Ideas - Lessons from last century’s failed Mideast peace deal

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat met in Washington to sign the first Oslo Accords in 1993, it was supposed to usher in a new era of peace and lay the groundwork for a more stable Middle East. Three decades later, the Accords are primarily remembered as a failure. Nahlah Ayed and guests discuss what went wrong, and what lessons the Oslo Accords hold for the future. 

This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. And welcome to the second in our five-part series, Inventing Peace. It's a series of panels recorded at the Stratford Festival in summer 2025. Each explores a 20th century peace agreement. We discuss the history behind them, their legacy for the nations involved, and the lessons that we can take for our own time. One question that always emerges is whether simply halting violence,

what's called negative peace, can ever be enough. In this episode, we look at the Oslo Accord. That the security of the Israeli people will be reconciled with the hopes of the Palestinian people. This brave gamble that the future can be better than the past must endure. September 1993, in a moment seen around the world, American President Bill Clinton brings Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin together with Yasser Arafat,

chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to shake hands. The first Oslo Accord is signed in Washington. It was an interim declaration of principles. Israel accepted the PLO as representing Palestinians and the PLO recognized Israel's right to exist in peace. It led to the formation of a governing Palestinian authority, for the West Bank and Gaza, and it was intended to ultimately pave the way to a two-state

solution. The accord had vocal critics on both sides. Here's where I'll note something that applies to this entire series. Our goal is to learn something about what it takes to invent peace. It's not our intention to litigate or debate these conflicts exhaustively. And with an example like the Oslo Accord, the conflict is still very much. much alive and deeply felt by many people today, as you'll hear shortly in this episode. Four guests join me to explore the first Oslo Accord, and I began by asking each to recall a moment that informed how they think about peace. Starting with Renee Warringer, she is a professor of Islamic, Ottoman and Middle East history at the University of Guelph. She is author of several

books, including a short history of the Ottoman Empire. I had been to Israel and Palestine in 1985 as an undergraduate, and so I had been interested in this issue and learned about it. I was back there in 1990, in the summer of 1990, to study Arabic when Saddam Hussein and Iraq invaded Kuwait. And it was a very trying time. I found myself thinking I'm in a place where I see an occupation that has gone on for a couple of decades now. and nothing has changed here. And at the same time, I'm seeing an invasion that the United States decided had to be dealt with immediately in order to get Iraq out of Kuwait.

And it made me wonder how to make decisions about stopping an occupation or trying to find a just way to resolve a conflict and where the United States fits in that. It was a very formative moment for me questioning these things. Writer and academic Renee Warringer. Jeffrey Wilkinson holds a doctorate in education from the University of Toronto. He is an author and works actively in the Jewish community and beyond on issues relating to trauma and the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Well, I'm thinking about the concept you started with about negative peace. And I certainly, I think we spend a lot of our time sort of mess. with the concept of peace, thinking of it, you know, often in ways that aren't often talked

about. But just for a moment, I'm going to value negative peace. My mother is a German Jew and her grandparents were able, her parents, my grandparents, were able to go to Holland just before the war. They lived a fine life there until the Nazi invasion in 1940. And in 1942, they were arrested, and almost all of the Jews that were arrested with them were sent to Auschwitz and other camps, and they, on a clerical era, escaped and went into underground hiding. So I was imagining what that moment was in May of 1945 when their hosts, who hid them deeply underground in a barn, you know, came to them and said, you don't have to hide anymore. And I thought, at that moment, negative peace was a pretty cool thing.

And then I thought that the lessons of the Shoah have not been learned. That the lessons of seeing one as human, as are purported other as part of us, that we, me as a Jew, me as our community, me as a citizen, have failed, that moment of opportunity to change the course of history. Educator and author Jeffrey Wilkinson. Michael Malloy is an adjunct researcher at Carleton University. He spent 30 years as a Foreign Service Officer, including a mission in Jordan as ambassador.

He worked on the Palestinian refugee issue and on the future of Jerusalem. At the final days of my term in Jordan, I was told I was coming back to Canada to take over the coordination of our peace process efforts was focused on Palestinian refugees. And I was instructed to go over to Israel and the Palestinian territories and talk to people, introduce myself and see what I could learn about what the challenge. head was. And I actually met Arafat after he'd just returned from the failure of Camp David, where he traveled around the world explaining to third world leaders how he'd escaped

being trapped into a bad peace agreement by Clinton and Barack. And the meeting took place as typical with Arafat, two o'clock in the morning. And the only thing he said of any use to me was you should meet with so-and-so, who was essentially a minister in the Palestinian Authority responsible for foreign affairs. So the next day I went and introduced myself and we had a nice chat. And on the way out to the car, he stopped and he said, have you any idea how to solve the refugee problem? And I thought to myself, here is a senior Palestinian official and he hasn't thought beyond this notion that we have a right to return. And I wasn't sure whether that was going to be an asset or to me.

or not. And then the following day, our ambassador in Tel Aviv took me to meet a very distinguished Israeli professor. Explain my task was. And this gentleman said to me, well, the first thing you have to understand, and we didn't collide on this, the first thing you need to understand is that Palestinians aren't human. And I thought, How the hell can anyone think and say like that, given this notion of sub-humans and where it came from and how it affected the Jews? And I realized at that stage, that what I was taking on was not going to be easy.

Ambassador Michael Malloy, Rajah G. Houdi is CEO of Houdi Conversations, the founding president of the Canadian Arab Institute, and a former commissioner with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Along with Jeffrey Wilkinson, who you heard earlier, he authored the wall between what Jews and Palestinians don't want to know about each other. That book was released on October 3, 2023, just a few days before the attacks by Hamas. I was born in Lebanon to Palestinian parents who fled the Nakhpah, the catastrophe. of 1948, and we're not allowed to go back to their homes when the war ended.

In the Middle East, you get acquainted with the phrase peace in the Middle East as a toddler. You know, here in Canada, we inhale hockey at that stage. But in the Middle East, you know, the idea of peace, of moving on from a state of being unsafe, finding justice is something that is we breathe every day and you learn to wait for it. You wait for the next Middle East peace envoy, Dennis Ross, George Mitchell, Martin Indic,

like you wait for Santa Claus, like you wait for Godot. And you wonder about God, does she exist? And then, you know, some of us migrate, like I did. Escaping war, escaping violence and conflict. and you come to a place like Canada and you realize that you've left the war behind

but you're not in peace because the injustice continues. I don't know if peace is the absence of injustice. Maybe that's part of it. But I can tell you what it isn't. It is in Gaza. the inhumanity that we have arrived at

and as the good ambassador mentioned a certain group of people not being human this is the complete absence of peace thank you Rajah that's a great beginning but Jeffrey I want to come back to you to kind of launch the conversation all conflicts of course

are by nature hard to resolve. But we do tend to think of this particular conflict as being one of the most intractable. You can disagree with that if you like. But my question is, what underlies this conflict, this particular conflict, that makes it so difficult to find a way to stop the bloodshed? Well, let me deal with the words intractable in conflict for a moment, and then we'll get into the depth of it. The word intractable assumes that there is an issue that is unsolved. The Israel-Palestine struggle is an issue of land and narrative, which is entirely solvable. How to get to that requires the understanding that all people deserve the same rights and the same dignity. And that so far has evaded us.

But the actual struggle that's often labeled as a conflict as this sort of idea that it's so embedded that these people will never get along really is a fallacy. It is a struggle like all struggles over land, over resources. Two national projects landed in relatively the same space in about the same time. And they have yet to figure out a way to share it. And it is entirely doable.

That's really important to understand. Why is it so difficult? The core reason I believe we believe is the traumatic histories of the two people, which can, I want to be really clear, can be the key access to the solution because we share grief, we share loneliness, suffering, decades of isolation, fear, being othered, being alone, being separate. This is the story of both the Jewish and the Palestinian people. And that can be the vehicle towards each other.

That is our mission, our path to use shared grief and pain as a vehicle towards each other. But so far, it has primarily been a deep separating factor that I'll be very honest with you is manipulated, exacerbated, deeply embedded by groups that do not want us to know each other. that use trauma to ensure their own political survival. Roger, can you pick up from that and just complete the thought of how it is, just briefly, that you to use this shared, or this, for lack of a description, competing traumas to actually find common purpose, a common ground? Yeah, we make a clear distinction between the trauma over there and the trauma over here.

over there there are folks that are shooting at each other over here we have communities that are living next to each other yet at very clear odds and polarization you know from each other now the you know the intractable you know conflict as as Jeff said you know when something is intractable that means there there are people with in maintaining the status quo. And you have to look at who owns the cards?

Who owns the cards? The Palestinians only own one card, and that is resistance. Whether it's armed resistance or peaceful resistance or through boycotts or through rallies or through poetry or theater, it's cookbooks. Palestinian cookbooks. But that's all they got. And then, you know, and... We're talking about the Azzla and course

and we're talking about anti-semitism. Sorry. Thank you. Once again, we're... We're talking about Azzler. Yes, we are. We're just setting the stage, sir. Please, no, no, we're not done

the conversation, sir. Thank you for your opinion. Thank you very much. This is a conversation that is just starting, and I hope you will stay in and listen. Thank you, sir. Unfortunately. Just the end of that thought, and we can move on to the next part,

which is the history of the Oslo Agreement. So, yeah, we can move on. You know, we talk about trauma. We talk about how the two communities, it's how I got into the dialogue business and into understanding, you know, Zionism and how Canadians, Jews feel and think and react. And that was the kind of understanding that was,

needed. Okay. So Renee, we're going to come to you now and talk about that period prior to Oslo. If you could set the political stage for us in the 1980s, we're not going to go all the way back. But just this whole decade before Oslo, what you see is the key international political factors shaping this conflict as it existed back then. Yes. When we talk about the global context of what's happening in the 80s leading up to this Oslo agreement, we have to think about the Cold War. You know, the polarization of the world and the polarization of the Middle East, in fact. You know, Israel was considered a Cold War ally of the United States against the Arab states in the region, many of whom were supported by the Soviet Union, which was weakening

in the late 80s. Regionally, we have to think about what's happening after the start of the war, the Civil War in Lebanon, and the PLO is up there. in 1982, the PLO is evacuated from Lebanon, and they end up in Tunisia. So Arafat and the PLO are now outside of the region of Israel and Palestine, and desperately wanting to be back in, but they are disconnected from what is actually being experienced on the ground from the occupation as Palestinians. So Arafat is out of touch with what's happening in some way. When we talk about the localized situation, the first Intifada starts in 1987 as a Palestinian rebellion against the Israeli occupation. And it actually forced Israel to have to go to the table.

So this is the prelude to what's going to come about, which is the Madrid conference in 1991. But in the midst of all of this, you have Iraq invading Kuwait and the first Gulf War in 1991. and what happens here as the Soviet Union is collapsing, the United States is left as this sole superpower and is in a position that it feels it can compel sides together to make some kind of an agreement between Palestinians and Israelis. This is what we were at with the Madrid conference in 91. Thank you, Renee.

And Michael, you were witnessed to all of this. You were a participant. You were in the region at the time. Could you pick up from there and talk about 1991 and just what, as Renee mentioned, the Gulf War had broken out in the region, how that helped set the stage for a change of approach on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? What help was the fact that the Soviet Union was disappearing and the Americans having led a coalition that included many Arab armies to eject Iraq from Kuwait was at the high point of its power as far as I can see. The story that we had was that the Americans then went to the Saudis and say, now we can either use our power to democratize the Middle East

or we can use it to try and make peace between the Arabs and the Israelis. And oddly enough, the Saudis said, well, let's make peace and then we'll democratize after that. And the... So the Americans literally frog marched. both sides to a conference in Madrid, where they launched what was called the bilateral process, where the Israelis would meet in Washington simultaneously with Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Syrians, and Lebanese,

and that got going. Didn't go very far, but it got going. And subsequently, a couple of months later, they called everyone to Moscow, because the Canadian is included, and said there are going to be four working groups to deal with cross-border issues. So that includes water, environment, trade, and security. Barbara McDougal led the Canadian delegation,

and she went there with strict orders to grab the water working group because that seemed to be the safest. She was the Canadian foreign minister at the time. And she got there, and the American foreign minister, Baker, took her aside and said, look, the Palestinians won't play on any of the the working groups unless there is a fifth group on refugees. And the Israelis will not agree to a refugee working group unless it's in safe hands and they consider Canada to be safe hands. But Dougal had to phone the Prime Minister, Mulroney, and get him up in the middle

night. And he was horrified at the thought that Canada would have to deal with such a complicated issue. But in any event, he agreed to let it go ahead. And that was at the point, it's At that point, we took on the hardest of all the issues. And there's a long story that really hasn't been told about how successive Canadian diplomats, I was the third in the role, tried to come to terms against the background that shifted continually. There's a book in that, I think.

I think so. Somebody else is going to read it, though. What are you doing this week? Yes, exactly. You know, as we've heard earlier and we see every day, everyone kind of has a sense of what this conflict is about. But because you were there, Michael, and have seen the shifts in this conflict, can we do what you just did a minute ago listing, literally just a list? What are those difficult issues? So we know the refugee issue is a difficult issue, but just can you list two or three that were always the impediments to finding common ground between these two sides?

The internal issues include refugees and include the borders and territory and security. The external ones that we were involved in had to do with cross-border things like water is a big issue there, of course. So who controls what water and how does it get shared out was a big issue. There were all sorts of environmental difficulties because of the harshness of the climate there. And again, the Canadians had lots to say about that.

And the third one had to do with trade. And we played an enormous role in that, getting the first international conference where Israelis and Arabs came together to talk about how the economy would benefit if they were all trading with each other. And the final, of course, dealt with arms control. In that area, everybody's arm to the teeth, how do you get to a point where it's safer for everybody? And, of course, Jerusalem. Oh, yes.

The future of Jerusalem. Yes, I missed God. I missed Jerusalem. I only worked on it for eight years. There's the question of Jerusalem, Holy City to Three Religions. And Dennis Ross, who was one of the American leaders on the peace process, once said, you know, the reality, Jerusalem is not about sharing. It's about owning. And that's the way it is to this day. And so that's one of the things we worked on, having, you know, suffered enough for the refugees. And did write a book about it. Yeah, we did write a book about that.

That's out there. Jeffrey, you wanted to say something. I wanted to talk a little bit about, I mean, we've already seen, you know, that this is an emotional issue. So I want to talk about how, you know, as I sit here listening to a historian and a, excuse me, a diplomat about the details, about, you know, which I'm very interested in. I'm always asking, what's the impediment to learning and listening about the difficult issues? And at its core, it goes back to what we talked about,

beginning about trauma and particularly about victimhood. Being a victim is an event or being victimized are things that happen to you. Living in victim one is a social psychological profile that ensures that you believe ensures that what did happen is still happening and will always happen. And in our conversations of the discourse here in Canada and the U.S. about Israel Palestine, it always comes down to do you care enough to hear enough to hear what the others experience is. Do you hear how a Jew reacts to the word anti-Semitism completely differently than a Palestinian does?

How a Jew hears resistance in an entirely different way than a Palestinian does. And that these underlying current issues are the reason that we can't have the ending discussion, which is if we are all worth enough, and I don't get to win and you don't get to win. we get to win together that is what peace is to me

that Oslo sadly was not able to accomplish so let's stay with that idea and rewind to that year 1993 when after secret negotiations suddenly there is some kind of breakthrough and these two men are standing on the White House lawn and they're shaking hands

I just want to know the two men being Yasser Afat and Yitzhak Rabin the Israeli Prime Minister Yasser Afat the PLO chairman at the time. What was your, what did you imagine as the future for these two people when you saw that moment? That's a great question. I'm an optimistic person by nature.

I believed that it was going to be successful. I believed in the notion when I saw the handshake and the grabbing of the elbow that these men had a meeting of the soul, not just an intellectual meeting. and that that would translate into lasting peace. Thank you. And how important was it, Rajah, to you to see that moment? What did it mean to you at the time? It meant to me my father, my mother.

And, you know, how, you know, they might be able to have at least some access to the, you know, the towns and the homes that they were born in. I remember the Six-Day War in 1967, I was 80 years old, and it was called a six-day war because it ended in six days. And on day one, my father was talking about possibly going back home, going back to Palestine, that this is the war that will take us back to our Palestine, where we were born and raised. And then by day six, he was sobbing and crying, and he said, it's over. So when that handshake the place, to me, I thought, maybe there's some hope for him to get some satisfaction. Author and Dialogue Facilator, Rajahud.

You're listening to a public panel exploring the Oslo Accord. It was recorded in July at the 2025 Stratford Festival. It's the second discussion in our five-part series called Inventing Peace. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Each of the panelists at our Inventing Peace event brings a different connection to the table when it comes to the Oslo Accord. Renee Warringer writes and teaches Mideast history.

Jeffrey Wilkinson and Rajahuri are co-authors of The Wall Between What Jews and Palestinians Don't Want to Know About Each Other. And Michael Malloy was Canadian ambassador to Jordan in the 1990s. As we start the second half of the panel. I asked him about the relationship between the leaders representing the two sides, Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. I think it was absolutely critical. One of my conclusions, having looked at and watched this thing for so long,

is that you need a moment when there are two brave leaders to drag people. to the table. And we've had periods where they've been strong on one side and they've been strong and willing on the other side, but it's been a long time since we had the two sides where there were people actually willing to sit down and put aside the events of the day and the week and the last month and say, okay, how do we get this? I've always found it interesting that people who have led the Mossad, the Israeli security service, five or six of them have got together over the last couple of years and all come together and written reports that say, we missed the opportunity to make peace. There is no way out of this but peace. These were the people in charge of doing the repression, and they all come in their retirement to understand that there is no way forward but peace.

Do we know, do we have any of the three of you, any idea of how those two men were brought together? It was quite a secretive arrangement and it took many people by surprise that were participating in the Madrid conference. So I'm still not certain of the details of how they came together. I think it's important that the two instigators were ones not attached to the conflict. The people in Norway, I think that that is essential, that there was not the emotional, traumatic tension. An honest broker of sorts. Yeah, an honest broker, a naive broker in a sense. I mean, people who didn't believe in the obstacles that were in front of them.

But on that point, Michael, I'm curious if you could address the importance, not just to maybe in that moment, but later as time went on, the importance of the roles of diplomats from Canada and, of course, the United States, which kind of, you know, watched over the entire process. But how important was the role of Western countries in this process that Oslo unleashed? Well, I've always felt that the problem was that there could be no solution without the United States, but the United States alone could not bring about the solution. And you had to have the Europeans, you had to have Canada, you had to have the donor world, which includes Japan. You had to have them there providing political support and providing financial support, most importantly, when there was progress.

without that, you couldn't do it. And I remember talking to Dennis Ross at the end of his term when they had ignored the multilateral process and thought that it would just be possible for the United States to go alone. And, of course, it all fell apart. And he said to me, he said, you know, we used to sneer a little bit of the work that you and the Norwegians and other were doing, but we finally now realize too late

that yours was the main game. game, not the, and ours was, working with the leaders was peripheral because unless you bring the populations, given the depth of the trauma on both sides, unless you can convince those populations they come along, the leaders can sign whatever agreements they want. What is needed is a peace between the peoples. While that initial deal dealt with very specific issues that was meant to pave the way towards a two-state solution, it also left some really important issues out because they were so difficult and thorny. And you've mentioned some of them, Michael, you know, the refugee issue in Jerusalem and other things. Looking back now, I wonder if you

can, maybe most of you comment on this, what the effect of leaving those questions, those bigger questions unresolved in the initial courts. Obviously, it was meant to facilitate a signing of sorts, but what was the ultimate effect of leaving those issues out? The ultimate effect, effect was the process failed. If you're going to deal with it, you cannot deal, have peace if you don't deal with Jerusalem. You can't have peace if you don't deal with refugees. You can't have peace if you don't deal with borders and decide who's going to live where, what to do about the settlements and what land has to be traded. If you don't do, you can talk about all the peripheral things, but that leaves the bleeding ulcers untouched. And the, you

Terrible irony is that once the peace process started moving, having left those key issues addressed, the situation got worse rather than better. Before that process, Israeli families were going to Palestinian villages on the weekends for lunch. And Palestinians from the West Bank were shopping in department stores in Tel Aviv. There was a cold piece of sorts. but people were making it work and there were any number of Palestinians both from within Israel and outside

who had jobs, good jobs across the border and industry in Gaza that was feeding in to the Israeli economy and all that disappeared once a peace process got started so it says something about figuring out at the beginning what's the really important stuff and not punting it into the future because it is not going to get any easy. Of course, there was criticism on both sides of this issue of this, you know, these

absences of these really cavernous matters that needed to be looked at. But I'm curious just briefly, Raja and then Jeffrey, if you could talk about how those things left out were talked about in your communities. So Raja first. There were critics of the Oslo Agreement in the Palestinian community, including such notable figures as, you know, Edward Said. And when I heard him, I remember, you know, starting to have my own doubts as to whether this is going to work. So much was left till later depended on there being trust, and that trust eventually, you know, evaporated after the death of Rabin. We always, I think, feel in our talks this real need to sort of bring things to a conscious level that might be sort of in the periphery but not there, you know, deeply. for many of you, obviously this is, I would assume, not your sort of core issue or what you've

thought about a lot, is that for the vast majority of my community of Jews, the concept of Israel is not the way we might frame it as a democracy, as a country. It is an idea. It is a possibility of freedom and a parachute for what might, for a place we could. go if something happened. It is so deeply embedded that Israel and Jewish survival have become basically the same thing. So the issues like the two issues that I would say were the most stressful to Jews was the refugee issue in Jerusalem, because they both centered on, are we going to have a home that's going to be safe for us? And it's a demographic question. Always has been a demographic question, that a Jewish majority state has become the definition of what self-determination

is. I always want to offer the possibility that we as Jews have self-determination. Whether we have a state or not really depends on that state living up to its need and commitment to look after all of its people. I think we've lost that. Let's go to the moment in 1995 when Rabin and Arafat sort of signed a second set of Oslo Accords. It set a deadline for a permanent solution. It was supposed to be 1999, which gives you a sense of how this has gone. And the whole process was supposed to lead to the formation of a Palestinian state and all of that. But in November in 1995, Rabin was assassinated at a peace rally in Tel Aviv by an Israeli Jewish extremist

who was opposed to the Oslo Accords. Michael, again, you were a witness to all this history. You weren't there, of course, but you were living the consequences of all this. What did that do to the peace process? Really, I think that's where it died. I mean, remember Rabin was the guy who, during the first Intifada, told his soldiers to break the bones of the protesters, and yet he had come to this realization

that we can't go on like this. And oddly enough at that stage, he did have a partner on the other side. And I think his disappearance, and this is something, it's not something that happened in isolation because throughout this process, there have been spoilers on both sides

who would either blow up a bus or kill a bunch of people who were praying somewhere and do outrageous things to stop the process. And that's one of the things that is often overlooked. There are people willing to do those things in support of their own beliefs.

And it's really hard to guard against them and it's really hard to recover from that. You know, the Arabs at one stage put forward, the Saudis at one stage put forward something called the Arab Peace Initiative, where among other things, it for the first time admitted that the whole business of the refugees

needed to be negotiated rather than imposed on Israel. But it happened after a massacre of people who were celebrating the Passover. And there was no way an Israeli government, even if it had been inclined in the direction of peace, there was no way at that stage they could have taken up that offer. I assume now that you're going here, so I'll jump to it and you tell me if we're...

Give it a try. We'll give it a try. It's hard to overstate the consequences of both Oslo being signed and its failure. Everything that we see today from this particular government, from Netanyahu's power to the rise of fascists in the government, can be linked either to the original signing and the reaction to that signing or to the failure of Oslo, the second in Tevada, the death of the left, mostly in Israel, the rise of the right. And the reason I'm really emphasizing this, and you tell me if you want to go somewhere else,

is that we can't do something different unless we know why it failed. And when you have an opportunity and you blow that opportunity, almost always something way worse is going to replace it. And that's what's happened today. And I think the key lesson for me about Oslo is I personally don't think that the Israelis were actually committed to the things that needed to happen to make peace. And I'm not saying that Arafat was great or that, you know, the Palestinian leadership was great. But things like Jerusalem and the refugee problem, I never saw a willingness to seriously address because it was, it was.

easier to blame Palestinians for resisting than it was to take responsibility, for example, for 1948. And that the entire discussion that we have today is a 1967 forward discussion. And to Palestinians, it's a 1948 discussion. It's the NACPA. It's the expulsion. It's the inability to come home. And just like here, unless there's some form of truth and reconciliation process, this peace thing, he might as well just stop talking about it. Renee, pick up on that, if you will, as a historian, kind of looking back at the failure and the fact of, the fact that it even happened at all,

and talk about the line that we can draw to what we see today. Well, I have a view very similar to Jeffrey about the U.S. role in this whole thing, and that I firmly believe that whatever, future negotiations happen, we need a new set of entities that are going to play a role in framing and pushing forward this negotiation. And I mean, obviously, we have to find Israelis and Palestinians who can recognize each other's narratives. You know, I remember hearing a Palestinian philosopher that used to teach at Al-Quds University that would say, we're at a point where if you don't

recognize my narrative and I don't recognize your narrative pretty soon I don't recognize your existence and you don't recognize mine. That has to change as a start. But then in terms of who can play a role in this, who can be, I don't know if you want to call it a neutral party in the negotiations, I don't know that that can be even possible, but the U.S. is out. They can't do it. the EU in my opinion because of the way in which global economies are so interlinked now the EU can't be a part of this either they're too committed to certain things China Russia no my view is that in this new framework we could have this is just my idea Ireland they have dealt with trying to bring together two

different groups of people South Africa they have tried to bring together three different groups of people. New Zealand, they have brought together two different groups of people. Canada is trying to bring together three different groups of people, and they might just have observer status for a while, because the verdict is still out in that. But I think Canada could play a role here, perhaps. But we need a new framework of some sort. Picking up for Renee, Michael, I did want to ask you this. You know, the diplomatic core of Canada is not what it used to be in the years that you were in the region. And the kind of hands-on expertise in the Middle East,

at least from where I sit, appears to be nothing like it was back then. And I, you know, in Canada's reputation, as an honest broker in this conflict, which was the norm back then, also doesn't appear to exist anymore. How crucial are foreign diplomats do you think to supporting future attempts at what has been described as the future of actually finding any kind of solution

to this conflict? When I came back to Canada to take that role on, I reported to work the day the second in the FATA started. And the role was, just so we get it worked there? The role was to continue to work on the Palestinian refugee question. And I thought, well, I'll just sit quietly in my office for a year and then ask for another posting. But I got called over to the prime minister's office and told by his.

Foreign Affairs advisor, I remember what he said. He said, I have no idea what you're going to do, but do it. This role for Canada is far too important to let it disappear just because the peace process has disappeared. So I thought, well, when in doubt, consult, and I went literally all over Europe, to the states, to the region, to Russia. And I was in Sweden. And the Swedes had an ambassador at large for humanitarian affairs. And he said to me, he said to me, You know, your predecessor did a lot of really great practical things in tackling the conditions that the Palestinians are living in. And there's a whole book to be written about that.

But he said, don't put your time into development. Don't even put your time into humanitarian affairs. And he said, you're the Canadian Foreign Service. You can do things that none of the rest of us can do. that was our reputation back in 1986 I think we can thank the harper years for the decapitation of much of the Canadian public service and our foreign affairs department in particular because they were told for how long was he in power a decade the third of a career we don't want your ideas we don't want your ideas we don't want your suggestions. We know what we need to do. But that function, that an analytical function and taking on the tough issues and trying to figure, is there something Canada can do, has been largely blunted by successive governments. Okay. The other piece of this, I think, too,

is what the two of you focus on Jeffrey and Raja. And so the question to you, Raja, because you've kind of already said your piece on this, I think, you've been going cross-community, you've been talking to Jews and Palestinians on this continent, and ever since October 7th, 2023, and before, of course. And so much has happened since. So much horror on both sides and thousands of people dead. I'm just wondering against this backdrop that you've been sort of taking the time to talk to diasporic communities, how you would describe the importance of the peace in a diasporic,

community to achieving the larger peace between Israelis and Palestinians. It will probably be easier to establish it over there than it is to establish it over here. You think? Honestly, I mean, I've seen people come from Israel, Palestine, and looking to, you know, build on something here to help over there, but then they realize that over here, it's even worse. We've taken a conflict and made it our own. own in a way that made this gentleman leave after hearing a few remarks.

This kind of polarization is nothing like I've ever seen in this area and I've lived through many decades of it. That said, I mean, our work has been to work with the two communities here to try and change that. It's not easy at all because, again, you know, there's trauma. And, you know, there is a, you know, a complex history of European anti-Semitism and then North American anti-Semitism. When the Holocaust happened, Jews had nowhere to go. They tried coming to Canada. And the, our prime minister at the time said, one is too many. They couldn't

go to the United States either. So there is all that complete. complex, you know, history there. And I can fully understand the Jewish need for safety and even self-determination, even though that self-determination happened in my bedroom. And all I'm asking for now is to recognize. I don't even want my red bedroom back, but recognize that you took it away from me so that we can actually, you know, find a way to, you know, coexist and find that elusive piece between us. Could I say something? Please.

Just as hopeless as I feel sometimes, what I see on the university campus is young people who are Muslim Canadians, who are Jewish Canadians, who are neither in Canadian, working together, actually. So as much as there is a real struggle here among those communities, at the same time, I'm seeing young people. people working together and recognizing one another. And I think that's a major difference.

Can I steal 20 seconds? Yes, absolutely. Go ahead. I think it's important for this audience, for all of us to understand that why it is theoretically easier over here, why it's actually harder, because over there, the consequences are immediate and devastating. And there are many groups, many groups that is important. Palestine who work together every day because their goal is to prevent any more of their children from dying. We don't have that here. We sit behind our computers and scream at each other. We don't

have that moment where we must live together because the alternative is death. And I would like us to leave here with that urgency. That the alternative is discontinuing. So we must do that work of listening and learning. Because it is in another way. It is death to a peaceful and just society if we allow these kind of things to continue, especially with our support. Thank you for taking that time to say that.

I appreciate it. There is one last thing I'd like to ask each of you, and it really is a 30-second answer. One lesson, one key lesson, that you draw from Oslo about how we can in the future make peace or how not to make peace? A statement. Look for a long-term solution that will give access to Jews and Palestinians to all of historic Palestine.

Perhaps an interim measure would be two separate states. There's a concept called land for all that finds a way of. you know, finds a way of sharing the land while maintaining self-determination for both people. Renee. You cannot impose peace. You need to seek justice through negotiations. Thank you. Michael.

Any future process has to, first of all, identify and then tackle the big issues. Up front, deal with them, even if it takes 50. 15 or 20 years to come up with solutions for Jerusalem, for the territory, for the refugees, work on that, figure out how to do that. It's not impossible. There's not much land, and there's all sorts of other things. But if we don't deal with those, we don't get peace. Totally agree with Mike.

I think that's a very profound one. And I'll add to it that the others, only the other, as long as you see them as other. that it is our choice. The other does not exist. We create them. Make the other hours. That's the lesson for Mazel. On ideas, you've been listening to Inven,

inventing peace, the Oslo Accord. It's the second part of our series, recorded at the Stratford Festival in Ontario. My guest today were Renee Warringer, Jeffrey Wilkinson, Rajahuri, and Michael Malloy. Many thanks to all of them and to the entire Stratford festival team. Ideas at Stratford is produced by Pauline Holdsworth. Technical assistance from Emily Kiervasio and Orande Williams.

Editing by Lisa Godfrey. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.