30 years ago today, Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands in front of Bill Clinton on the White House lawn. Imaginations got fired up about a post-Cold War world that even saw peace in the Middle East.
Obviously, that didn’t happen. But we didn’t need the benefit of hindsight to see that the Oslo Accords could never do what it was meant to do. We didn’t even need to be as smart and well-informed as some of the experts–prominently including the late Prof. Edward Said–who were derided as haters for saying it wouldn’t work. As I relate here, if you bothered to see what the Accords actually said, anyone could see they were doomed.