Israeli perceptions and the Oslo process

t the time of its signing, in the summer of 1993, the Oslo Declaration of Principles (DOP) seemed to mark a strategic turning point regarding the Middle East conflict and prospects for resolving it. But today, five years down the road, this seems to have been much too optimistic. The Oslo process has been at a standstill for almost two years now, with no essential breakthrough expected in the foreseeable future. Even more discouraging, as Meron Benvenisti—a prominent Israeli political analyst—has recently put it, “the Palestinians lost hope while Israelis lost interest [in the process].”

Why and how was this unprecedented opportunity to resolve the conflict missed? Apparently, it resulted from a myriad of internal and external factors on both the Israeli and Arab sides. We will focus here on one of those factors—a negative one: the difficulty among much of the Israeli public to transform their perception of the state into one less characterized by conflict. This includes, for example, the legitimization Israelis continue to give to the use of force, invariably presumed to be defensive, from actual military operations to ongoing occupations of security zones.