Twenty-five years on, Oslo Accords peace hopes a fading memory

Record ID: 1355879

  • Title: Twenty-five years on, Oslo Accords peace hopes a fading memory
  • Date: 12th September 2018
  • Summary: JERUSALEM (FILE - FEBRUARY 25, 1996) (ORIGINALLY 4:3) (REUTERS) VARIOUS IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF HAMAS BUS BOMBING IN JERUSALEM
  • Embargoed: 26th September 2018 19:30
  • Keywords: Israel Palestinians Oslo Accords peace hopes twenty-five years on Rabin Arafat Israeli-Palestinian conflict
  • Location: HEBRON, RAMALLAH, TULKARM, NEAR EFRAT SETTLEMENT, BEITAR ILIT SETTLEMENT, WEST BANK/ TEL AVIV, ISRAEL/ WASHINGTON D.C., UNITED STATES/ JERUSALEM
  • City: HEBRON, RAMALLAH, TULKARM, NEAR EFRAT SETTLEMENT, BEITAR ILIT SETTLEMENT, WEST BANK/ TEL AVIV, ISRAEL/ WASHINGTON D.C., UNITED STATES/ JERUSALEM
  • Country: Israel
  • Topics: Conflicts/War/Peace
  • Reuters ID: LVA00A8XBN87B
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: As Palestinians prepare to lower the flag over their shuttered mission in Washington, no one can predict when they will return to the city where just a quarter of a century ago a diplomatic triumph was celebrated on a sunlit White House lawn.
    Hosted by then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, Palestinian and Israeli leaders came together on Sept. 13, 1993 to sign the first of the Oslo Accords, designed to be the foundation of a permanent peace deal within five years that would create two states, side-by-side.
    The three men who would win the Nobel Peace Prize the next year - Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres of Israel and Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat - did not live to see peace in their time.
    Now, with relations between U.S. President Donald Trump and the Palestinians, who see him as an unquestioning ally of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at a breaking point, the Oslo deal seems like a relic from a bygone age.
    As if to drive home the flaws inherent in Oslo's original Declaration of Principles, 25 years later it is the very issues that were postponed for later resolution that are now dominating the headlines once again.
    They include the status of Jerusalem - claimed by both sides as their capital, the fate of millions of Palestinian refugees from wars dating to 1948, Israeli settlements on occupied land that Palestinians want for a state, mutually acceptable security arrangements, and the issue of agreed borders.
    The early hope of peace shattered quickly after Rabin and Arafat awkwardly shook hands on the South Lawn.
    Two years later, Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli ultra-nationalist opposed to peace policies that had already been tested by the massacre of 29 Palestinian worshippers by a Jewish settler in the West Bank city of Hebron, and by suicide bombings by the Hamas and Islamic Jihad militant groups that killed 77 civilians and soldiers in Israel and the occupied Gaza Strip.
    Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed in 2014. Trump has pledged a "deal of the century" to end the decades-old conflict.
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