By Ghassan Khatib, Bitter Lemons, 06.02.08

After the decade of relative optimism that surrounded the peace efforts of the 1990s, the beginning of this century has witnessed a complete reversal. Peaceful relations and practical cooperation have been replaced by fierce and violent confrontations. Accusations and recriminations have taken the place of the language of promise. Israelis accuse Palestinians of having instigated the violence forcing Israel to reoccupy the West Bank, while Palestinians accuse Israel of undermining the peace process by continuing settlement building and expansions on Palestinian land.
A process of radicalization in both societies has accompanied this deterioration. In Israel, the extreme right wing under Ariel Sharon came to power in 2001. Sharon pursued a unilateral strategy characterized mainly by the use of force to impose Israel's will on the Palestinians. In the occupied Palestinian territories, meanwhile, the radical Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) won parliamentary elections in January 2006 by an overwhelming majority and formed a government that refused to recognize Israel or adhere to previously signed agreements.
With the two parties busy blaming each other, the failure of the peace process inspired many to study the experience in order to understand what lessons could be learned and applied in future negotiations.
Many of the more convincing analyses examined the structural deficits of the previous process. Among these, the most common conclusion was that the open-ended nature of the peace process was one major problem. With neither side certain where the process would lead, both needed to have plan Bs, reserve options to use in case negotiations failed. Thus, the Israeli fallback position was to retake military control over all the Palestinian territories, while on the Palestinian side it was to resume the armed struggle.
The other widely recognized structural problem of the 1990s process was the lack of harmony between the atmosphere of the negotiations and the situation on the ground. The absence of any proper relation between what was said around the table and what was done on the ground was a major cause of tension and, occasionally, crises. The most obvious example is the continued building and expansion of Jewish settlements in occupied territory in spite of the explicit prohibition on either of the parties acting to preempt any of the issues subject to negotiation.
Many Palestinian opponents of the peace process argued from the start that the imbalance of power between the Israelis and Palestinians would carry over into open-ended negotiations. Indeed, that imbalance allowed Israel, along with its American ally who happened to be both sponsor and mediator of the process, to impose structural conditions. At the beginning of the process, in Madrid and Washington there wasn't a Palestinian delegation per se, rather it was subsumed into a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. Furthermore, no Palestinians from Jerusalem or the diaspora were allowed to participate, nor would Israel countenance any direct role for the official leadership and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, the PLO.
But the negative effect of this imbalance of power was truly emphasized by the secret negotiations in Oslo. Before, the Palestinian delegation at least had three factors with which to try and redress the imbalance in power: there were clear terms of reference for the negotiations in the provisions of international law, there was an active third party actor and there was public pressure and public involvement through the media coverage.
All of these factors were absent at Oslo. The PLO, having secured itself a direct role around the table, negotiated without pre-arranged terms of reference, did so away from the public eye and without a third party to mediate. The Oslo negotiations were thus structured in a way that isolated the Palestinian delegation from its public and from the all-important international frame of reference. It was a major source of weakness in the Palestinian negotiating position.
In addition to the structural failures of the peace process, there were also problems with the performance of the two parties. Domestic Israeli political turmoil had negative effects on the peace process. What was, in spite of the structural weaknesses, a relatively healthy process in the early 1990s was dramatically interrupted by the change in government that followed the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Since then there have been numerous occasions when Israeli politics dictated the pace or rather lack of pace of the process. This is a dynamic that continues today. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert only recently accepted to postpone negotiations on Jerusalem indefinitely in order to keep the religious Shas party in his ruling coalition.
The performance of the Palestinian side was no less problematic. The approach to both governance and negotiations was characterized by an individualistic and patriarchal style and there was an abject lack of structure and organization. This contributed to the signing of a series of fluid agreements that were hard to implement on the ground.
There is much to be learned from looking back at the peace process of the 1990s. It is therefore very sad to see that almost all of the mistakes made then are being repeated now. The Annapolis conference failed to provide subsequent negotiations with the necessary terms of reference; there is neither clear end game nor code of conduct for the parties on the ground or an active role for an impartial third party. History is doomed to repeat itself.
Ghassan Khatib is coeditor of the bitterlemons.org family of internet publications. He is vice-president of Birzeit University and a former Palestinian Authority minister of planning. He holds a PhD in Middle East politics from the University of Durham.