstein kept firing until he was overpowered and beaten to death by survivors. The Israeli right, including its rising star, Benjamin Netanyahu, warned that territorial compromise risked the lives of every Israeli. Netanyahu helped to rouse furious crowds of Jewish nationalists who cursed Rabin and called him a traitor and a murderer. At a demonstration in Zion Square in Jerusalem on 5 October 1995 the placards included a mocked-up poster of Rabin dressed in an SS uniform. A month later, he was shot dead by a Jewish extremist in Tel Aviv. During his first interrogation Rabin’s assassin asked for a drink, so he could toast his belief that he had saved Israel from a betrayer who was denying God’s plan for the Jewish people.
When Rabin was killed negotiations were already way behind schedule. But Arafat and Rabin, bitter enemies, had achieved an unlikely, grudging respect. Rabin’s widow, Leah, invited Arafat to the family home in Tel Aviv to pay his respects. She refused to see Netanyahu. Six months later, Netanyahu beat Shimon Peres by a wafer-thin majority and became prime minister for the first time.
It is entirely possible that the attempt to make peace was doomed to fail, with or without Rabin, the Israeli leader who could reassure its citizens more than any other. Just before the assassination, Haidar Abd al-Shafi, a much-respected doctor in Gaza, a founder of the PLO who was repelled by the compromise and corruption around Arafat, declared that Oslo had already failed, writing that “by now it is obvious that Israel is determined to maintain its presence, its control over the territories, the settlements. In fact, what has gone unnoticed is that Israel has never given up its claim to the occupied territories in its entirety, in keeping with the Zionist programme.”
A year before the assassination, Arafat, Peres and Rabin were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. After the assassination Hamas intensified its suicide bomb campaign. Within a few days in February 1996 the number 18 bus was attacked twice in Jerusalem close to the BBC office in Jaffa Road, killing 45 people. The mastermind was Mohammed Deif of Hamas, a deadly enemy of Israel until he was killed in an air strike in Gaza last summer.
After the bus attacks in 1996 Arafat, under pressure from Bill Clinton, sent his men to crack down on Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In the tranquillity of the British Commonwealth war cemetery in Gaza, I interviewed a man who had stumps instead of fingertips after Arafat’s torturers tore out his nails with pliers after he was rounded up as a Hamas suspect. Thirty years on, Gaza is in ruins and more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed. Netanyahu says only he can make Israelis safe, and so will never allow Palestinians to have a state they can use as a base to attack Jews.
Nothing in all the generations of the conflict between Jews and Arabs comes close in horror to 7 October and in the 19 months since. New depths of dehumanisation, on both sides, cast a deep shadow over the future. In the 1990s enough Palestinians were prepared to trust Arafat and enough Israelis trusted Rabin to open a small window when peace might just have worked, with luck and if both sides had been more determined to give up cherished dreams and beliefs. The window closed and now is buried deep in the past.
Still alive and dangerous is the illusion that total victory is possible, for anyone. On 7 October, it must have been uppermost in the minds of the men who broke out of Gaza and killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 others hostage. The illusion of victory is as strong as ever inside Israel’s ultra-nationalist right, whose leaders keep Netanyahu in power. Their dreams are fuelled by Donald Trump’s dangerous fantasy of Gaza as the Dubai of the Mediterranean, owned by America and without Palestinians.
Hope died long before 7 October 2023. In the years leading up to that day, like many who watch the conflict closely, I felt some sort of explosion of violence was coming. I thought it would happen in Jerusalem or the West Bank, not Gaza. At times I even wondered if it would take the shock of terrible bloodshed to force the two sides to find a way back to negotiation. But when it came, the killing turned divisions into chasms. The long war between Israel and the Palestinians over the land between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean marches on into its second century.
Jeremy Bowen is the BBC’s international editor. He is the author of “The Making of the Middle East: A Personal History” (Picador)
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This article appears in the 07 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Peace Delusion