It is certainly possible to view the 1980s as a lost decade for the Israeli–Arab conflict, as it provoked a major war in Lebanon in the first half of the decade and an intifada in the occupied territories in the second half. Adding to that, it was also clear early on in the decade that the much-celebrated Israel–Egypt peace treaty would not solve the Palestinian part of the Israeli– Arab conflict. In the wider region, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was vigorously condemned by the EC and regarded as a threat to peace, security and stability in the Middle East (Bulletin of the EC 1-1980: 7). This meant that the Cold War period of détente, which had characterized the 1970s, was replaced by the ‘New Cold War’ (1979–86). While the tightening of the bipolar structure that followed is widely interpreted to have made it harder for the EC to have an active, alternative policy to that of the United States, the 1980s was also a decade when the EC's diplomacy was very successful in legitimizing the two ideas that came to underpin the Oslo peace process: mutual recognition and the ‘land for peace’ principle. The EC's most important declaration ever on the Israeli–Arab conflict, the 1980 Venice Declaration, established the EC as a fairly independent international actor in the shadow of the Cold War rivalry. Four decades after it was issued, it still constitutes the basic principles of the EU's policy towards the conflict. When the Declaration of Principles (DoP) was finally signed in 1993, thirteen years after the Venice Declaration was issued, it looked much closer to the Venice Declaration than anything the US, the Israelis or the Arab side, including the Palestinians, had previously outlined.