New podcast: Israel, Palestine, and the Oslo Accords
Graffiti on part of the barrier between Israel and the West Bank, June 2014. Photo © James Rodgers
This week, my City, University of London colleague Professor Amnon Aran and I have released the first episode of our three part podcast series, Inside the Oslo Accords. We are making the series with The Conversation.
For me, the series has been a chance to think again, with the benefit of historical distance, of issues I reported on as the BBC’s correspondent in Gaza from 2002 to 2004, and then wrote about in my books No Road Home (2013) and Headlines from the Holy Land (2015).
We wrote an article to explain why we wanted to make the series, in which we interview people involved in the secret negotiations process, and leading Israeli and Palestinian politicians.
THE PHOTO MARKING THE MOMENT is so enduring because it once seemed so unlikely. President Bill Clinton towered over two other men as he encouraged them to shake hands. Yitzhak Rabin, then Israeli prime minister, and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), were smaller in stature than Clinton. To their separate and warring peoples, though, they were giants who seemed then to be on the verge of creating an historic agreement.
That was September 13, 1993. That picture, taken on the White House lawn after secret negotiations in Oslo, is remembered now perhaps as a time of great hope, but also as the start of a process that ultimately did not succeed.
Today, there is no lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians, there is no Palestinian state, and the Israeli occupation has expanded and deepened. Yet there is much to understand, to discuss and to learn from this moment in history.
Three decades later, we have made a three-part podcast series for The Conversation Weekly podcast to revisit what became known as the Oslo process.
You can read the rest of the article here, and the first episode is below. The second episode will be released in the week beginning September 18th.
Near the Damascus Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem, January 2014. Photo © James Rodgers.