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The Arab Israeli Conflict Essay

Decent Essays

According to an apocryphal story, Pope John Paul once said that he believes there are two possible solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the realistic and the miraculous. The realistic being divine intervention, and the miraculous being a voluntary agreement by both parties. On September 13th, 1993, it looked like the miraculous had happened when the Oslo Accords were signed by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House South Lawn. However, the objectives of the historic accords were never fully implemented and the Palestinians remain a stateless nation. Further steps toward Israeli-Arab peace, including the Cairo Agreement, Oslo II and the Camp David Summit, have fallen short of the goals of both parties.
When he became president in 1993, Bill Clinton and his advisors did not initially make Israeli-Palestinian peace a priority. The administration looked first to other Middle Eastern affairs, believing that an Israeli-Syrian agreement was more likely, and that the policy of “dual containment” in Iran and Iraq was more pressing. They thought that once they made a breakthrough between Israel and Syria the Lebanese would be close behind, and that this would put pressure on the Iran and Iraq, the biggest opponents of any sort of Israeli-Arab peace deal (US Office of the Historian). The Americans were made aware of the secret negotiations that had begun in Oslo in December 1992 between the

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