The Oslo Process 20 years later
Commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Oslo Process, a seminar was held at Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI) on 23 September 2013 with Joel Peters, Associate Professor at Virginia Tech University, to discuss the legacy of Oslo. Joel Peters began his talk by recalling that in the world of 1993, in a dramatic moment shortly after the Cold War when Apartheid fell and the peace process in Northern Ireland was gaining momentum, Oslo enjoyed broad support with critique coming mainly from extremist sides.
Several factors accounted for the failure of Oslo. The end goal of the process was never defined. That a Palestinian state would be established was an assumption, rather than a stated goal. Even the European Union started to support Palestinian statehood explicitly only from 2002 on. There was a lack of leadership from the international community, as well as the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships who did not attempt to engage the spoilers of the peace process. Most troublesome, however, was that the logic of the agreements was based on the notion of separation and control. In so doing the peace process, rather than tackling questions of justice and fairness and ironing out differences, cemented them.
Israelis and Palestinians are today further apart than ever and retain their different conceptions of what peace should be and therefore of what a peace treaty should look like. Joel Peters concluded his analysis by questioning if the logic of Oslo, i.e. a two-state solution and the land for peace formula, is still relevant. The discussion indeed focused on the issue of a two-state versus a one-state solution or possible scenarios between these paradigms. It was also questioned why the US is pushing for talks at a moment that the region is experiencing large instabilities which are not directly connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
