Peace for Apartheid: The Oslo Accords and Orientalism in Liberal American Foreign Policy, 1991-1996

Abstract

My paper looks at the Oslo Accords, the "peace process" between the Palestinians and Israel. However, I argue that Oslo was never a peace process, and this is largely because the United States was never the neutral arbiter it purported to be. The United States sees the conflict through the lens of Orientalism, which precludes their objectivity. I ground this position in original analysis of the memoirs of two policy planners in the Clinton administration, Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk. As I show, they solely criticized the Palestinians for resorting to violence and terrorism while ignoring the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territory, which are designed to extend Israeli sovereignty and render the creation of a Palestinian state implausible. I review the history of the conflict to show that this policy is antithetical to the terms of peace, specifically UN Security Council Resolution 242, which Israel nominally supports.