They say that hindsight is 20/20. It is more than three decades now since that historic handshake on the White House lawn in September 1993, when Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands under President Bill Clinton’s smiling supervision.

The Oslo Accords were hailed as a breakthrough in Middle East peace. But it was all theatre. The flags, the applause, the lofty rhetoric, all designed to conceal the truth: Oslo was a trap, and Arafat walked right into it. It was a masterpiece of strategic deception.

Arafat’s original sin was not betrayal but delusion, a catastrophic miscalculation that would spawn all his future strategic blunders. The guerrilla fighter who had spent his life escaping from Jordan to Lebanon to Tunisia had belatedly recognised an unpleasant reality: he could never match Israel’s military strength. In the early 1990s, as Israeli settlements were proliferating with lightning speed across occupied territories, he was convinced he was running out of time.

That moment required clear-eyed realism and the courage to walk away from any deal that reeked of deception and disaster. Instead, Arafat’s default position was wishful thinking. Perhaps Israel would come through for him. Maybe they would meet him halfway. Indeed, the United States would stand by him—or so he hoped. That was his first sin: choosing desperate hope over tactical wisdom, clinging to the illusion of good faith when every sign screamed it was a trap. Rather than abandoning negotiations contrived to fail, he doubled down on a fantasy that would cost his people their homeland. His uncontrolled dash led to Oslo’s first sin: Arafat’s naivety about the nature of the negotiation itself.

A veteran revolutionary turned reluctant diplomat. He was essentially unqualified for the chess game of international diplomacy. While Israel brought........

© Middle East Monitor