A decade after the initial Oslo Accord was signed in 1993, public opinion on the process it spawned was divided between those who believed it was a promising initiative to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace that was tragically derailed, and those who insisted that it lacked the rudimentary elements of a meaningful peace process. Today, those who continue to believe in "the peace process," aside from that perennially invested smattering of European Union and United Nations functionaries occasionally encouraged by their peers in Washington, can be counted on the fingers of an amputated hand.
Among Palestinians, disenchantment with Oslo and hostility to its perpetuation is particularly widespread, and cynicism about it can also be found throughout the ranks of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the body charged with its implementation. Palestinians view the intensified dispossession and impoverishment they have experienced since 1993 as realities enabled by the agreements of the 1990s rather than developments that have taken place despite them.
Nevertheless, the PA leadership remains committed to Oslo, and there is seemingly nothing– including Israel's current extremist government–capable of producing a change of heart in Ramallah. In the Gaza Strip, the Hamas movement that gained power on the strength of popular disillusion with Oslo in the early 2000s and its vow to demolish it, has made an implicit peace with the limited self-government Oslo produced.
The status quo may soon change—not because it is untenable, but because Palestinian as well as Israeli politics are in transition. Not only is Israel becoming an increasingly authoritarian polity, but its electorate has for decades been shifting increasingly rightwards, bringing fanatics from the fringes into the mainstream and rewarding them with growing representation and power. If Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu understands the value of maintaining Oslo as a fig leaf for creeping annexation and of sustaining the PA to police the Palestinians, his far-right coalition partners are incapable of tactical flexibility and increasingly view the very existence of the PA as an affront to their determination to proclaim formal sovereignty over the entirety of the West Bank. Bringing the entire edifice down is for them a price worth paying. More to the point, the annexationists in power believe there are no significant costs involved in carrying out their plans and substantial benefits to be had in doing so.....