The proposal to create a transitional regime of autonomy for the Arab population of the West Bank was initiated by Israel Prime Minister Begin. Through US mediation, the idea of autonomy was adopted by Egypt and Israel at Camp David as a program of full autonomy to the Arab inhabitants. The Camp David Accords proposed withdrawing the Israel military administration from the West Bank and Gaza and replacing it, for a transitional period of five years, with an elected council. The issue of the final status, after the termination of the five-year period, was left open to negotiation. The Accords referred to “the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and their just requirements.” This phrase could be understood as referring to a right of self-determination but it was not stated explicitly. Egypt and Israel failed to agree on the implementation of the autonomy plan. The issues that prevented agreement were participation of East Jerusalem Arabs in the elections for the Council and the powers and responsibilities that were to be transferred to the elected council. The main elements of the Camp David Accords were, later, adopted by the Israel-PLO “Oslo” agreements.

Throughout the mid-1980s, the Soviet-American rivalry in the Muslim world had remained a “zero-sum game.” Even after Mikhail Gorbachev embraced perestroika and Ronald Reagan toned down his Cold War rhetoric, the two superpowers continued to butt heads. Then between 1988 and 1991, the “end of history” seemed to arrive and George H. W. Bush trumpeted the emergence of a new world order based on cooperation, not confrontation, between capitalist America and communist Russia, even in volatile places like the Persian Gulf. By the early 1990s, however, American and Russian policymakers recognized that the Cold War was more likely to be followed by ethnic and religious conflict than by global peace and prosperity. In late 1991, Gorbachev lost his battle to reform the Soviet Union. Muslims in Chechnya and other non-Russian minorities sought independence. Elsewhere, the multiethnic regime in Yugoslavia disintegrated, with Christian Serbs slaughtering Bosnian Muslims; Islamists won elections in Algeria' and Islamic radicals toppled the pro-Soviet junta in Afghanistan. By January 1993, both Bush and Gorbachev were gone and all the hope for a new world order had been replaced by the fear that the post-Cold War Muslim world was becoming the epicenter of a “clash of civilizations.”

Through an analysis of the mnemonic activities of three leading civil society organizations – Baladna, ADRID, and Badil – Chapter 4 examines two collective mnemonic Nakba practices established in the wake of the Oslo Accords inside Israel and the West Bank: annual Nakba Day commemoration and collective returns to former Palestinian villages. By detailing the mnemonic symbolism and political goals of these commemorative activities, this chapter illustrates that the established forms of Nakba commemoration in the post-Oslo period articulate the urgent desire to further awareness of the Nakba among younger generations with the specific aim of encouraging the continuing struggle for the right of return (Arabic: haq al-ʻawdah). With reference to the organizations’ varying social and geographical focuses, this chapter also attests to the fact that Nakba mnemonics seek to resist ongoing marginalization while reflecting Palestinian communities’ contemporary political, economic, and cultural grievances and diverging historical mnemonic traditions. The theoretical focus on the confrontational and defensive nature of Nakba mnemonic practices does not denote that the exclusionary narrative unfolds overtly. The analyzed commemorative acts are not “sites” of a narrative collision. Nevertheless, the societal invocation of the Nakba as a “present continuous” – or an “ongoing Nakba” – does shed light on existing trends of marginalization discussed throughout the work, which hinge on a retaliatory screening out of any past suffering of the out-group.

The post-Oslo period in which this study is situated refers both to the buoyancy of a potential reconciliation in the immediate wake of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords and the subsequent demise of a viable two-state solution. As evidenced in this chapter, perceptions of the formulation of the Oslo Accords and the reasons for the agreement’s key successes and failures remain a subject of narrative dissent. Rather than provide the reconciliatory framework and confidence-building measures to address past grievances, as was intended through the interim nature of the 1993 agreement, the post-Oslo period therefore witnessed an ongoing irreconcilability of key narratives. This chapter offers both a holistic understanding of the political and societal impact of these historic accords and an overview of the key events that were influenced by – and affected – subsequent implementation and interpretations of the Oslo peace agreements. The events and societal trends highlighted in this chapter do not provide an exhaustive analysis of Israeli-Jewish or Palestinian politics in the post-Oslo era; however, they do seek to render formative insights into the societal underpinnings that explain the rise and persistence of exclusionary identity politics that form the main interest of this work.

Chapter 2 examines Israel’s foreign policy amid the rise to power, in 1992, of the Labour party under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabin. It explains how Israel redirected its foreign policy from entrenchment to engagement, which rested on three pillars: scaling down the Israeli occupation, relinquishing territory in exchange for peace agreements with the Arab states, and putting a premium on diplomacy in Israel’s Middle Eastern foreign policy while keeping military force as a viable foreign policy tool. The chapter accounts for the decision-making process during key events such as the deportation of 415 Hamas members, Rabin’s failed peace proposal to Syria, via the ‘deposit’, and the decision to launch the Oslo peace process with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The chapter adds to the literature in two ways. First, by providing new information on Israeli foreign policy decision-making towards the peace processes with Syria and the PLO. Second, by tracing how and why Prime Minister Rabin and Foreign Minister Peres imposed engagement, as Israel’s preferred post-Cold War foreign policy stance, on the government and the security network.

Mobilized by radical networks of solidarity, stretching from Cuba, through Algeria and all the way to Vietnam and China, an anti-imperialist revolutionary subjectivity was constituted through a global flow of discourses and associated visuality. In this globally expansive revolutionary geography, Beirut — dubbed the 'Arab Hanoi' — acted as a nodal site in and through which an aesthetic of solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement converged and circulated along transnational circuits. Chapter 6 focuses on the publications of Dar al-Fata al-Arabi, a vanguard pan-Arab children’s publishing house linked to the PLO, which launched from Beirut in 1974. It examines how it came to represent a radical node of transnational solidarity among Arab artists, intellectuals and writers committed to the Palestinian cause and to revolutionary change in the Arab world. In tracing the social life of a particular publication, entitled The Home, from production in Beirut to international itinerary accompanying Yasser Arafat’s landmark speech at the UN in 1974, the chapter reflects on the historical junctures and disjuncture of the Palestinian struggle with global politics of decolonization; the aesthetics of revolutionary armed struggle and the translocal figure of the freedom fighter; tensions between radical art and diplomacy; and last but not least, the utopias and disenchantment of a generation of politically committed Arab artists and intellectuals.