On Sep­tem­ber 13, 1993, on the White House lawn, Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chair­man Yass­er Arafat shook hands after sign­ing the peace agree­ment known as the Oslo Accords. It was sup­posed to have led to a per­ma­nent peace. (In)sights is a his­tor­i­cal record of the Oslo Accords, illus­trat­ed with per­son­al stories. 

Although the book was writ­ten months before Hamas’s Octo­ber 7, 2023 attack on Israel, the coau­thors address the ten­u­ous­ness of the peace­mak­ing process. In the book’s final sec­tion, ​“The Path For­ward,” they acknowl­edge that peace may not be attain­able in the near future. Nev­er­the­less, they believe the day will come. They have writ­ten this book look­ing toward that time, to offer politi­cians and nego­tia­tors guid­ance on how best to design that future polit­i­cal process. They are opti­mistic, set­ting out the rea­sons why con­di­tions for peace nego­ti­a­tions are bet­ter than they were in the 1990s. Yet they cau­tion, ​“Where­as there is a lot that we can learn from his­to­ry, out­comes can­not be predicted.”

Their decades of involve­ment in the thir­ty-year peace process, which have includ­ed both progress and set­backs fre­quent­ly halt­ed by vio­lence, have shown them that the way for­ward is to cre­ate ​“a two-state real­i­ty,” with the par­ties grad­u­al­ly shap­ing their ​“Per­ma­nent Status.” 

At the same time, they sug­gest, Israel should treat Gaza, ruled by Hamas since 2007, and the West Bank, run by the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty, as two sep­a­rate enti­ties. They note that (at the time of their book’s pub­li­ca­tion) this was already the real­i­ty, with Israel work­ing indi­vid­u­al­ly with each par­ty. For exam­ple, ​“thou­sands of Gazans were enter­ing Israel each week for work, busi­ness, and med­ical treat­ment. In 2009, who would have believed that such a real­i­ty could emerge?”