https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/oslo-accords-douglas-feith/
Perhaps the most important misperception about Oslo is that it is – or was – a peace process, a two-sided affair, a matter of give-and-take in which each side’s promises depended on fulfillment of the other’s promises. My view, as a witness to some of the relevant history, is that it was a kind of unilateral Israeli withdrawal.
Oslo pretended to be a peace process. Israeli officials knew that Oslo lacked mutuality, but they misled the public about the relationship of withdrawal to peace.
The Rabin government’s top officials knew their priorities. Peace was important, and trading land for peace might be useful. But most important of all was reducing the burdens of the occupation. Even if Israel didn’t have the power to win peace from the Palestinians, it had the power to quit the territories on its own.
The idea of unilateral withdrawal had some appeal in Israel long before the first Oslo agreement. Years later, support in Israel for unilateral withdrawal had grown, even though (or maybe because) Oslo had been widely discredited by the terrorism that the Palestinian Authority incited and often perpetrated. Unlike the Oslo redeployments, Israel’s 2005 departure from Gaza was nakedly unilateral; it made no pretense of being a land-for-peace deal.
I served as a low-ranking Middle East specialist at the White House in the Reagan administration and much later as a senior Defense Department official in the George W. Bush administration. I will share a few Oslo-related stories from both of those periods.
Early on I saw that Oslo was more about Israeli withdrawal than peace. I was attuned to this point because of something that happened long before the famous September 1993 Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House south lawn.
Twelve years before, during the first year of the Reagan administration, I was a National Security Council staff member. Yossi Beilin – at the time an aide to Shimon Peres, who was Opposition leader – came to Washington as the guest of the US Information Agency as part of a program to cultivate friendly relations with promising young foreign leaders. Beilin’s itinerary included a meeting at the White House and I was assigned to talk with him.
Mr. Peres had recently published an article in Foreign Affairs that Beilin was generally assumed to have written, so I asked him about it. The article made the well-known argument that, if Israel continued to hold the territories, the state could not survive as both Jewish and democratic. But, the article said, Israel should withdraw from the territories only if it received reliable Arab peace pledges.
