Cold War End, the Gulf War and Oslo, 1989–95

The End of the Cold War

Between November 1989 and December 1991 the geopolitical map of the Middle East was rewritten by events thousands of miles away. The Berlin Wall came down; the Warsaw Pact dissolved; the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist on 26 December 1991. Arab states that had relied on Soviet weapons, advisers and political cover — Syria most of all, but also Iraq, Egypt before 1972 and South Yemen — lost their patron. The United States entered what one of its strategists called the unipolar moment. For the first time since 1945 there was no second great power to fund Arab rejectionism. Cold War alignments that had blocked every previous peace effort lost their force.

Iraq, Kuwait and the PLO’s Mistake

On 2 August 1990 Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait. President George H. W. Bush built a thirty-five-state coalition under UN Security Council Resolution 678 that included not only the NATO allies but Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Morocco — an Arab-state line-up that would have been impossible during the Cold War. Yasser Arafat, gambling on his domestic Palestinian audience, publicly supported Saddam Hussein. The Gulf states retaliated by expelling around 350,000 Palestinian guest workers from Kuwait alone after liberation; Saudi, Kuwaiti and Gulf Cooperation Council aid to the PLO was cut, leaving the organisation roughly $300 million a year poorer. Arafat’s 1990 alignment cost the PLO the Arab funding it had relied on since the late 1960s — a financial squeeze that pushed it towards negotiation by 1992.

The Gulf War, January–February 1991

The air campaign of the Gulf War began on 17 January 1991. Saddam attempted to break the Arab portion of the coalition by firing thirty-nine Scud missiles at Israeli cities — if Israel retaliated, Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia could not stand alongside the Israelis. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, after intense US pressure and the deployment of US Patriot missiles in Tel Aviv, held back. The ground war began on 24 February and ended in a ceasefire one hundred hours later. The coalition held; the United States emerged as the only conceivable broker of any future Middle East settlement; and Israeli restraint had been visibly worth something to the United States, providing a debt the next administration could collect.

Madrid, October 1991

From 30 October to 1 November 1991 the United States and the dying Soviet Union co-hosted the Madrid Conference. For the first time Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and a Palestinian delegation (formally part of the Jordanian delegation, with PLO members vetted by Israel) sat at the same negotiating table. Madrid produced no breakthrough but it set up bilateral tracks — Israeli-Syrian, Israeli-Lebanese, Israeli-Jordanian, Israeli-Palestinian — that ran in parallel for the next few years. The Madrid track was visible, multilateral, and slow; the deal that broke through came from a track no one in Madrid was watching.

The Norwegian Channel, 1992–93

In June 1992 Yitzhak Rabin’s Labour party won the Israeli election, narrowly displacing Shamir’s Likud. From January 1993 the Norwegian government hosted secret meetings outside Oslo between Israeli academics (later Israeli government negotiators) and PLO representatives. The two sides reached a draft Declaration of Principles in August 1993. On 9 September Arafat wrote to Rabin recognising Israel’s right to exist; Rabin replied recognising the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. On 13 September 1993, on the South Lawn of the White House, Rabin and Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles in front of US President Bill Clinton, who hosted but did not negotiate. The reluctant handshake between Rabin and Arafat became the defining image of post-Cold War Middle East diplomacy.

From Declaration to Authority

Implementation followed quickly. In May 1994 the Cairo Agreement transferred Gaza and Jericho to Palestinian self-government. The Palestinian National Authority took over civil administration; Arafat returned to Gaza on 1 July 1994 after twenty-seven years in exile. On 26 October 1994 Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Abdelsalam al-Majali signed the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, the second Arab-Israeli treaty after the 1979 Treaty of Washington. On 28 September 1995 Rabin and Arafat signed the Interim Agreement, known as Oslo II, in Washington. The agreement divided the West Bank into Areas A, B and C: A under full PA control, B under PA civil control and Israeli security, C under full Israeli control.

Rabin’s Assassination

Oslo had powerful Israeli opponents. Settler movements and right-wing rallies in 1994–95 portrayed Rabin as a traitor; some demonstrators waved posters of him in Nazi uniform. On 4 November 1995, after speaking at a peace rally in Tel Aviv’s Kings of Israel Square, Rabin was shot twice by Yigal Amir, a 25-year-old Jewish religious nationalist. He died on the operating table. Hamas, which had rejected the Oslo Accords from the start, escalated suicide bombings of Israeli buses and cafes in 1995–96. Shimon Peres lost the 1996 election by a fraction of a percent to Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who had campaigned against the Accords. The Oslo process did not formally end in 1995; the political momentum behind it largely did.