Actually, Everybody Recognizes Oslo Failed

Some of Shany Mor’s indictment of the Middle East policy professionals whom he calls “the peace processors” is apt and deserved. His critique of the process that led to the 1993 Oslo Accords, and of course the agreement itself, explains why today it is hard to find unreserved defenders of Oslo, even among its original architects. Even though the unintended consequences—so harmful to Israeli civilians, and ultimately Palestinians, too—of the 1990s peace process are ripe for criticism, the mistaken assumptions that contributed to Oslo’s failures are, by now, well-trod ground.

Mor’s diagnosis of Oslo is not wrong. But he is wrong to impose the reasons for yesterday’s failures onto today’s impasse between Palestinians and Israelis. Mor’s central thesis is that the lessons of Oslo have not been learned, and that those working to bring an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict substitute a moral impulse resistant to changing circumstances in place of a strategic, interests-based approach. But the central piece of evidence he cites—a report issued by the Center for a New American Security co-authored by me and two colleagues—does not support this claim. In fact, the CNAS report’s point of departure is the very same as Mor’s: that the Oslo process has thoroughly failed and that a new approach is needed.

I’ll return to what the CNAS report does (and what it doesn’t) recommend shortly. But first I need to explain the incoherence of Mor’s description of the peace processors. He acknowledges that “[t]o speak of the peace processors as one coherent group is, of course, a contrivance.” The problem is less in the idea of constructing such a group than it is in the description of the policy agenda that supposedly unites it. For instance, Mor posits Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights as a core peace-processor belief, despite the fact that those who opposed American recognition of Israeli sovereignty there, such as the former U.S. ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, were almost universally in agreement that Israel should stay right where it is because of Israel’s ongoing security concerns with vacating the Golan. Furthermore, support for Israel’s withdrawal from the Golan as part of a peace treaty with Syria was supported by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu himself. And why, with its tenuous relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, does Mor characterize support for Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a hallmark of the peace-process camp? For my part, I was warning about Erdogan’s authoritarianism during President Obama’s first term, which is when Mor says peace processers were lauding Erdogan for standing up to Israel.