Middle East Peace through Partition

Just last summer, the seven-year-old Israeli-Palestinian peace process seemed on the verge of success. Palestinian Authority (pa) Chairman Yasir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak met with President Bill Clinton at Camp David and came close to agreement. But Arafat walked away from a deal at the last moment, and less than three months later the Occupied Territories erupted in violence. Now, after months of bloodshed and with the death toll approaching 400, it has become fashionable to say that the Oslo process (so called for the city where talks first began) is dead. Rumors of its demise, however, have been exaggerated. Its central objective? transforming the existential Israeli-Palestinian conflict by ending Israel's mutually harmful control over three million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza?remains as crucial today as it was seven years ago. It was in Oslo in 1993 that the Israeli government, under then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, first agreed to withdraw from parts of the West Bank and Gaza and opted definitively for territorial partition. With this shift in Israeli policy, Rabin crushed the Israeli right's dream of a Greater Israel. And he signaled his support for a