The Oslo accord was already declared dead and irrelevant by the time the first edition of this book was published in 2003. Instead of bringing healing to a torn country, the peace efforts led it into yet another wave of bloodshed at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Political Palestine, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, was at war with Israel, as a result of which much of it came under occupation. This meant that historical Palestine, apart from chunks of the Gaza Strip, were under the full control of the Jewish state. Even before the eruption of this last wave of violence, it became painfully clear that the peace accord of the 1990s was doomed to fail. As early as 1995, most Palestinians had labelled the Oslo process as yet another form of occupation, and most Israelis felt that it had failed to safeguard their personal security. For both communities, it seemed useless to ponder whether this unfortunate state of affairs had been anticipated by their leaders, or whether this was a genuine peace process that had gone astray despite the good intentions of the politicians.

A decade later, it seems to me that the major problem was that the practical consequences of the Declaration of Principles agreed upon by Yasser Arafat, Bill Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin on 13 September 1993 on the White House lawn bore little relation to those principles.