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[OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/9/2014, SPi]

xxxii The Crooked Course

Territories and Personal Representative to the PLO and the Palestinian Authority at our new headquarters in Gaza city. The PLO had regained its uncontested leadership, and the Palestinian Authority received a massive financial boost with the influx of donor money from across the world. Israel received a moral boost as a large number of countries formally recognized its existence and established diplomatic relations.

A hallmark of the Declaration of Principles was the establishment of a gradual approach to resolving the conflict. Gradualism now became the keyword for describing the peace process. By breaking the overall goal of peace into manageable sections that could be addressed in sequence, the Oslo process allowed for progress to be made and trust to develop on less contentious issues before tackling more controversial topics like Jerusalem, borders, security arrangements, and refugees, which could threaten to derail any talks.

One of the principal advantages of the step-by-step or gradualist approach was that it enabled the parties to reach compromises through ongoing dialogue and interaction with each other by starting with the easiest issues and leaving the hardest for last. It allowed for an incremental change in perceptions and political positions. Although gradualism allowed success to be achieved in a variety of areas, moving the process forward, at each stage, depended on the parties taking the bold steps necessary to fulfill their respective commitments. The main weakness was slow movement in implementation, with progress falling behind agreed upon timelines. This led to periodic disillusionment and back-sliding.

A recurrent problem was that the parties had failed to agree on a mechanism to penalize non-compliance. This critical deficiency undermined progress. As leaders and the political climate changed, so too did the resolve to implement.

Successful gradualism required the use of ambiguous language on the most contentious issues: Jerusalem, borders, security, and refugees. The successive Israeli governments and the Palestinian leadership had substantially different views on the final status of all four of these issues. The language contained within the Oslo documents, as well as subsequent agreements, provides room for interpretation. Either side could claim that the text represents their interests. This allowed leaders to go home to their respective constituents and retain popular support.

Another practice that proved effective was the use of the annexes attached to agreements to flesh out disruptive details, or to substantially water down the impact of certain commitments made within the body of the text. In many cases the annexes are exhaustively long and detailed but are rarely read by the public, affording the leaders political space to make agreements that might otherwise face public criticism.

The three Israeli Prime Ministers who were in office from 1993 to 1999—Rabin, Peres, and Netanyahu—approached the challenges of peace through a concept of gradualism, postponing the tricky final status issues. Barak, who took office in 1999, was the first Israeli Prime Minister to address the final status head-on with a “totalist” approach (read below).

While the Oslo process was based on the concept of gradualism, characterized by bilateral negotiations—facilitated by a third party—and cumulative small steps demonstrating good faith, Ariel Sharon eventually took a contrary approach through “uncompromising unilateralism”. The day after he won the election in February 2001,

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