The Oslo Accords: 25 years of illusions, paid for in blood and crushed hopes. - by Jonathan S. Tobin

Most Israelis understand they were duped. Why does the foreign-policy establishment still resist learning from history?

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
05 September '18..

When the Trump administration announced that it was ending its funding of the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) last week, the protests from the foreign-policy establishment were loud and anguished. As a New York Times op-ed that masqueraded as a news story sought to explain, UNRWA “matters” because the experts say it does.

UNRWA has perpetuated the refugee problem it was established to solve and has become one of the chief obstacles to peace. It has served to keep the 1948 refugees and their descendants in place as a weapon to use against Israel and to give hope to those who wish to destroy it. But uttering these painfully obvious facts and drawing the proper conclusions from them is just something the “experts” about the Middle East don’t do. They don’t because doing so would be to admit that they’ve been wrong about the conflict for a very long time. Coming to grips with this means admitting what amounts to foreign-policy malpractice.

That’s an important point to remember this week as we commemorate a more recent but no less consequential act of folly: the 1993 Oslo Accords. The Oslo process was supposed to serve as a mechanism to end the conflict, and it was celebrated as the answer to the prayers of generations of Israelis who had known nothing but war since the day their state was born.

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