Middle East & Africa | Long road to nowhere

The Oslo accords were always doomed to fail

Thirty years on, the promise of Israeli-Palestinian peace remains as elusive as ever

Yitzhak Rabin signing the Palestinian Peace agreement with Yasser Arafat and William Clinton, September 1983
Image: Alamy
|DUBAI

They were never meant to live to adolescence, let alone adulthood. The Oslo accords, the peace agreement signed by Israel and the Palestinians in 1993, were meant to fade away. After five years both peoples would settle into sovereign states within fixed borders. The interim deal would become obsolete. But five years came and went, then five more, five more times. The interim became permanent.

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline “Long road to nowhere”

From the September 16th 2023 edition

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