Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences

07
FAIR CASE BRIEF

The Case of the Israeli–Palestinian Peace Process (1993–2001)

Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)
PO Box 9229 Grønland, NO-0134 Oslo, Norway
Visiting Address: Hausmanns gate 3
Nadim Khoury
Memory and Forgetting at the
Negotiating Table
www.prio.org ISBN: 978-82-343-0369-2 (print) Cover: Frode Overland Andersen / Norwegian
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Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)
Hausmanns gate 3
PO Box 9229 Grønland
NO-0134 Oslo, Norway
Tel +47 22 54 77 00
www.prio.org

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profit institute established in 1959. The overarching
purpose of the institute is to conduct research on the
conditions for peaceful relations between states, groups
and people. The institute is independent, international and
interdisciplinary, and explores issues related to all facets of
peace and conflict.

On Fair Terms: The Ethics of Peace Negotiations and

Mediation (FAIR)
What makes peace negotiations fair? The FAIR project is a
systematic investigation of ethical problems and solutions
in peace negotiations and peace mediation. The project en-
gages with existing debates on norms in peace negotiations
and explores relevant philosophical perspectives. FAIR sets
out to develop a conceptual and philosophical framework
for how to think normatively about negotiations or media-
tion in research, practice and public debate.

The FAIR Case Brief series presents normative controver-

sies in negotiations across ten case studies.
ISBN: 978-82-343-0369-2 (print)
ISBN: 978-82-343-0370-8 (online)

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Executive Summary
Brief Points
• Radical disagreements over
collective memory are a defin-
ing feature of the asymmetrical
conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians.
• These disagreements were put
aside by negotiators and media-
tors during the Oslo peace pro-
cess and a solution to them was
indefinitely postponed.
• Some critics of the peace process
argue that dealing with the past
is a central issue for reaching
a lasting and durable peace in
Palestine/Israel. As such, they
recommend transitional justice
measures.
This case brief examines how the Israeli–Pal-
estinian peace process dealt with radical dis-
agreements over collective memory. It identi-
fies three positions taken towards this specific
issue: prescriptive forgetting that avoids the past
altogether, strategic forgetting that postpones
dealing with it, and transitional justice that
recommends addressing it head-on. The first
two approaches fit within the framework of
the Oslo accords that was characterized by its
pragmatic and gradualist approach to negotia-
tions. Transitional justice, on the other hand,
was absent from the peace process and was
typically endorsed by its critics who insisted on
the need to deal with the past. This case brief
looks at how these different approaches played
out during the peace process, focusing mostly
on the period stretching from 1993 to 2001. It
concludes by discussing some implications for
the ethics of peace negotiations.
3
Collective Memory and Peace Negotiations
Israeli West Bank barrier. Photo: Justin McIntosh / Wikimedia Commons
Issues related to collective memory do not
strike us as obvious objects of peace negotia-
tions. This is because they rank lower than
matters deemed more consequential for the
success or failure of peace negotiations, such
as the terms of a cease fire, the conditions for
power sharing, and the drawing of borders.
Unlike these issues, moreover, conflicts over
the past cannot be entirely settled at the nego-
tiating table. Some scholars even maintain that
the concept of negotiation loses its technical
meaning when applied to memory and that the
idea of negotiating the past can only be used
metaphorically.1
The past, however, has been the object of
actual peace negotiations. Ian Lustick, for ex-
ample, has examined how Israeli and German
diplomats negotiated the respective German
4
and Israeli narratives of the Holocaust as they
negotiated material compensations for its vic-
tims in 1952. In a similar vein, Valerie Rosoux
describes the rapprochement between France
and Germany after World War II as involving
a shift from mutual exclusion to the negotia-
tion of national identity.2 Collective memory
has become increasingly present in peace
negotiations with the growing importance of
transitional justice. As a result, the revision
of official historical narratives, the funding of
memorialization projects, the protection of me-
morial sites, and the dissemination of the past
through educational curricula have made their
way to the negotiating table. This case study
looks at how Israeli and Palestinian negotia-
tors addressed the issue of collective memory
during the Oslo peace process or, to be more
specific, how they avoided it.
The Israeli–Palestinian Peace Process (1993–)
The Oslo peace process began with a series of
secret negotiations between Israel and the Pal-
estine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993,
mediated by the Norwegian Foreign Ministry.
These led to two founding documents: the let-
ters of mutual recognition and the Declaration
of Principles (DOP). In the first, Israel and the
PLO formally recognized one another; in the
second, they set up the guidelines for peace ne-
gotiations and the foundations for a Palestin-
ian interim self-government in the West Bank
and Gaza.
with the issue of collective memory. During
the Oslo peace process, I will show, negotiators
and mediators privileged two main approaches
towards this issue: prescriptive forgetting that
avoided it; strategic forgetting that postponed it.
Reacting to this kinds of forgetfulness, critics
of the peace process recommended transitional
justice mechanisms that promote dealing with
the past head-on.

A defining feature of the Oslo peace process

is its incrementalism, which is a method of
negotiation where parties take small steps to
initiate trust and move from simpler to more
complex issues. In this vein, the DOP pro-
jected a five-year transitional period where
Israel progressively withdraws its occupying
forces from specific areas in the West Bank
and Gaza and transfers authority to the newly
created Palestinian Authority in the fields of
education, culture, health, social welfare, di-
rect taxation, tourism, and internal security.
Within five years, it was then agreed, the PLO
and Israel would begin negotiating “final sta-
tus” issues that included refugees, borders, the
status of Jerusalem, and settlements. Soon af-
ter it was initiated, the Oslo peace process was
marred by setbacks, frustrations, and failures.
Eventually, the PLO and Israel failed to reach
an agreement for a final settlement at Camp
David in 2000, leading in part to the second
intifada (2000–2005). Negotiations have stalled
since, despite different attempts to revive
them.

The focus of this case brief is on a specific as-

pect of the peace process, namely how it dealt

5
Prescriptive Forgetting: Avoiding the Past
According to firsthand accounts, the past was
the first thing taken off the negotiating agenda
during the secret negotiations in Oslo. In his
memoirs, the chief Israeli negotiator Uri Savir
recalls how he and his Palestinian counterpart,
Ahmed Qurei, quarrelled about their respec-
tive historical narratives soon after they first
met. Realizing that this would jeopardize the
negotiation process, they agreed to leave the
past aside:
Never again would we argue about the past.
This was an important step, for it moved us
beyond an endless wrangle over right and
wrong. Moving forward thus meant reconciling
two rights, not readdressing ancient wrongs.3
The claim is corroborated by Palestinian ne-
gotiators. “We focused our attention on the
present and the future,” wrote Ahmed Qurei,
Yitzhak Rabin, Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat at the White House, 1993. Photo: Vince Musi / The White House
6
“trying to gauge the extent to which we had
common ground.”4 “In all negotiations I was
involved in,” notes Hussein Agha, “I argued
that Israelis had their narratives and Palestin-
ians had their narratives and we shouldn’t
waste time disputing them.”5
Savir’s and Qurei’s agreement to forget is not
unusual. It is a case of what Paul Connerton
calls prescriptive forgetting, where forgetting is
prescribed for the sake of security and peace.6
Examples of prescriptive forgetting abound
in the history of peace negotiations. As early
as 403 BC, the ancient Athenians decreed not
speak of the past following a bloody civil war
that divided oligarchs and democrats.7 In 1648,
European powers concluded the Thirty Years’
War by signing the treaties of Westphalia that
included clauses to forget and pardon past
offenses.8 And in 1975, Spain’s parliament
agreed to a pact of forgetting (pacto del olvido)
and a policy of disremembering (la desmemo-
ria) that purposely put aside the legacy of tor-
ture, exile, and civil war following the demise
of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship.9 Forgetting
to negotiate and achieve a peace agreement
has, however, become increasingly less com-
mon. As I will discuss below, the growing
presence of transitional justice mechanisms
has made memory more important to peace
negotiations.
negotiations at Camp David in 2000, for ex-
ample, Israeli negotiator Gilead Sher would
accuse the PLO delegation of weaponizing
negotiations as “an instrument for righting an
historical wrong” because they demanded that
Israel acknowledge its responsibility for the ex-
pulsion of Palestinians in 1948.15

This was not the case of the Oslo peace pro-

cess, however, where prescriptive forgetting
meant that the past was excluded from the
scope of negotiations. The rationale for this
exclusion was pragmatism. Norwegian media-
tors would even define pragmatism as an ap-
proach to negotiations where “previous history,
i.e. long-standing grievances … be ignored.”
For indeed, if negotiators “began to discuss the
historical causes of the conflict, it would be im-
possible to make any progress.”10 The mandate
of the negotiator was thus limited in time (the
present and the future) and scope (the tangi-
bles of the conflict rather than the intangibles).
“If I were in charge of peace negotiations,”
wrote the Israeli novelist and Peace Now activ-
ist, Amos Oz, “I would order the sound techni-
cians to turn off the microphones whenever
one of the parties involved starts talking about
the past. They are paid to find solutions for the
present and the future.”11 It was thus best to
leave history to the historians and negotiation
to the negotiators.12

Within the logic of prescriptive forgetting,

bringing history to the table – as negotia-
tors often did13 – was construed as a form of
spoiling from within the room.14 During the

7
Strategic Forgetting: Postponing the Past
Another approach adopted vis-à-vis the issue of
memory was strategic forgetting. Like prescrip-
tive forgetting, strategic forgetting deems it
unpragmatic and counterproductive to negoti-
ate historical narratives. Unlike prescriptive
forgetting, however, it does not categorically
exclude collective memory from the scope of
negotiations. Rather, it strategically postpones
it until the conditions are ripe. The approach
is best summed up by the Special Assistant
to President Clinton for Arab–Israeli Affairs,
Robert Malley, who, in response to failures of
Camp David, recommended that parties secure
“the conditions of peace first,” and afterwards
engage in “the work of memory.”16
Strategic forgetting is in line with the incre-
mentalistic approach to negotiations stated in
the opening paragraph of the DOP:
The Government of the State of Israel and
the PLO team (…) representing the Palestin-
ian people, agree that it is time to put an
end to decades of confrontation and conflict,
recognize their mutual dignity and security
and achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive
peace settlement and historical reconciliation
through the agreed political process.
The DOP describes a gradual move from mini-
mal to maximal goals. First there is peacemak-
ing (“ending of confrontation and conflict”),
followed by mutual recognition (“the recogni-
tion of each other’s dignity and security”),
which leads to a final deal (“an achievement
of a just, lasting, and comprehensive peace”)
and eventually “historical reconciliation.”17 It
is only at the last stage that the past makes its
way to the negotiating table, not before.
8
According to strategic forgetting, diplomats
would slowly address the past as they neared
final status negotiations. In fact, part of what
makes these final issues so difficult to negoti-
ate is their conflicting historical significance.
Jerusalem, for example, is at the heart of com-
peting religious–national narratives that divide
Israelis and Palestinians. Even more divisive is
the Palestinian refugee issue that touches upon
core elements of Palestinian and Israeli narra-
tives – the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) and
the Israeli war of independence.18 Postponing
these issues then could be interpreted as a way
of postponing the need to address their histori-
cal narratives: how they are remembered and
how they ought to be remembered.
There is some evidence to suggest that the past
became gradually more important as negotiators
neared final status negotiations. In a preliminary
meeting in Stockholm in May 2000, for example,
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators noted the
importance of resolving the gap in Israeli and
Palestinian historical portrayal of the refugee is-
sue.19 When both delegations then met in Camp
David to negotiate a final peace deal in July 2000,
Palestinians asked that Israel accept historical
responsibility for the eviction of Palestinian refu-
gees and raised the issue of an official apology, a
request Israelis categorically rejected. After the
failure of Camp David, Israeli and Palestinian
negotiators met again in Taba 2001 where they
were said to make some progress on the refugee
issue and its historical significance. In his re-
port, the UN Special Representative Moratinos
noted that “the Israeli side put forward a suggest-
ed joint narrative for the tragedy of the Palestin-
ian refugees. The Palestinian side discussed the
proposed narrative and there was much prog-
ress, although no agreement was reached.”20
Transitional Justice: Dealing with the Past
The third approach towards the issue of the
memory is to deal with it head-on through
transitional mechanisms such as restitution,
criminal trials, apologies, reparations, and me-
morialization. Transitional justice is traditionally
categorized as a post-conflict enterprise. Increas-
ingly, however, it is becoming a part of peace ne-
gotiations themselves. In negotiated settlements
in El Salvador, South Africa, and Guatemala, for
example, issues of memorialization, alongside
those of accountability and amnesty, were on the
negotiation agenda.
Transitional justice is different from the two
approaches discussed above. Unlike prescrip-
tive forgetting, it deals with the past to achieve
justice, whereas prescriptive forgetting categori-
cally avoids it to secure peace. And while tran-
sitional justice can potentially overlap with the
gradual approach of strategic forgetting, it does
Photo: Are Hovdenak / PRIO
not overlap with the Oslo peace process that
eschewed transitional justice mechanisms alto-
gether. When Palestinian negotiators suggested
reparations for Palestinian refugees, Israeli nego-
tiators accused them of hijacking negotiations to
right historical wrongs and American mediators
deemed their demands “backward-looking” in-
stead of “forward-looking.”21
As a result, arguments about the need to in-
tegrate transitional justice in an overall peace
agreement increasingly found their place
amongst certain critics of the peace process, es-
pecially on the Palestinian side.22 Here demands
for apologies, truth commissions, memorializa-
tion, and reparations were encouraged by intel-
lectuals and NGOs to criticize the ahistorical as-
pect of the peace process, for erasing Palestinian
history and reinforcing the Israeli narrative.23
9
Conclusion
The past plays an essential role in the asymmet-
ric conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
As a result, debates about what to do with the past
have also played an important role in peace ne-
gotiations. Even today, when this process is non-
existent, these discussions are ongoing. Donald
Trump’s so-called “Peace to Prosperity” released
in 2020, for example, reaffirmed the logic of pre-
scriptive forgetting, noting that “[r]eciting past
narratives about the conflict is unproductive” and
that “the solution must be forward-looking.”24
The issue of collective memory has implica-
tions on the ethics of peace negotiations that I
will briefly discuss to conclude. The first im-
plication is on the broader peace vs. justice de-
bate. Here, prescriptive forgetting can be seen
as favouring the logic of “peace” while tran-
sitional justice can be interpreted as favour-
ing the logic of “justice.” Surely, transitional
justice is broader than the issue of collective
memory, but memory plays an important role
in transitional justice, which explains why Pal-
estinian negotiators brought them up during
final status negotiations, and why elements of
Palestinian civil society insist on them.
The second ethical issue is related to participa-
tion. Questions related to whose past and what
Nadim Khoury is associate
professor of international
studies at the Inland Nor-
way University of Applied
Sciences and associate
professor II at Oslo New
University College. His
work focuses on issues re-
lated to collective memory,
historical injustice, Pales-
tine/Israel, and the history
of political thought.
10
past we should include or exclude boil down to
questions about whom to include and whom to
exclude from negotiations more broadly. The fact
that Palestinian refugees or those living in Isra-
el, for example, were excluded from the process
has to do with which kind of historical narratives
the peace process wants to avoid and discredit,
namely the Palestinian Nakba and Israeli re-
sponsibilities for expelling Palestinians in 1948.
The last ethical issue is power. While deci-
sions to exclude the past from negotiations
(prescriptive forgetting) or to postpone them
(strategic forgetting) are framed as pragmatic
agreements, they have a lot to do with power.
In the case of strategic forgetting, for exam-
ple, questions regarding at what stage the past
should be addressed, when is a ripe moment
to address it, and in what order, are typically
decided by the most powerful party, in this
case Israel. After the demise of the Oslo peace
process, for example, Israeli negotiators added
a new condition to restart negotiations, name-
ly the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.
The demand centres the issue of memory and
narrative – it is a demand to recognize Israel
is the land of the Jewish people. The demand,
however, was rarely portrayed as one hijacking
negotiations in the name of history. Quite the
contrary, it became a pre-condition to restart
peace negotiations. US mediators, in the per-
sons of Obama and Trump, moreover, would
both call on Palestinian negotiators to issue
this recognition, all the while demanding
that they do not deviate from a Palestinian,
“forward-looking” approach to peace. In such
situations, forgetting – whether prescriptive
or strategic – is not a joint agreement made
to advance negotiations, but a way to support
some historical narratives over others.
Notes
1. Zartman, I. W. (2001) Negotiating identity:
From metaphor to process. International Nego-
tiation 6(2): 137–140.
2. Lustick, Ian (2014) ‘Negotiating Truth: The
Holocaust, Lehavdil, and Al Nakba’. Journal of
International Affairs 60(1): 331–353; Rosoux,
Valerie (2001) ‘National Identity in France and
Germany: From Mutual Exclusion to Negotia-
tion’. International Negotiation 6(2): 175–198;
see also Kelman, Herbert (1997) ‘Negotiat-
ing national identity and self-determination in
ethnic conflicts: The choice between pluralism
and ethnic cleansing’. Negotiation Journal 14(4):
327–340; Khoury, Nadim (2018) ‘Plotting
Stories After War: Towards a methodology for
Negotiating Identity’. European Journal of Interna-
tional Relations 24(2): 367–390.
3. Savir, Uri (1999) The Process: 1100 Days that
Changed the Middle East. New York, Vintage
Books, 15.
4. Qurei, Ahmed (2006) From Oslo to Jerusalem:
The Palestinian Story of the Secret Negotiations.
London: I.B. Tauris, 58.
5. Agham, Hussein (2018) ‘We must liberate our
thinking from the Oslo straitjacket’. Fathom
Journal 21(8).
6. Connerton, Paul (2008) ‘Seven types of forget-
ting’. Memory Studies 1(1): 59–71.
7. Loraux, Nicole (2006) The Divided City: On
Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens. Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press.
8. Connerton (2008).
9. Enarcacion, Omar G. (2014) Democracy Without
Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting. Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
10. Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1999)
‘Norway’s involvement in the peace process in
the Middle East’. 31 October.
Available at: www.regjeringen.no/en/doku-
menter/involvement/id420034. (Accessed 7 July
2021).
11. Cited in Assman, Aleida (2018) ‘One Land and
Three Narratives: Palestinian Sites of Memory
in Israel’. Memory Studies 11(3): 297.
12. Bar-On, Mordechai (2006) ‘Conflicting Nar-
ratives or Narratives of a Conflict’. In: Robert
I. Rotberg (ed.) Israeli and Palestinian Narratives
of Conflict: History’s Double Helix. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 153.
13. Rosoux, Valerie (2019) ‘Israeli and Palestinian
Stories. Can Mediators Reconfigure Incompat-
ible Narratives?’ Global Policy 10(52): 61–67.
14. Sher, Gilead & Deborah Shulman (2019) ‘Spoil-
ing International Peace Negotiations From
Within The Room’. In: Gilead Sher & Galia
Golan (eds) Spoiling and Coping with Spoilers:
Israeli-Arab Negotiations. Bloomington, Indiana:
Indiana University Press, 9–29.
15. Cited in Scham, Paul L. (2006) ‘The Historical
Narratives of Israelis and Palestinians and the
Peacemaking Process’. Israel Studies Forum 21(2):
71.
16. Malley, Robert (2001) ‘Au Proche-Orient, on
en reviendra toujours à l’équation posée par Bill
Clinton’. Le Monde, 23 January.
17. Bashir, Bashir (2016) ‘Neutralizing History
and Memory In Divided Societies: The Case
Of Making Peace In Palestine/Israel’. In: S. Sille
Storihle (ed.) The Goodness Regime. New York,
Berlin: Strenberg Press, 22.
11
18. Khalidi, Rashid (1999) ‘Truth, Justice and
Reconciliation: Elements of A Solution to The
Palestinian Refugee Issue’. In: Ghada Karmi &
Eugene Cotran (eds.) The Palestinian Exodus
1948–1998. Reading: Ithaca Press; Scham, Paul
(2000) ‘The Historical Narratives of Israelis and
Palestinians and the Peacemaking Process’. Israel
Studies 21(2): 58–84.
19. Hirsch, Michal Ben-Josef (2007) ‘From Taboo to
the Negotiable: The Israeli New Historians and
the Changing Representation of the Palestinian
Refugee Problem’. Perspectives on Politics 5(2):
250.
20. Moratinos, Miguel (2002) ‘Moratinos Docu-
ment’. 14 February. Available at: prrn.mcgill.
ca/prrn/papers/moratinos.html. (Accessed 15
August 2021).
21. Al Jazeera (2008) ‘Palestine Papers’. 16 July.
Available at: transparency.aljazeera.net/
files/2942.PDF.
Justice. London: University of Westminster;
Said, Edward (1999) ‘Truth and Reconciliation’.
Al-Ahram Weekly 412, 14–20 January.
23. This is not to say that there is an agreement on
what transitional justice means in the context
of Palestine/Israel, or how and to what end the
different mechanisms of transitional, including
memorialization, are to be used. For more on
this issue, see Khoury, Nadim (2021) ‘Transi-
tional Justice in Palestine/Israel: Whose justice?
Which transition?’. In: Leila Farsakh (ed.) Re-
thinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination
and Decolonization beyond Partition. Berkeley:
University of California Press: 153–172.
24. White House (2020) Peace To Prosperity: A Vision
To Improve The Lives Of The Palestinian And Israeli
People. January. Available at: trumpwhitehouse.
archives.gov/peacetoprosperity.

22. See for example Bashir, Bashir (2016) ‘The

Strengths and Weaknesses of Integrative Solu-
tions for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’. Middle
East Journal 70(4): 560–578; Bisharat, George
(2004) ‘The Power of Apology’. Haaretz, 2
January; Dudai, Ron (2007) ‘A Model for Deal-
ing With the Past in the Israeli-Palestinian
Context’. International Journal of Transitional
Justice 1(2) 249–267; Masalha, Nur (2008)
‘Remembering the Palestinian Nakba: Com-
memoration, Oral history and Narratives of
Memory’. Holy Land Studies 7(2): 149; Peled,
Yoav & Nadim M. Rouhana (2004) ‘Transitional
Justice and the Right of Return of the Palestin-
ian Refugees’. Theoretical Inquiries in Law 5(2).
DOI: 10.2202/1565-3404.1096; Nuseibah, Munir
(2013) Forced Displacement in the Palestinian-
Israeli Conflict: International Law and Transitional

12