The thirtieth anniversary of the Oslo Accords has passed without great fanfare. They wrought great damage and the damage they wrought continues to unfold.
In the Middle East Forum video below Daniel Pipes recalls the great expectations created by the Oslo Accords. He then reviews twelve Israeli errors that turned them into disaster and concludes by reviewing lessons learned and/or unlearned. Pipes is a historian and author of 16 books who founded MEF in 1994. Before that he taught at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Pepperdine, and the Naval War College.
I tried to contribute a small retrospective of my own in my comments on Israel’s late President Shimon Peres when I returned from his Presidential Conference in June 2012. Peres of course won a Nobel Peace Prize for his involvement in the Oslo Accords that brought Yasser Arafat from his Tunisian exile to rule over the Arabs on the West Bank and Gaza. This was a profound mistake deriving from idealism and cynicism, but you can be sure that Peres did not count it as such.
Indeed, Peres glancingly reaffirmed it in remarks he gave at the 2012 conference: “In order to make peace, you have to close your eyes. You cannot make love or peace with open eyes.” This is a witticism that will not bear comparison with Churchill’s apothegm: “At the summit true politics and strategy are one.”
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