Many people felt that they were witnessing history in the making, the end of the 100-year bloody conflict between the Jews and the Palestinians, when they saw Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, with a beaming U.S. President Bill Clinton looking on as they signed the Oslo Accords.
This was soon followed by the awarding of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize to Rabin, Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. “Euphoria” was the word used by many. “We were jumping in the streets; I never saw anything like it,” said Palestinian Ambassador Hind Khoury at the roundtable discussion that appears in this issue. Many believed that the road to Israeli-Palestinian peace was now irreversible and that nothing could stop the forward momentum.
However, the Oslo Accords, officially known as Oslo Declaration of Principles (DOP), were not a peace agreement. They were an agreement to launch a process that was s
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