http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/08/oslo-twenty-years-on/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=f1eb931452-Mosaic_2013_8_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-f1eb931452-41165129
Next month the world will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the most famous handshake in modern history, that legendary moment when Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat stood face to face on the White House lawn and acknowledged each other’s existence. The fact that Oslo’s anniversary comes just as John Kerry revives Israeli-Palestinian peace talks gives special urgency to that favorite question of Middle East pundits—why did the peace process fail?
If history is any guide, most analysts will invoke the same hackneyed narrative of Palestinians who had unequal bargaining power at Oslo and Israelis who, backed by imperial America, cleverly “co-opted” the PLO in order to obstruct any possibility of a viable Palestinian state.
The problem with this narrative isn’t necessarily the allegation of PLO inequality, it’s the failure to recognize this inequality—if it in fact existed—as both natural and downright just. More problematic, however, is that the Oslo Accords actually seem to have been slanted far more in the other direction.
Let’s assume for a moment that the critical account is correct and that the Palestinians had unequal power at Oslo. Should anyone be surprised? When Rabin and Arafat shook hands in 1993, Rabin ran a sovereign state with a recognized territory, a democratic population, and a representative government. Arafat, on the other hand, ran a muddled and murderous revolutionary movement based in Tunisia. The PLO was no nascent state; it was a loose coalition of terrorist factions, a nominal bureaucracy, and a loud-mouthed press office. It held no land, no democratic mandate, and no presence in the territories it claimed to represent.
