Why Oslo still has relevance
The hopes briefly raised by a handshake 30 years ago can be more than a sad footnote to history.
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In September 1993, then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (left) shakes hands with Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) chairman Yasser Arafat, as then US President Bill Clinton witnesses the signing of the Israeli-PLO peace accord, at the White House.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Serge Schmemann
A few days after then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated on Nov 4, 1995, I remember an Israeli acquaintance telling me that however terrible the circumstances of his death, it had established Mr Rabin as a martyr for peace. As a result, the Oslo peace process he had begun, named after the city where it was secretly hatched, had become irreversible.
It certainly seemed that way at the time. I had just arrived as a correspondent in Israel, and an aura of hope still hung over the pair of agreements signed in 1993 and 1995, which granted the Palestinians a degree of self-government and, more important, started a peace process meant to reach a permanent settlement within five years.
