Despite its title, The Secret Israel-Palestinian Negotiations in Oslo (Routledge, Oxford: 2007) is no potboiler, being a recent publication in the scholarly Durham Modern Middle East and Islamic World Series. Rather it looks at the topic against the background of negotiation concepts and strategies, focusing particularly on the timely issue of non-recognition. That was certainly a significant topic in the early 1990s when the book’s events are mainly set; but is an absolutely vital one today given the emergence of Hamas as a key political force and the soap opera currently playing in Palestine and world capitals, starring various forces and governments refusing to recognize each other.
The author Sven Behrendt studied politics and management before receiving a Ph.D. in International Relations. After the completion of his studies he joined the Bertelsmann Foundation and directed a project addressing Middle East issues. He has since 2000 been working for the World Economic Forum where he set up and directed numerous projects focusing on geopolitics and business strategy, including several in the Arab World.
Behrendt’s credentials are thus sound, on both theory and the real life issues of the region, and his description and analysis do not disappoint. The book starts by showing how Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization were facing challenges in the late 1980s and early 1990s that drove them to start talking to each other. Though Arab-Israeli diplomacy was always there, what made the Oslo negotiations different were direct, face-to-face talks between Israel and the PLO.
Oslo called for withdrawal of Israel from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, affirming a Palestinian right of self-government within those areas. After an interim period, the two sides would negotiate a permanent agreement on deliberately excluded “final status” issues such as Jerusalem, refugees, and Israeli settlements. However, with these core topics off the table, what did Oslo actually accomplish? Most importantly, the two sides had engaged in formal mutual recognition. The Israelis officially accepted the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people while the Palestinians recognized the right of the state of Israel to exist, and renounced terrorism and violence.
Though the accord aroused hope for an end to conflict, skepticism abounded. Subsequent negotiations were many, in Europe, the US and the Middle East, ending in the fiasco of the Camp David 2000 Summit, which failed to resolve final status issues. The al-Aqsa Intifada followed that, and the rest, as they say, is history.
In the final analysis, Oslo was an icebreaker. Not that ice breaking is not an honorable activity, or indeed a necessary one. The last chapter in the book is tellingly entitled “The Success of the Oslo Talks — and Why the Process Failed.” Behrendt correctly concludes that the lack of longer-term vision on both sides doomed Oslo, but which was in its own way a successful breaking of the ice.
Where are we today, 14 years later? James Wolfensohn summed it up by ending a recent interview on a note of exasperation: “Israelis and Palestinians really should get over thinking that they’re a show on Broadway. They are a show in the Village, off-off-off-off Broadway. I hope I don’t get into too much trouble for saying this, but what the hell, that’s what I believe, and I’m 73.” For those who may not get the thespian metaphor, “the Village” refers to downtown Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, where small audiences see obscure plays, as opposed to Broadway where big names star in grand shows.
Wolfie is a 21st century Old Testament Patriarch who will certainly not get into hot water over his outspokenness. I on the other hand, neither septuagenarian nor Jewish, hope I can stay out of trouble for repeating something I said, on the record, in late 1995 about Arab-Israeli rapprochement: “The ice has been broken but the temperature is still below zero. It could easily freeze over again.”
With Ehud Barak politically resurrected and Peres occupying the bully pulpit of the Israeli presidency, could we now be in for another, perhaps final, chapter of the Palestinian-Israeli show? Barak, the man who scuttled Camp David in 2000, is now presumably wiser; and Shimon Peres co-orchestrated the breaking of the ice at Oslo, so maybe… With the American position unraveling in the Middle East, and the majority of its inhabitants (including those of Israel/Palestine) fed up with the consequences of Zionism and its antitheses, it may be time for Israel to wind down its failed neo-colonialism. This would first involve real recognition of the Palestinians and their rights, instead of an Oslo-like public relations exercise. In any event, it will be interesting to see what the next phase of Arab-Israeli diplomacy looks like; and I for one would look forward to Behrendt’s sequel.
RIAD AL KHOURI is an economist who relaxes by reading books and sometimes reviewing them
