Reconciliation and Recognition in the Oslo Accords

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the brief, although game-changing, Oslo Era. This chapter argues that the Oslo period has operated a rupture in the already existing tendency of dehumanizing the ‘other’, as discourses and narratives connected to dehumanization in the elite level deeply impacted perceptions on the societal level, creating the environment for the positive transformation of the conflict. However, its conclusions point to the pernicious impact of the disappointment connected to the feelings of loss of expectations and hope, as well as the emergence of new narratives about blames and responsibilities, which have added new grievances to the already existing ones.

This chapter analyzes the brief, although game-changing, Oslo Era. The changes operated in the world order by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the subsequent end of the Cold War led to a profound alteration in the international peace architecture from 1990s onward. Free from the constraints of the bipolar power system, international interventionism evolved into a series of mechanisms that began to be deployed in a more coordinated, systematic and sequenced fashion with the objective of promoting peace, development and liberal democracies in the peripheries of the so-called Western world. With regard to Israel and Palestine, the gradual changes in discourses and practices concerning the conflict at the societal level—which simultaneously were potentialized by and culminated into the First Intifada, discussed in the previous chapter—have paved the way to a more focused and planned approach toward promoting a definitive solution to the dispute between the—now widely recognized—two national identities. This has inaugurated a new phase in the efforts to intervene in the situation which, at that time, was officially baptized as the beginning of an official peace process between Israelis and Palestinians.

Mirroring the objectives and structure of the previous chapters, Sect. 6.1 examines the changes in the international peace architecture in the 1990s and how this has affected the ongoing process of dehumanization. While this period was marked by a peace process that, as has been argued, had already been established as protracted, Sect. 6.2 discusses how the late recognition of the Palestinians as an identity group and a legitimate interlocutor for peace negotiations in this period have impacted reconciliation efforts. Section 6.3 brings the two analyses together and explores the consequences of both the feeling—and, above all, discourses—of hope that had emerged in this period and the impact of the subsequent failure of the Oslo Accords to the relationships in the societal level. This chapter argues that the Oslo period has operated a rupture in the already existing tendency of dehumanizing the ‘other’, as discourses and narratives connected to dehumanization in the elite level deeply impacted perceptions on the societal level, creating the environment for the positive transformation of the conflict. However, its conclusions point to the pernicious impact of the disappointment connected to the feelings of loss of expectations and hope, as well as the emergence of new narratives about blames and responsibilities, which have added new grievances to the already existing ones.

1 Liberal Peace, Mutual Recognition and Dissent

From this moment on, the term “peace process” is no longer relevant. Starting today we will not talk of a process, but of making peace.

(Yitzhak Rabin 1992)¹

The collapse of the USSR, in 1989, and the end of the Cold War marked a huge change in international attempts to promote peace and in interventionist praxis, especially due to the triumph of liberalism, that came along with the transformation of the bipolar world order. The liberal peace approach was based on a consensus that democracy, free markets and the rule of law would be indispensable ingredients for promoting sustainable peace in post-conflict societies (Campbell et al. 2011: 1). The simplistic idea of managing conflicts, that had dominated international interventionism during the Cold War, was replaced by the ambition of actively making peace through development promotion and social justice (Sabaratnam 2011: 13–14). This whole apparatus has been introduced within a more sustainable and coordinated approach to peacemaking which led to the widespread use of the term peace process, as can be seen in Yitzhak Rabin’s quotation in the beginning of this section. Nevertheless, as its critics point out, liberal peacebuilding would become excessively concerned with political and economic liberalization (Paris 2004), overlooking important aspects of protracted conflicts such as identity needs.

The ultimate expression of the liberal peace model can be seen in the 1992 United Nations’ Agenda for Peace (UN 1992). This document represents a paradigm shift in the approaches to conflict and their resolution,² as well as the very definition of peace employed by the organization. It is an ambitious proposal that includes the already existing mechanisms of peacekeeping and preventive diplomacy, the ideas of statebuilding, and post-conflict peacebuilding. This change of policy was not only instrumental. It also represented an epistemological turning point, since the UN redefined the very nature of the peace it would help to shape (Richmond 2008). Instead of cosmetic remedies that should attenuate the symptomatic manifestations of conflict (i.e., direct violence or war), this new approach proposed “to address the deepest causes of conflict: economic despair, social injustice and political oppression” (Boutros-Ghali 1992). Nevertheless, identity needs continued to be absent of this understanding, creating a situation in which a new narrative about the conditions of conflict societies had emerged, allowing for “a representation of the periphery as a place of menace and chaos, in which the lack of governability (invariably attributed to internal causes) […] legitimizes the externalization of the medication”³ (Pureza 2011: 32). In this sense, it can be perceived as a continuation instead of a rupture in the practices developed within the peace process rationale.

Nevertheless, in practical terms, this shift in the policies toward conflicts due to the end of the Cold War produced a hegemonic approach to peace that indeed had accentuated international interventionism and its practices in the periphery of the world (Pugh et al. 2008). For this reason, it is frequently compared in Peace Studies and critical IR (International Relations) literature to the sixteenth century “mission civilisatrice”, reflecting the idea that peacebuilding missions can be considered a form of Western imperialism (Turner 2012). As put by Roland Paris, this modern version of the colonial discourse is based on the continuation of a former “belief that European colonial powers had a duty to improve the people living in their overseas possessions—now translated into contemporary parlance of ‘capacity building’ and ‘good governance’” (Paris 2011: 41). This argument has in fact been developed within postcolonial theoretical frameworks, which take it to the extent of saying that both interventionism and the study of intervention need to be decolonized (Sabaratnam 2017: 17). The main consequence of this change was that the whole body of tools and mechanisms available in the context of peace processes got much more complex, since the idea of solving conflicts—and, therefore, making peace—became even more attached to the Westernization of post-conflict societies (Shilliam 2011: 16). To this aim, the peace process goals would now include development, (liberal) statebuilding and the construction of market economies (Mac Ginty and Williams 2009). In practical terms, this meant that building peace should go beyond the signature of formal agreements between political elites that represent states, encompassing activities within the institutional and societal levels. This new formula deeply impacted the ambitions and scope of the second phase of the now Israeli-Palestinian peace process that corresponds to the brief but game-changing Oslo Era.

While the international developments that gave way to the Oslo Agreements were only made possible after the end of the Cold War, winds of change started to blow in the mid-1970s. The USA first got involved in the peace process from 1973 to 1977, following the war on Yom Kippur, which culminated in the signature of the Camp David Accords, in 1978. This mediation effort was meant to gather Israel and the neighboring countries to discuss the basis on which peace would be achieved, namely the UN Resolutions 242 and 338. The first resolution called for Israeli withdrawal from the territories conquered in the 1967 war, establishing the so-called green line as the border of a future Arab state (Pappé 2010: 205–206), and emphasized the necessity of achieving “a just settlement for the refugee problem” [the italic is mine] (UN 1967). The second urged for the implementation of the former resolution and the reactivation of negotiations, although in a very superficial and imprecise way (UN 1973). However, both resolutions failed to even mention the Palestinians by name, always referencing them implicitly when addressing the “refugee problem” (Khalidi 2013: 2–3). In fact, the discussions of this period ultimately had little to do with the Palestine Question, since they were still focused on the so-called Arab World. This situation would only be reversed by the end of the 1980s, promoting an important paradigm shift in the conflict that led to the recognition of the Palestinian people as the key actor to negotiations.

As mentioned in the last chapter, the Palestinian Intifada played a huge part in changing this situation, promoting a reorientation of official discourses by the end of the 1980s that started to address the possibility of peace, and even contributing to identity shifts within the Israeli society (Strömbom 2013a; Darweish and Rigby 2015). The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), mainly controlled by the political party Fatah, had co-opted what was a spontaneous Palestinian uprising and instrumentalized its political gains in order to advocate for the legitimacy of the movement as the representative of the Palestinian people both internally and internationally (Ricarte 2013: 52–59). As per the former, in the Political Resolution of the Palestine National Council⁴ of November 15, 1988, the PLO declared that the Intifada demonstrated the “national unity” of the Palestinian people and “its comprehensive loyalty to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the sole, legitimate representative of our people—of all our people in every place where its members are gathered—both inside and outside the homeland”. Regarding the latter, the beginning of a ‘quest for survival’ was a strategy that had also proved itself effective, since the Palestinians—and, more specifically, the PLO leadership—gained the right to represent themselves in the peace process efforts and became widely recognized internationally.

The change in international perceptions of the Palestinians, their identity and historical narratives was also accompanied by a subtle but important shift in official discourses regarding the ‘other’. The moderation of the PLO discourse⁵ can be perceived, for example, in the change of nomenclature when referring to the neighbor, previously represented as ‘the enemy’ or ‘the Zionist entity’ and identified in the PNC Political Resolution solely as ‘Israel’, what implies a recognition of its statehood condition. Although this document does not refrain from denouncing the war crimes perpetrated by the State of Israel and the condemnation of the occupation, it does so in light of international law and the UN resolutions, expressing an institutionalization of the PLO’s position. It also represents a compromise in such position that counts on several mentions to the pre-1967 borders (the green line), “affirms the determination of the Palestine Liberation Organization to arrive at a comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its core, which is the question of Palestine” and, to this end, calls upon the international community and, more specifically, the UN, to convene an “international peace conference”.

This more mature stance of the PLO, that reflects its will to position itself—and to be considered by others—as a state-like entity, was accompanied by the publication, in the same date, of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence⁶. Parallel to the State of Israel’s Proclamation of Independence⁷, the Palestinian Declaration of Independence begins with an indirect reference to the ‘other’ by affirming that “Palestine, the Land of the three monotheistic faiths, is where the Palestinian Arab people was born, on which it grew, developed and excelled. The Palestinian people was never separated from or diminished in its integral bonds with Palestine” [the italics are mine]. The document also places the right of self-determination as inalienable and indisputable, concluding that “the Palestinian Arab people ensured for itself an everlasting union between itself, its land and its history”.

Nevertheless, the characterization of the Palestinian identity, and the justification of its right of self-determination in the land of Palestine, appears in this document as an explicit response to the Zionist narrative about the Palestinian connection (or lack of it) to the land, reinforcing the tendency of negative interconnectedness between these two national identities (Kelman 1973). It emphasizes the long-lasting struggle with the occupation, the continuous obliteration of their existence in the Zionist national discourse and how this interaction with the ‘other’ has shaped and affirmed the Palestinian identity. On this regard, the document states that “resolute throughout that history, the Palestinian Arab people forged its national identity, rising even to unimagined levels in its defense”, that “it was the Palestinian people, already wounded in its body, that was submitted to yet another type of occupation over which floated the falsehood that ‘Palestine was a land without people (…)’” and that it was “from out of the long years of trial in ever mounting struggle, [that] the Palestinian political identity emerged further consolidated and confirmed”.

These quotations emphasize the continued interdependence between those two identities and their national narratives, that is explained in this document as a consequence of the “historical injustice inflicted on the Palestinian Arab People […] following upon UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (1947), which partitioned Palestine into two states”. Although there was a widespread recognition of the state of Palestine by several countries (Tessler 1994: 722), the lack of definition regarding its borders, institutions and situation with Israel contributed to the failure of its establishment in practice. Nevertheless, the pragmatic change in the PLO’s discourse and its will to compromise on the future resolution regarding the question of Palestine was an important rupture with the former period that allowed for the beginning of a renewed peace process that, this time, was directly between Israelis and Palestinians, instead of other Arab country (Strömbom 2014: 179).

The Israeli willingness to embark in such endeavor took its time to come. On May 14, 1989, the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir proposed a peace plan, but only to reactivate the peace process with Egypt. In its “basic premises”, the Prime Minister specifically stated that “Israel opposes the establishment of an additional Palestinian state in the Gaza district and the area between Israel and Jordan”, that “Israel will not conduct negotiations with the PLO” and finally that “there will be no change in the status of Judea, Samaria and Gaza other than in accordance with the basic guidelines of the Government”⁸ [the italic is mine]. Although not mentioned directly, this document can be considered in some of its parts a response to the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. The official Israeli position was not only of rejection of the Palestinian ambitions and the repeatedly categorization of the PLO as a terrorist movement—and, sometimes, as the Palestinians in general as a terrorist people—it also maintained the already frequent policy of denying both the Palestinian identity and, most importantly, their existence as an autonomous people, by referring to the West Bank as the “area between Israel and Jordan” or “Judea and Samaria”, the biblical terms for the region that encompassed the former Kingdom of Israel. Nevertheless, the Israeli elections of 1992 would play an important role at least in the change of this discourse since “Jewish society was now willing to give a chance to a government openly declaring its readiness to vacate occupied land” (Pappé 2010: 241).

It was in this context that the term peace process would become usual in the 1990s, mainly under the auspices of the United States⁹. The Madrid Peace Conference of 1991 was the first time that a Palestinian delegation (albeit part of the Jordanian delegation) participated in direct talks with the Israeli leadership (Kriesberg 2001: 379; Khalidi 2013: 32). In this regard, the United States issued on October 18, 1991, a Letter of Assurances to the Palestinians¹⁰. In this document, the US government expressed the expectation that the renewed peace process would positively impact the dimensions of dehumanization, namely the denial of identity and community, that had been important parts of the relationships established within those two societies since 1947: “The United States also believes that this process should create a new relationship of mutuality where Palestinians and Israelis can respect one another’s security, identity, and political rights”. However, as we shall see, the beginning of this renewed process was marked instead by a discursive dispute over which would be the most truthful historical narrative about Palestine and its people, thus turning the negotiations into another stage for conflict and dissent.

Just a few days later, on October 31, 1991, the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and the Leader of the Palestine Delegation Haydar Abd al-Shafir spoke on the Madrid Peace Conference. Both discourses can be considered very strong statements about each group’s understanding of their history and identity. Moreover, both equally address the relationship with the ‘other’ as a key aspect of these narratives, institutionalizing the already existing tendency of turning the peace process into an arena for legitimizing one’s identity by undermining the ‘other’s’. The Palestinian speech emphasized the asymmetric character of the conflict, questioned Israeli willingness for peace in face of settlement activities in the occupied territories¹¹ and denounced the conditions of life under occupation that encompasses dispossession, house demolitions, arrests and other collective punishment policies. But it also mentioned cases of Jewish solidarity and empathetic behaviors toward the described situation, expressing a will to achieve peace and reconciliation. The narrative of the speech is focused precisely on combating the dehumanization of Palestinians, by responding to what is called the ‘myth’ of invisibility, silence and even inexistence of the Palestinian people. As put by Haydar Abd al-Shafir, “we refuse to disappear or to accept a distorted identity”¹².

On his turn, the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s speech accused the Palestinians and, mostly, the PLO, of terrorism and emphasized Israeli needs of security. His narrative about the Israeli identity went back to 4000 years ago and depicted what he referred to as the “Palestinian Arabs” (a terminology frequently used as a way to deny the Palestinians a separate identity, by implying that they were generically Arabs) as a very recent creation that appeared as an opposition to the establishment of the Jewish State only¹³. Although the speech began with several references to coexistence, reconciliation and peace, Shamir insisted in framing the Palestinian situation as internal affairs of both Israel (depicting them solely as “Arabs who have chosen to remain in Israel” and that “have become full-fledged citizens”) and neighboring countries (that bore responsibility for the “Arab refugees”—obliterating, and therefore dehumanizing, once again, the Palestinians—whose problem had supposedly been created by the Arabs and not by Israel).

The Prime Minister’s narrative, that was strongly rooted in a distortion of the situation of the Palestinians living both in Israel and under occupation, and that relied deeply in the international ignorance so far about such situation, was considered by the Arabs a proof of Israel’s unwillingness to negotiate in fair terms (Barak 2005: 731; Lupovici 2015: 41). In fact, Likud Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s real perspectives with joining the Madrid Talks in October 1991 would later be known worldwide, as he declared after leaving office in June 1922 that his intention “was to drag out talks on Palestinian self-rule for 10 years while attempting to settle hundreds of thousands of Jews in the occupied territories” (apud Smith 2010: 419). Put differently, he was one of the first Israeli politicians to admit having planned on taking advantage of the façade of commitment with a solution that the participation in a peace process implied, to deepen the status quo and promote irreversible geographic changes on the Palestinian map, what some have called the politics of creating “facts on the ground” (Khalidi 2013: 21). Consequently, references to the peace process as the so-called peace process or simply the ‘peace process’ started to appear very soon among Palestinian intellectuals, such as Edward Said, that started to use quotation marks to refer to the peace process already back in 1995, in an opinion article in the newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly (Said 2003: 3–7).

The change of government that led to a modification (at least in the realm of political discourse) of this policy after the election of the Labor Party did not impact instantaneously the public opinion and societal interactions that emerged as a reaction to this process. The instability and uncertainty associated with the Madrid Peace Talks inside both Israeli and Palestinian societies was responsible for an increase of despair and insecurity that allowed for a posterior characterization of this period as one of violence and terror. According to Charles D. Smith, from the December 1992 to March 1993 alone, the increase of violence led to 73 Palestinian deaths, being at least 50 killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which used to fire indiscriminately into crowds during demonstrations to repress and disperse the protesters. On the other hand, 22 Israelis were killed by Palestinians belonging to radical groups such as the Islamic Jihad although some seemed to be individuals acting out of spontaneity (Smith 2010: 419–420). However, as argued by Rashid Khalidi, although the results of this Conference changed nothing on the ground, its symbolic importance in terms of the irreversible recognition and assertion of the Palestinian national identity was unprecedented (Khalidi 2010: 201). By placing the Palestinians as rightful interlocutors in the direct negotiations with the Israelis, and by promoting dialogue between the two peoples (finally equally recognized as such internationally, regionally and nationally both inside Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories), this phase of the peace process promoted a very important rupture that was able to transform the ongoing processes of dehumanization of Palestinians in the official and institutional level, due to the recognition of their existence as a people, as well as their national identity.

With this change of paradigm, the new phase of the Oslo Process that started with the Declaration of Principles that followed this meeting two years later, in 1993, is marked by an “apparent approach of peace” (Laqueur and Rubin 2008: 401). In his Inaugural Speech of July 13, 1992¹⁴, the new Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, from the Labor Party, affirms that Israel “must join the campaign of peace, reconciliation, and international cooperation” with what he referred to simply as “the Palestinians”. One year later, “the Government of the State of Israel and the PLO (…), representing the Palestinian people” signed the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements—the Oslo Agreement—in which they

agree that it is time to put an end to decades of confrontation and conflict, recognize their mutual legitimate and political rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence and mutual dignity and security and achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation through the agreed political process. [the italic is mine]

The Declaration of Principles¹⁵ was ultimately a negotiated accord for institutional—needless to say, state-centric—peacebuilding, with a strong component of statebuilding that included the creation of a Palestinian Authority (PA) and several other governing structures to assure the “transfer of powers and responsibilities from the Israeli military government and its Civil Administration to the [Palestinian] Council”. However, it was established by its Article V that key issues such as “Jerusalem, the refugees, settlements, security arrangements, borders, relations and cooperation with other neighbors” would be discussed later in the Permanent Status Negotiations that would “commence as soon as possible, but no later than the beginning of the third year of interim period”.

This imposition of postponing negotiations on key issues to the Palestinians, subordinated to the outcomes of the transitional period that was grounded on the perspective that it should work as a trial period for the Palestinians and their leadership, denounces the asymmetry of the parties involved in this process (Khalidi 2010: 203; Pogodda 2016). Moreover, the subsidiary understanding of this agreement—and the ones that followed such as the 1994 Cairo Agreement that, among other things, demarcated the powers and responsibilities of the Palestinian Authority; the 1994 Paris agreement, which was the economic component of Oslo; and the 1995 Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, signed by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, that further developed the mutual understanding on the future infrastructures of the “Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority”—is that promoting (liberal) peace in the state/political elites level would be the road to peacemaking in Israel and Palestine, what maintains an overall negative understanding of peace and its consequences. According to what was stated in the 1993 Declaration of Principles, the timeline to commence “final status negotiations” would be 1995 so that the final agreements were to end by 1997. Nevertheless, nothing in the negotiations went according to plan, as evidenced by its later failure and subsequent deepening of the conflict. What Rashid Khalidi had already categorized as the “protracted nature of the process” became “an enormous victory for Israeli partisans of the status quo in the occupied territory” (Khalidi 2013: 27) and, as we shall see, in fact functioned as a key mechanism for deepening this status quo.

However, notwithstanding its failure, the process did impact both the Israeli and the Palestinian societies in terms of the negative dimension of identity building, changing irreversibly their public discourses, narratives and perceptions about the ‘other’ and the conflict. On the one hand, the peace process was one of the factors that contributed to the process of disrupting the hegemony of the Zionist ideology in the Israeli society, either by making it seem anachronistic or because it highlighted the aggressive policies that have been adopted in its implementation, for example, by settlers in the occupied territories (Strömbom 2013a). Ilan Pappé classified this new period as the “Post-Zionist decade” and argued that “the Zionist identity of the land and society was undermined” (Pappé 2010: 270). Also, the prospects of peace and the atmosphere of hope that was created by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1994, to Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres also played an important part in transforming relationships and, especially, representations of the ‘other’ in the official discourses, thus impacting the public opinion and media. The main indicator of change on this regard has to do with former categorizations of the ‘other’ as ‘the enemy’, that shifted in official discourses and in the conflict lexicon as a whole to a discourse about ‘the neighbors’, as seen in the examples analyzed thus far, stressing the importance and inevitability of coexistence. On the other hand, the lack of results and the ultimate failure of such process have been regarded by both Israelis and Palestinians with suspicious and feelings of uncertainty. According to Ilan Pappé, “as early as 1995, most Palestinians had labelled the Oslo process as yet another form of occupation, and most Israelis felt that it had failed to safeguard their personal security” (Pappé 2010: 272). The assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by a member of the far-right settler movement is a drastic and unfortunate example of this. The new wave of violence that appeared as a reaction on the societal level to the uncertainty and fear connected to the failure of the elite-driven peace process ultimately converged to the stalemate of negotiations over a permanent settlement further in 2000, at Camp David.

Regarding the main objective of this section, that is the analysis of dehumanization in light of the peace process’ role to its reinforcement or transformation, this brief but intense phase is considered a turning point in the history of the conflict. As has been argued, although the Oslo Accords failed in their finalization and implementation, the early expectations connected to this phase, as well as the politics of mutual recognition that it provided, changed forever the relationships and narratives of these two peoples regarding the ‘other’. This represented an unprecedented transformation in the cultural dimension of violence¹⁶ that, as will be further discussed in the next section, was reflected in the discourses about the ‘other’s’ aims, struggles, rights, identities and even existence, persisting until today. Moreover, its consequences were not only symbolic, since the Accords did enforce the materialization of a state-like entity for the Palestinians which exists until today, the Palestinian Authority.

In conclusion, as far as dehumanization processes are concerned, this phase and its politics promoted huge changes toward the positive transformation of their dimensions. However, in the turning of the millennia, this movement will be reversed again following the failure of the Accords. The disappointment connected to the feelings of loss of expectations and hope, as well as the emergence of new narratives about blames and responsibilities, have added new grievances to the already existing ones and thus have played an important part in another increase in the levels of violence and dehumanization, that will be analyzed in the next chapter about the final phase of the protracted peace process.

2 Policy Changes in the 1990s: Post-conflict Peacebuilding and Reconciliation

It is time to put an end to decades of confrontation and conflict […] and achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation through the agreed political process.

(Declaration of Principles 1993)¹⁷

The quotation above, extracted from the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, known as the Oslo Accord, is a portrait of the changes operated in the international interventionist paradigm during the 1990s and its intention to break with the former approach to peacemaking during the Cold War, that had characterized the first phase of the Israeli-Palestinian protracted peace process. Ever since the subtle but important changes initiated in the 1970s and analyzed in-depth in the last section, reconciliation has been incorporated into the narratives and approaches to conflict. In the case under analysis, this happened either explicitly and intentionally or by means of recognizing the identity claims and needs of Palestinians through the gradual incorporation of this actor within the peace process. This section will analyze what the changes in the international environment meant for the concept and practice of reconciliation in the context of peacemaking, as well as its impact on social identity in Israel and Palestine.

As discussed in the last section, the collapse of the Soviet Union did not simply mean the transformation from a bipolar to a unipolar system. According to the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, this change in the international world order represented an opportunity to strengthen, complexify and enlarge international efforts to promote peace and security from prevention to post-conflict consolidation (UN 2000). It also represented the triumph of the liberal (capitalist) order that would inform the model and design of such interventions. Recapitulating this ideological standpoint is key to understand the development of new, more intrusive but also more complete approaches to conflict insofar as reconciliation is concerned, encompassing not only the management of violent conflict but also the long-term (re)building of institutions and political systems resembling liberal democracies and free markets (Paris 2011; Sabaratnam 2011). This one-size-fits-all model will also be attempted in Israel and Palestine through a major process that was materialized in the Oslo Accords. The deployment of new mechanisms such as post-conflict peacebuilding, statebuilding and development promotion within the UN framework through the already mentioned 1992 Agenda for Peace is also responsible for a big change in the meaning of reconciliation and the historical evolution of this concept and practice in Israel and Palestine.

While reconciliation in the first phase of the Israeli-Palestinian protracted peace process had meant political reconciliation alone, representing a continuity in the paradigm of the British Mandate attempts to conciliate political elites’ interests in the first half of the twentieth century¹⁸, the concept of reconciliation presented in the 1992 United Nations Agenda for Peace frames it as a more holistic post-conflict mechanism in the context of peacebuilding activities (Paffenholz 2015). However, the state-centric bias of its concept and practice is maintained, insofar as reconciliation was addressed as a means to consolidate the peace efforts developed first in the political elites’ level (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013: 774–775). Although the UN expanded the concept to “address the deepest causes of conflict: economic despair, social injustice and political oppression” (UN 2000), the approach undertaken had mistaken causes with manifestations. Moreover, this perspective encompassed a negative view of reconciliation, insofar as it is understood as dependent upon the settlement of the conflict and the consolidation of a negative peace.

By failing to deal with root causes of conflict, this new vocabulary of peacebuilding and reconciliation had promoted in practice little change in terms of the level within which the peace process operated. However, it had allowed for the development of a differentiated global approach to peace that, although proposed as a systematic model with clearly sequenced activities, in practice created overlapping phases of peacemaking and the coexistence of several mechanisms deployed in order to mitigate the manifestations and effects of long-term conflict in societies (Darby and Mac Ginty 2008). For this reason, the idea of peace-less reconciliation (inspired in former works such as Biletzki 2013; Strömbom 2013b) is brought into this book in order to represent the set of empirically observable peacemaking efforts developed in contexts of ongoing conflicts that aim at promoting relationships, mutual recognition and respect (and, therefore, act in the realm of reconciliation), dealing with the dimensions of narratives, discourses and practices that have the potential of promoting a positive identity construction through the (re)definition of perceptions about the ‘other’ (Verdeja 2013: 170).

As the analysis developed so far has suggested, although there has been an evolution in the incorporation of reconciliation in approaches regarding the conflict, peace-less reconciliation is not a feature of the peace process in this period. The main promise of the Oslo Accords, as outlined in the 1993 preamble of the Declaration of Principles, quoted in the epigraph of this section, still consisted of the possibility of political reconciliation, expressed in the settlement of the conflict through the signature of a negotiated agreement (although a very comprehensive one) between political elites. Nevertheless, as discussed in the last section, representations of success of the peace process during the negotiation of the Accords played a central role in the transformation of dehumanization processes and promoted peace-less reconciliation at all levels by reinforcing a new paradigm of mutual recognition and creating the idea that peace was in fact achievable. This has allowed for the construction of an alternative view of the conflict reality, in which peace was in fact a concrete possibility, thus affecting the long-established intersubjective meanings such as dehumanization, enmity and conflict and allowing for an actual transformation of societal behavior and interactions, norms, interests and identities.

Although most critical literature represents the Oslo Process either as disadvantageous for the Israelis in terms of the already established balance of power or as a farce or a trap insofar as the Palestinians are concerned (Said 2003; Khalidi 2013: 29; Pappé 2010: 243), in terms of the transformation of relationships, it has changed the conflict forever and for good. In fact, as this chapter has shown thus far, during the Oslo Process, the representations made in the public and official discourses have promoted a reorientation of the established lexicon of the conflict that impacted narratives and identities by consolidating the recognition of Palestinians and their national identity claims, as well as the acknowledgment of the neighboring country by Palestinian political elites, thus promoting mutual recognition. Although, as we shall see in the next chapter, this process will suffer a throwback later on in the turn of the millennia, some of its most important gains were maintained, such as the recognition of the Palestinian people and its materialization within the establishment of a proto-state entity with (limited) governing functions.

In the societal level, in the context of the increase of hopes and changes in the vocabulary and discourses connected to the peace process in the 1990s, the foundation of new organizations can be perceived. During the period of the Intifada (1987–1993), the number of registered non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Israel and Palestine had already experienced a great increase, being one-third of all NGOs that are still active today founded during these years¹⁹. Notwithstanding the many problems connected to the nature of the Oslo Accords²⁰, such as the clear asymmetry between the two sides expressed in the terms of the 1993 Declaration of Principles²¹, the lack of identification of mechanisms to enforce the decisions and the option of dealing with core issues of the conflict in future negotiations, the atmosphere of peace created by them has impacted conflict developments in all levels. The Oslo period has witnessed a rapid rise in the establishment of civil society organizations and NGOs in Israel and Palestine, thus creating what can be called a real peacebuilding industry. According to Payes (2005: 61) “while in 1991 the number of registered associations (amutot) [in Israel] reached 16,728, in 1998 this number grew to 28,885”.

However, the liberal reframing of the international doctrine regarding peace in this period has performed a change in their nature, since “most of these popular initiatives had transformed into professionally-based, foreign-funded and development-oriented organizations” (Payes 2005: 104), thus evidencing the political economy of conflict and, more specifically, protracted conflict. For Gearoid Millar (2014: 168), “the very structures of the peacebuilding industry and the economic incentives that drive the international system seem to work against any truly local ownership of peacebuilding processes in contemporary transitional states”. As we shall see, for better or worse, these organizations got effectively institutionalized in the context of a greater peace process. This institutionalization has allowed for the development of the organizations but has also promoted some sort of alienation of their agendas and separated many of them from the grassroots.

Regarding approaches to reconciliation at the institutional level connected to the actual peace process, despite the changes of doctrine promoted by the incorporation of a liberal vocabulary into international interventionism, it failed to operate a clear rupture with the former period, maintaining the negative understanding of reconciliation in terms of political reconciliation alone. Rouhana and Bar-Tal (1998) argue that one of the reasons that explain the failure of the peace process in this period relates precisely with how it had refrained from dealing explicitly with the importance of the past, history, collective memories and narratives (in other words, identity) to the present relationships and reconciliation. For instance, the 1993 Declaration of Principles only mentioned reconciliation once, in a vague and symbolic way that seems to invoke a final stage status and that can be seen in the quotation of the epigraph of this section. Two years later, the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip used the word reconciliation only twice. The first time was connected to the same meaning of the former agreement. The second time, in Chap. 4, Article XXII about Cooperation, addressed identity in its moral/cultural dimension and seemed to encompass the present manifestations of conflict in its timeframe, although lacking any operationalization for the concept:

Israel and the Council will ensure that their respective educational systems contribute to the peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples and to peace in the entire region, and will refrain from the introduction of any motifs that could adversely affect the process of reconciliation.²²

Also, “it has increasingly been acknowledged that Oslo also failed due to its inability to address the conflict’s more affective dimensions, side-lining the relational dimensions of peacebuilding as peripheral rather than regarding them as central building blocks in bringing about peace” (Burkhardt-Vetter 2018: 238). According to Sara McDowell and Márie Braniff,

while the failings of Oslo are often attributed to unresolved physical lines and places, there is another school of thought attesting that, as with many peace processes, Oslo did not engage with the past (and therefore with the present) and its conflicting narratives (Hill 2008), with questions of truth and reconciliation, with the victims of past violence and with issues of culture and identity. (McDowell and Braniff 2014: 103)

However, it can be considered that although the Oslo Accords failed to achieve its objectives and, as explained above, according to some, has even worsened the Palestinian position and prospects for the future, the Oslo Process and this phase of the peace process indeed succeeded—more due to historical circumstances than because of the content of the Accords—to transform the process of dehumanization of Palestinians and Israelis in the official discourses, since its main consequence was the mutual recognition of the ‘other’ and the acceptance of each group’s national aims as a community. Nevertheless, in the realm of policies and practices, the failure of the Oslo Accords deeply affected future developments of the conflict in a way that promoted an institutionalization of dehumanization since the occupation intensified, the so-called Separation Wall started to be built and more policies of discrimination and exclusion were written, mainly by the Israeli leadership. In terms of the societies, a twofold consequence can be drawn: dehumanization has intensified, but a peaceful response to it has also emerged. Next chapter will deal with the consequences of this change to the peace process and its future dynamics.

3 From Hope to New Grievances in the Conflict of Identities

In Rashid Khalidi’s words, “so far as the Palestinians were concerned, at this stage the ‘peace process’ did not encompass the basic elements of a real, lasting and just peace, or a resolution of any of their basic problems” [italics are mine] (Khalidi 2013: 36). The author goes further by pointing to the contrasting consequences of this process to Israelis, which he considers to have been of alleviation of the burdens of the occupation promoted by the interim period which gave the “illusion that Israel was moving toward peace with the Palestinians, while leaving in place and indeed allowing for the reinforcement of all the fundamental elements of Israeli occupation and settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories” (Khalidi 2013: 36). Joining the choir of many other voices who consider that the process was biased in favor of Israel since its beginning (Pappé 2010; Barak 2005; Said 2003; among others), Khalidi concludes that the terms of the negotiations were never favorable to promoting peace in the first place. This perception about the peace process and the attribution of blames for its failure is one fragment of the new discourses that have arisen in the turn to the twenty-first century and that became incorporated in the main narrative about the conflict and the relationships between the two national identities ever since.

However, an analysis of the second phase of the Israeli-Palestinian protracted peace process anchored on the concepts of dehumanization and peace-less reconciliation reveal a different diagnosis. Besides the symbolic changes in the peace process performed by this phase, there can in fact be seen some important advances in the Oslo Era encompassing practical implications that did collaborate for the positive transformation of the processes of mutual dehumanization. Those included the acknowledgment and specific nomination of Palestinians as a people bound together by their national identity, as well as the legitimization of their claims of self-determination; the declarations of mutual acceptance and recognition; the establishment of some kind of Palestinian self-rule, albeit very limited, over a portion of the territory through the creation of the PA; and the intention of establishing cooperation in several areas ranging from security to technology, management of resources, infrastructure building (including housing and social rehabilitation), economic development, media and the environment. Although the root causes of the conflict, that are connected to the dimensions of cultural violence and reconciliation, were postponed for later negotiations, the amplitude of the agreement and the economic prospects of development and cooperation were aimed at tackling not only direct violence but also structural violence, inequality and social injustice. Furthermore, those accords in fact established the basis of the new vocabulary that would be applied from now on to refer to this conflict, although some argue that the very idea of a ‘peace process’ that was promoted in this period was nothing more than Orwellian newspeak (Khalidi 2013: xiii).

Most people interviewed during my first fieldwork trip to Israel and Palestine²³ in 2015 agreed that the Oslo Accords represented a watershed not only in terms of the history of the conflict but also because of the transformation of relationships within societies, both at the collective and at the individual levels. Albeit some defended that the Accords were an important step toward the positive transformation of the conflict, since they respected and institutionalized the two states (one Israeli and the other one Palestinian) formula, and attempted to build institutions in order to achieve a transition of power that would lead to both peoples’ self-rule, others believe that they were an orchestrated farce. According to the latter, its purpose was to weaken the Palestinian position and strengthen the asymmetry that already existed between both parties, while buying Israel time to deepen the colonialist effort by definitely changing the map of the region in the meantime. From an a-historical standpoint, meaning without taking full account of the conflict since its beginning and failing to recognize the constant denial of the Palestinian identity and agency within the peace process until 1990s, this is an understandable argument due to the current developments in the situation. For example, Sandra Pogodda argues that the final balance of the second phase of the protracted peace process shows that the asymmetry of power became even more evident, pointing to some of the most dreadful consequences of its failures. According to her, “using the ‘peace process’ as window-dressing for expansionary policies has turned Palestine into an archipelago of villages and towns dotted around an Israeli-controlled territory” (Pogodda 2016: 406). She considers that this outcome is a product of Israel’s unwillingness to compromise and the consequence of the significant concessions imposed upon the Palestinians in the context of the Oslo Process.

Nowadays a harsh critic of this process, as can be seen in the quotation in the beginning of this section, the historian Rashid Khalidi, who participated in the Palestinian delegation as a consultant during the Madrid Peace Conference, had already recognized in 1997 what was at that time a huge change of paradigm in the relationships between the two peoples. In his words, “irrespective of the many flaws in the accords with Israel, and the bitter Palestinian critiques of them, a process with great importance for issues of Palestinian identity has now begun” [the italic is mine] (Khalidi 2010: 203). The scholar acknowledged back then that the year of 1993 represented a huge change in terms of the recognition of the Palestinian people by the Israelis, citing as example how Labor Party leaders like Yitzhaq Rabin and Shimon Peres “spoke freely about an independent Palestinian personality and a Palestinian people with a national cause—something that twenty-five years earlier Golda Meir could not bring herself to say” (Khalidi 2010: 204). Regardless of the current developments of the conflict, this late recognition of the Palestinian identity claims and needs became in fact institutionalized to the point that Khalidi’s words in the end of the 1990s might sound anachronic nowadays. Another important change of discourse that was operated by this process has to do with the incitement to violence. As the analysis in this chapter has shown, the former vocabulary of armed struggle was abandoned from the PLO’s documents and speeches; its Covenant was even modified due to the arrangements made during the negotiations. On the other hand, the Israelis refrained from categorizing the PLO and the Palestinians as terrorists. Talks about war were replaced by the perspective and, above all, the promise of peace. Mutual acceptance was the main consequence of this process and, with it, a renewed feeling of hope.

However, as we will see in the next chapter, the representations of the failure of the Oslo Accords will play an important role in reversing this tendency again. The feeling of hope will give way to the appearance of new grievances connected with the discourses on blames and responsibilities for the lost prospect of peace. The end of the 1990s is marked by an increase in the levels of direct violence, which will culminate in the renewal of the Israeli discourse about its security and threats to its existence. The eruption of the Second—more violent—Intifada in the beginning of the twenty-first century will be a visible symptom of what Edward Said called “the end of the peace process” (Said 2003). All in all, the overall dynamics of the protracted peace process will be maintained so far as the search for recognition and legitimacy is concerned, serving as yet another arena for the reenactment of exclusionary narratives and conflict. In this sense, little space is left for change, insofar as each actor—not only in IR terms but literally performatively speaking—seems to be compelled to keep playing its previously assigned role.

4 Conclusion

This chapter about the Oslo Accords brief but watershed period has argued that the peace process during the 1990s has positively impacted the construction and transformation of the identities in conflict, especially with regard to its negative dimension,²⁴ related with de-identification or the difference from the ‘other’. One of the main indicators of the positive impact of the Oslo Era in the transformation of processes of dehumanization is the modification of vocabulary that was performed during this period. As shown in this chapter, instead of the “enemy” or “the Zionist entity”, the Palestinian neighbor began to be addressed solely as “Israel”; instead of “Arabs”, “Arab citizens of Israel” or “Palestinian Arabs”, the people led by Yasser Arafat were finally widely recognized as the “Palestinians”. Even the “Arab-Israeli conflict” became internationally known as the “Israeli-Palestinian” one. This terminology was in fact already employed by both the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat in their December 10, 1994, speeches, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize that was shared between them due to the peace efforts of the Oslo Process.

This change of vocabulary—that implied the actual material recognition of both national identities and their claims—has endured until nowadays, deeply impacting the developments of the conflict during its final and current phase. On the one hand, the important symbolic gains witnessed in this period, performed by the mutual recognition of each national identity, led to the reversal of the tendency of denial of agency and community which had been the main manifestation of dehumanization in this conflict. On the other hand, this change was also expressed in material terms, insofar as the PLO was recognized as the main interlocutor on behalf of the Palestinians in the scope of the peace process. Moreover, the Palestinian Authority was stablished with self-governing powers, although limited, creating a Palestinian proto-state which is widely recognized internationally nowadays either as a future state or even as the Palestinian state itself. Finally, the idea that the two peoples should see their claims for self-determination expressed in the peaceful coexistence between two national states became the indisputable formula for addressing the conflict until today.

Nevertheless, the failures of the Oslo Accords connected with the lost hope of peace and frustration of expectations had had a pernicious effect in the conflict developments. As we shall see in the next chapter, the collapse of the Oslo Era and the selective implementation of the accords have taken the conflict to a different level. Part of the self-perpetuating dynamics of protracted conflicts, the peace process and the discourses and representations of its failure have given way to a new phase. Narratives about blames and responsibilities connected with the rise of violence due to the frustration and lack of expectations created by the breakdown of the Accords have allowed for an intensification of the exclusionary discourses and the reinforcement of narratives about security and defense. The turn to the twenty-first century was then marked by a period of extreme social detachment and separation, both symbolic and material, in which the distance between both societies has never been bigger.