Israel Studies Review

We are deeply saddened by the loss of Professor Gad Barzilai (1958–2023), who died on 10 April 2023. Gadi was an influential scholar in the fields of law and political science. He served as the president of the Association for Israel Studies (AIS) from 2011 to 2013. His leadership, exceptional scholarship, and vision helped shape the field of Israel studies and foster important intellectual debates on issues pertinent to Israeli society.

Contrary to the commonly held belief that the 1993 Oslo Accord was a peace treaty, this article shows that it was an imbalanced interim agreement that unsurprisingly failed. Three decades later, the Israeli-Palestinian reality is marked by a massive expansion of Israel's settlement project, a gradual erasure of the Green Line, a symbiosis between Israeli security forces and the settlers, and an authoritarian and divided Palestinian leadership, with the Palestinian Authority acting as Israel's sub-contractor. Israel's regime of control also separates between Palestinian groups, with each group given a different set of limited rights. While the Oslo process had the potential to transform a predominantly ethnic struggle into a conflict over land and borders, the ramifications of the one single regime that has replaced the Oslo order cannot be underestimated. After describing these developments, the article introduces the contributions to the special issue, which add new perspectives to the still ongoing debate on the genesis, interpretation, and implications of Oslo.

This article examines the role of interpersonal trust (IPT) in establishing and developing the 1992–1993 Oslo Channel by drawing on a number of interviews alongside available English-language discursive material. The central argument is that IPT developed in two specific dyadic relationships in the Oslo Channel: between Dr. Yair Hirschfeld and Ahmed Qurei, and then between Qurei and Uri Savir. These relationships underpinned the development of the Oslo Channel. To support this argument, I examine the 1991–1993 Washington negotiations and demonstrate that IPT did not develop there. To analyze the relationships discussed in this article, I draw extensively on interdisciplinary literature on trust, examining how the basis for IPT changes in these dyads as the relationships develop. This article complements the existing literature on the Oslo Channel by examining the relationships between key individuals on the Israeli and Palestinian side.

How can ‘small’ and politically peripheral states have a significant impact on issues dominated by big states? For example, how did Norway come to play such an important role in fostering negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the early 1990s? This article seeks to answer these questions by analyzing Norway's relationship with Israel and the PLO from 1948 until 1993, as well as Norway's role during the negotiations that led to the signing of the first Oslo Accord. Seen through the theoretical framework of small-state mediation, Norway's lack of influence might have helped convince the parties to open dialogue, but it also implied an inability to provide a level playing field for just negotiations.

Since 1993, professional and historical record literature has largely focused on the Norwegian involvement in the Oslo peace process. Denmark's extensive mediation efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have not received similar scrutiny. This article assesses Denmark's involvement in the period following the Oslo Declaration of Principles in 1993. Denmark's peace engagement included two main diplomatic tracks. The unofficial track was designated as the Louisiana Process and the official track was named the Road Map for Peace. In both tracks, Denmark was able to demonstrate a comprehensive foreign policy that reflected a unique mediation strategy. Denmark's capacity to alter the nature of the conflict was restricted by its meager resources and its inability to impose decisions on the involved parties.

In this article, I discuss how several documentaries and films by Amos Gitai provide primary oral and written sources to write a history from below of the Oslo Accords and of their demise. In the first part of the article, I discuss sources from a set of interconnected documentaries (Give Peace a Chance and Arena of Murder) filmed between 1994 and 1996; in the second, I focus on the movie Rabin, The Last Day (2015), and I explore sources from the so-called Gitai-Rabin archive deposited at the Bibliothèque National de France. Overall, this material brings us the voices of various groups within Israeli society and among Palestinians, revealing the complexity of the issues on the negotiating table, and the cultural, social, and political questions that the peace process unleashed.

The signing of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s between Israel and the PLO has had significant implications for the Palestinian-Arab community in Israel. From a three-decade perspective it becomes clear that the debate on Oslo continues to resonate among the various political and ideological circles in Israel's Arab community. While the members of the Arab-Jewish current consider the Oslo period the Golden Era of Arab parties in Israeli politics, the Palestinian nationalists in the Arab community sharply criticize not only the outcome of the Oslo Accords but also the Palestinian leadership that endorsed them as well. The Islamists greeted the Oslo Accords with mixed reactions but over time began to criticize their outcome as well. This article sheds light on the evolving narratives of Oslo among the various ideological currents in Israel's Arab society from the early 1990s to the present.

Despite some improvement to the lives of Palestinians through human rights activism, this article argues that the legal regime governing Occupied Territories, combined with a rigid legalized conception and application of human rights, limits the ability to achieve human rights protections for those living under prolonged military occupations. Drawing on a critique of liberal legalism, this article will identify four key barriers to change through an analysis of court cases and human rights reports in the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinians. It will trace key shifts in human rights organizations in Israel and Palestine, which seek to overcome these limitations in an effort to secure long-term human rights for Palestinians.

Although previous studies have separately discussed the Oslo Accords and Israel–Africa relations, there has been little discussion of how and why relations between Israel and African countries evolved during the Oslo process and after its collapse. This article addresses these gaps, arguing that although the Oslo Accords did contribute to the establishment of diplomatic relations with many African countries, the contribution was minor and short-lived, and that common and national interests were more central motivations. It describes the complex nature of more recent developments in Israel-African relations and raises questions about the quality and consequences of bilateral relationships rooted mainly in national and common interests.

Mannheim observed that generational memory is shaped by the prominent public events an age cohort experienced for the first time as young adults. For Jewish-Israeli millennials, born 1980–1995, their political coming of age was shaped by the failure of Oslo, cyclical violence, and Israel's pursuit of policies of population separation from Palestinians. This article draws on a wider, phenomenological study (2014–20) of post-Oslo generational memory of self-described hiloni (‘secular’ in Hebrew) millennials across the political spectrum from left to right. More richly theorizing and nuancing what is popularly assumed about this demographic, it argues that Oslo's legacy is hope-as-waiting behavior. It introduces Rengger's concept of the anti-Pelagian imaginary to discussions of attitudes to Occupation, making a case for more carefully specifying this sensibility by Jewish-Israeli demographic subgroup. To comparatively research hope amid intractable conflict calls for deeper analysis of hope-as-waiting as a category of action.

David Tal, The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US–Israel Relationship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 320 pp., $ 89.99 (hardback).

Amal Jamal, Reconstructing the Civic: Palestinian Civil Activism in Israel (New York: State University of New York Press, 2021), 316 pp., $32.95 (paperback).

Ayala Levin, Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958–1973 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 320 pp., $89.99 (hardback).

Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman, Hollywood and Israel: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 368 pp., $105.89 (hardback).

Arieh Saposnik, Zionism's Redemption: Images of the Past and Visions of the Future in Jewish Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 300 pp., $99.99 (hardback).