Thirty Years On: The Ruse of the Middle East Peace Process

Summary

Inès Abdel Razek’s Al-Shabaka policy brief argues that the Middle East Peace Process, conceived at Madrid thirty years before, has not brought a just peace but has consolidated permanent occupation by a nuclear military power with an ever-expanding settler-colonial enterprise, because the very framing of direct bilateral negotiations under military occupation is iniquitous (Thirty Years On: The Ruse of the Middle East Peace Process, lines 141-143). Razek gives three structural reasons, under Liberal negotiation theory: the process lacks mutual terms of reference and good faith — Israel worked not for a Two-state solution but for limited Palestinian autonomy while continuing expansion, and the Palestinian Authority was designed for counterinsurgency — it is imbalanced with no clear timeline, Israel leveraging the interim period as a permanent process while settlements continued, and it lacks an honest broker or accountability mechanism, the United States supporting Israel militarily and diplomatically and vetoing accountability (lines 145-161, 199-251). Israel perpetuates this through creating facts on the ground, narrative manipulation and victim blaming, and bullying the international community (lines 253-285). The prescription is to abandon the MEPP framework for a rights-centered process, revive the Palestine Liberation Organization as a liberation movement, renounce the Oslo Accords and remove the PA as representative, hold Israel accountable, reject conflation of critique of Israel with Antisemitism and terrorism, and reject Arab-state Normalization agreements (lines 287-303).

What the file is

• An Al-Shabaka policy brief (topic: Politics), published Oct 31, 2021 as displayed in the text copy (lines 135, 325), “18 min read”, downloaded from https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/thirty-years-on-the-ruse-of-the-middle-east-peace-process/ (access basis: NGO). The original is the HTML page; the text copy supplied with it (5,258 words, lines 1-480) is a plain-text rendering of that page, with no page markers, so locators are line numbers.
• The text copy includes the site’s frame around the brief: navigation and featured items at lines 1-128 and 311-479, including items dated September 2026 that belong to the page as captured, not to the 2021 brief. The brief itself runs lines 129-309, followed by the author’s biography (lines 319-321).
• Text quality: the brief’s prose is clean and complete in both copies. The Introduction carries a footnote marker 1 after “ever-expanding settler-colonial enterprise” (line 189); in the original HTML that marker is an easy-footnote whose text is the French/Spanish translation note that also appears in the text copy at line 309, not a substantive note. Three pull-quotations in the text copy are followed by “Share on X” page controls (lines 205, 233, 261), which are not part of the sentences. The text copy gives the publication date as Oct 31, 2021; the original HTML’s structured data gives datePublished as 2021-10-30T17:15:15+00:00 (see Open questions).
• A correction dated December 22, 2021 is part of the brief as captured (lines 305-307): an earlier version incorrectly indicated PLO representatives met Israeli officials during the Madrid talks; the PLO was officially barred, and Palestinian representatives not directly associated but closely aligned with it took part.

Section by section

• Executive Summary (lines 139-181): the thesis, the three structural failures and the three Israeli strategies, and six recommendations to the international community, as in the Summary above. The Executive Summary states the PA counterinsurgency claim in full: the PA “has been specifically designed to play a counterinsurgency role in pacifying and controlling Palestinians instead of leading them to freedom and sovereignty”, and “The option of a Palestinian state thus never existed. The negotiations framework ensured this.” (lines 149-155). Khalil Tafakji’s map judgment is quoted: “I don’t know if someone promised you would have a State, but I am speaking starting from the maps, and if we look at the maps, there is no Palestinian State.” (line 155).
• Introduction (lines 187-193): Madrid, thirty years on; western sponsors the US and EU have introduced initiatives under the guise of “peacebuilding” rather than ending exile, subjugation and occupation; in 2020 Donald Trump introduced the Peace to Prosperity plan, which secured Israel’s interests through normalization agreements with several Arab states, while Palestinian rights remained absent from western brokers’ agendas (lines 189-191).
• Liberal Negotiation Theory in the Context of Military Occupation (lines 195-197): liberal negotiation has dominated US foreign policy in the post-Cold War era and the MEPP was put forward as its ultimate example of solving intractable crises; the framework is fraught with challenges in a liberation struggle under military occupation.
• The MEPP lacks mutual terms of reference, and is not based in good faith (lines 199-225): negotiation in good faith requires mutual interest between equal parties on a common basis; the US invitation to Madrid was on the basis of UN Security Council Resolution 242, the parameters for the “two-state solution”. Israel came for two reasons only: First Intifada leverage — Yitzhak Rabin: “There were only so many bones I could break.” — and George Bush’s withholding of $10 billion in loan guarantees sought to absorb Soviet Jewish settlers, described as one of the only times the US exerted conditional pressure for mere attendance (lines 207-209). Nine further rounds followed in Washington over 20 months; the barred PLO began back-channel talks in Oslo in January 1993, which supplanted Madrid and produced the Oslo Accords — Oslo I (1993 Declaration of Principles, with the Israel-PLO letter of recognition as preamble) and Oslo II (1995 Interim Agreement) — to this day the only documented outcome (line 211). Israel’s basis was limited autonomy on the Allon Plan (1967) and Drobles Plan (1978) foundations; Rabin’s 1995 Knesset speech said the “permanent solution” would include “the establishment of blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria” (line 213). Israel has not recognized Palestinians as a national group; in the 1993 letter the PLO recognized “the right of the State of Israel to exist” and accepted Resolution 242, while Israel recognized only the PLO as the “legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” (line 215). Oslo referenced no international law except Resolutions 242 and 338, and Israel claims the West Bank and Gaza are “disputed territories”, refusing the Fourth Geneva Convention (line 217). The PA was designed for counterinsurgency and the process became a mechanism entrenching occupation with a Palestinian ruling class maintaining the status quo (lines 219-221). Edward Said in 1993 is quoted on Arafat’s supporters turned into “enforcers of Israeli security” and non-contiguous “homelands” of about 10 percent of the West Bank and 60 percent of Gaza (line 223).
• MEPP negotiations are imbalanced, with no clear timeline (lines 227-241): the Declaration of Principles held talks on a five-year interim self-government, after which Resolution 242 could ground a final status agreement on water, refugees and Jerusalem, with no mechanism for interim failure; Israel’s best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA) was superior to any offer, so it dragged the interim into permanence while settlement construction continued, including throughout Oslo (lines 229-231). Tafakji, brought in as a technician in 1993, told the leadership “there is no Palestinian State […] you have nothing”; his and other experts’ assessments were dismissed, and Oslo fragmented the territory into Areas A, B and C (lines 235-237). Al Jazeera’s 2011 leak of over 1,600 secret documents from negotiations in 1999-2010 (including the 2000 Camp David Summit and the 2003 Road Map for Peace) confirmed concessions made without transparency or Palestinian buy-in; a leaking negotiator called the negotiations “a deceptive farce, whereby biased terms were unilaterally imposed by Israel and systematically endorsed by the US and EU capitals” (line 239). Despite expiring in 1999, the Oslo Accords remain the only framework in place (line 241).
• The MEPP lacks an honest third-party broker or mechanism for accountability (lines 243-251): the US has failed to hold Israel accountable for violations and war crimes in Gaza and used its Security Council veto to prevent others doing so. Razek, citing Rashid Khalidi’s latest book, traces a century of western denial of Palestinian national rights since the 1917 Balfour Declaration; she cites former Egyptian foreign minister Nabil Fahmy recalling in 2019 that Bill Clinton’s administration “blurred the distinction between American and Israeli interests and priorities”, and Dennis Ross’s statement, as quoted by Fahmy, that the “primary objective was to ensure that Israel’s interests were served” (line 247). Even Bush senior reaffirmed the Qualitative military edge and an “undivided Jerusalem” and did not object to settlements; US funding today totals approximately $3.8 billion per year (lines 249-251).
• Sustaining MEPP to Entrench Systemic Domination (lines 253-255): maintaining the MEPP’s viability has allowed Israel and its allies to subjugate Palestinians and their leadership and pursue the settler-colonial agenda with impunity, through the three strategies that follow.
• Creating facts on the ground (lines 257-263): settlement expansion and land theft under Oslo, suffocating and fragmenting Palestinians under a “maximum land with a minimal number of Arabs” doctrine — separating Jerusalem from the West Bank, forcible transfer, settler population growth, military and firing zones, denial of agricultural land and water, home demolitions, the Apartheid Wall, and a full blockade on Gaza. This is the politics of Fait accompli; defense minister Benny Gantz is quoted, after Mahmoud Abbas’s ultimatum on withdrawal from the 1967 territories: “no one is going anywhere.” (line 263).
• Narrative manipulation and victim blaming (lines 265-275): Abba Eban’s 1973 line that “the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” became the rejectionist slogan; Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad Bin Salman reportedly adopted it in 2018, saying the Palestinian leadership should “agree to come to the negotiations table or shut up and stop complaining” (lines 267-269). Razek answers that the PLO accepted many compromises on a Resolution 242 two-state basis while Israel never compromised, and that at Camp David in 2000, as negotiators recounted in 2001, “strictly speaking there was never an Israeli offer” (lines 271-273). Palestinian rights-defense outside bilateral negotiations is condemned as “unilateral” measures that would “hurt peace” (line 275).
• Bullying the international community (lines 277-285): a campaign delegitimizing the Palestinian struggle — equating it with antisemitism, criminalizing solidarity, and falsely accusing Palestinian human rights defenders of terrorism. Examples: ambassador Danny Danon in December 2019 accusing the International Criminal Court of capitulating to “diplomatic terrorism” for investigating possible war crimes; in May 2021, after outcry over disproportionate force in Gaza, Israel accusing the Chinese government and Pakistan’s foreign minister of “blatant antisemitism”, reprimanding the French ambassador over a foreign-minister statement that Israel was “at risk” of becoming an apartheid state, and pressuring a US university to remove a graduate student who criticized Israel (lines 279-281). From 1972 until December 2019 the US vetoed 44 Security Council resolutions aiming to condemn illegal Israeli actions (line 283). Lip-service to the process whitewashes violations; Israel’s “shrink the conflict” approach deepened PA dependency and facilitated apartheid and the settler-colonial enterprise (line 285).
• Breaking the MEPP Negotiations Cycle (lines 287-303): the six recommendations summarized above, in their full form — a rights-centered process including self-determination, return and security; support for reclaiming the Palestinian political system including in the Unity Intifada; reviving and transforming the PLO, renouncing Oslo and removing the PA as representative; accountability by conditioning and ending military aid, ending trade in settlement products and services, supporting the ICC investigation, and ending the Gaza blockade; rejecting the conflation of critique of Israel with antisemitism and the terrorism accusations against civil society organizations, with pressure to revoke the designations; and rejecting normalization agreements as a means to maintain Israel’s qualitative military edge (lines 293-303).
• Correction (lines 305-307) and translation note (line 309): see What the file is.
• Author biography (lines 319-321): Razek is Co-Director of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD) and its platform Rabet, was its Advocacy Director from 2019 to 2022, previously held policy advisor positions in the Union for the Mediterranean in Barcelona, the UN Environment Programme in Nairobi and the Palestinian Prime Minister’s Office in Ramallah, is a board member of BuildPalestine and an advisory board member of Palestine DeepDive, a policy member at Al-Shabaka, and holds a Master’s in Public Affairs from Sciences-Po, Paris.

Key passages

• “Rather than bring about a just and peaceful future in colonized Palestine through bilateral negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian representatives, the MEPP has instead consolidated a dire reality for Palestinians of permanent occupation by a nuclear military power with an ever-expanding settler-colonial enterprise.” (lines 141)
• “The option of a Palestinian state thus never existed. The negotiations framework ensured this.” (lines 149-155)
• “I don’t know if someone promised you would have a State, but I am speaking starting from the maps, and if we look at the maps, there is no Palestinian State […] you have nothing.” — Khalil Tafakji, as recounted in his book and quoted by Razek (line 237)
• “Paying lip-service to the so-called peace process, to negotiations, and to the ‘two-state solution’ only whitewashes Israel’s violations and rejects any accountability measures as unilateral” (line 261)
• “It is … unfathomable—indeed, absurd—to expect Palestinians to negotiate their freedom and fundamental rights while Israel continues colonization and entrenching apartheid as a fait accompli” (line 233, pull-quote form; the sentence is Razek’s)

Evidence the work relies on

• UN Security Council Resolution 242 and Resolution 338, as the stated terms of reference and the only international-law references in the Oslo Accords, as Razek presents them (lines 147, 203, 217).
• The Oslo Accords themselves, as Razek presents them: the 1993 Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (Oslo I), the Israel-PLO letter of recognition, and the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement (Oslo II) (line 211).
• The 1967 Allon Plan and the 1978 Drobles Plan, as the foundations of the settlement enterprise and of Israel’s limited-autonomy vision, as Razek presents them (line 213); Rabin’s 1995 Knesset speech on the Oslo Accords (line 213).
• Khalil Tafakji’s book, as Razek recounts it, for the maps judgment given to Arafat and the negotiators in 1993 (lines 155, 235-237).
• Edward Said, writing in 1993, quoted on Oslo turning Arafat’s supporters into enforcers of Israeli security (line 223).
• Al Jazeera’s 2011 leak of over 1,600 secret negotiation documents from 1999-2010, and a leaking negotiator’s recollection quoted by Razek (line 239).
• Rashid Khalidi’s latest book, as Razek summarizes it, for the century-long pattern of western support since the Balfour Declaration (line 247); Nabil Fahmy’s 2019 recollection, including his quotation of Dennis Ross (line 247).
• Figures Razek gives: $10billioninwithheldUSloanguaranteesin1991(line209);approximately$3.8 billion per year in current US funding (line 249); 44 US Security Council vetoes of resolutions condemning illegal Israeli actions from 1972 to December 2019 (line 283); over 1,600 leaked documents (line 239).

Analysis

• Method: a structural critique of a negotiating framework, not a negotiation history. Razek tests the MEPP against liberal negotiation theory’s own requirements — mutual terms of reference and good faith, balance and a timeline, an honest broker and accountability — and argues it fails each by design, then explains its persistence through three Israeli strategies and closes with recommendations addressed to the international community.
• Perspective: Palestinian decolonial; the brief’s terms (“colonized Palestine”, “settler-colonial enterprise”, “Apartheid Wall”) are its own and are kept as printed. The PA and the PLO’s Oslo turn are criticized from within that frame, not defended.
• Limits, on the brief’s own evidence: its historical claims rest on the documents and recollections it cites above, most presented in summary rather than quoted at length; the underlying Tafakji book, Khalidi book, Fahmy recollection and leaked papers are not themselves ingested, so their wording beyond the quotations given here cannot be checked from this source. The $3.8 billion and 44-veto figures are given without a source named in the text. The brief is an argument addressed to policy, dated October 2021, and its “recent” and “latest” references (Gantz, the May 2021 Gaza assault, the Unity Intifada) are as of that date.

People, organizations, places and events

Inès Abdel Razek, Khalil Tafakji, Yitzhak Rabin, Yasir Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Dennis Ross, George Bush, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Ehud Barak, Abba Eban, Palestinian Authority, Palestine Liberation Organization, Al-Shabaka, International Criminal Court, Madrid Conference, Oslo Accords, First Intifada, Unity Intifada, Camp David Summit, 2000, Balfour Declaration, Allon Plan, Drobles Plan, Peace to Prosperity, Fourth Geneva Convention

Concepts

Middle East Peace Process, Liberal negotiation theory, Fait accompli, Qualitative military edge, Two-state solution, Settler Colonialism, Apartheid, Normalization, Self-determination, Antisemitism

How it relates to other sources

• With Perceptions of Palestine: Christison’s account of Madrid is of a conference whose mere convening altered the US frame; Razek’s, thirty years on, is of a process conceived at Madrid whose framework ensured no Palestinian state ever existed as an option. Razek’s correction (lines 305-307) — the PLO was barred, closely aligned Palestinian representatives attended — is consistent with Christison’s account of a Palestinian delegation.
• With Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope: Falk likewise argues resuming direct negotiations under the Oslo framework has repeatedly demonstrated futility and that the framework slants heavily to Israel; Razek gives that argument its negotiation-theory form (no mutual terms, no timeline, BATNA) and its prescription in PLO revival and Oslo renunciation rather than a legitimacy struggle.
• With Palestine: A Socialist Introduction: its Chapter 5 likewise presents Oslo as a US-designed settlement that turned the Palestinian leadership into a subcontractor and contained no independent arbitration; Razek’s PA counterinsurgency claim and no-honest-broker claim are the same structure in brief form.
• With Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: published the same year, it likewise records the PA, Hamas and the international community still committed to a two-state basis Razek argues never existed as an Israeli basis at all.
• With Challenging Anti-Boycott Legislation in the US and Liberal Zionism: A Pillar of Israel’s Settler Colonial Project: later Al-Shabaka briefs in the same Politics/Civil Society series; Kenney-Shawa’s bullying/accountability material and Ayyash’s rejection of liberal “partner in peace” framings extend arguments Razek makes here about delegitimization campaigns and lip-service to the two-state solution.

Open questions

• The text copy displays Oct 31, 2021 (lines 135, 325) while the original HTML’s structured data gives datePublished as 2021-10-30T17:15:15+00:00. Both are recorded; the displayed date is used for filing.
• Whether Benny Gantz’s “no one is going anywhere” declaration (line 263) was made in the form and on the occasion Razek summarizes cannot be checked from this source; no date or outlet is given in the text.
• The negotiators who “recounted in 2001” that there was never an Israeli offer at Camp David (line 273) are not named in the text.
• The US university pressured to remove a graduate student who criticized Israel (line 281) is not named in the text.
• Khalidi’s “latest book” (line 247) is not titled in the text.

Coverage

lines 1-480 of 480, read in full.