Oslo on My Mind

As happens every year at this time, I can’t help dwelling on the events of the day, twenty-two years ago, when the Oslo Accords were signed by Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of the state of Israel, and the PLO chieftain Yasir Arafat, thereafter to be known as president of the new Palestinian Authority. This year, my memories of September 13, 1993 have been triggered by a passage in Ally, Michael Oren’s recently published account of his term as Israel’s ambassador to the United States between 2009 and 2013.

The most important parts of Oren’s book recount his dealings—fraught, frequently contentious, even abusive—with the Obama administration and the American president. That Oren is a professional historian and trustworthy witness only underlines the significance of what he reveals about this agonizing period in America-Israel relations. But along the way he also tells his own personal story: the story of how an American Jewish boy fulfilled his adolescent dream of moving to Israel and entering a life of service to his people.

It is within the context of that personal story that, early in the book, Oren recalls and reflects upon the meaning of September 13, 1993. Having moved to Israel in the mid-1980s, he was then raising his family in Jerusalem. That night (which was still afternoon in the U.S.), he stood on the roof of a downtown office building and observed the stark contrast between the festive lights blazing in the city’s Arab areas and the darkness of its Jewish neighborhoods. Like his cautious fellow Israelis, he says, he doubted that peace was actually in reach. Yet, for reasons both moral and political, he supported the peace process itself, and endorsed Rabin’s decision to enter into the agreement: