Today the Palestinian mission in the UK circulated a document which demonstrates the futility of talking to Israel from a position of weakness. It is a testimony to Israeli bad faith and United States deception.

As the introduction to the document says,

Twenty years have passed since the celebrated Arafat-Rabin handshake on the White House lawn. Twenty years have passed since the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority. Twenty years have passed since the formal start of the peace process.

This year marks 20 years of shattered hopes and unfulfilled obligations, of promises betrayed and an illegal colonization process that not only continues to intensify, but has inched us ever closer towards permanently ending any hope for a peacefully negotiated two-state solution.

On 13 September 1993 the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements between Israel and the PLO (“Oslo I”) was signed. However, Israeli bulldozers kept bulldozing, and with every illegally placed stone, the hope for peace faded.

Since 1993, Israeli settlers have tripled in number, their settlements choking and separating East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank and fragmenting the West Bank itself into loosely connected cantons.

This document below, in the words of the Palestinian mission, “spells out how the Oslo process metamorphosed into a process of colonization, taking us ever further from a just and lasting solution to this conflict”.

Oslo Process at 20