ABSTRACT
The Oslo process was launched in two stages: the first informally between Palestinians of authority and Israeli academics who generally believed in the Rabin–Peres leadership and in their capacity to produce a peaceful solution to the escalating Israeli–Palestinian dispute. Israel, having concluded a peace treaty with Egypt, which was regarded as the most dangerous of its enemies, was now ready to focus on the rest of its immediate rivals: the Syrians, the Jordanians, and the Palestinians. It is, then, imperative to describe what happened in Oslo, on both the academic–personal and political–diplomatic levels. Conversely, Oslo was a free wheeling and open-agenda informal meeting, scrupulously kept under wraps, where all participants could raise the most outlandish ideas. The ideas which remained noncommittal because no records were taken and everything could be advanced or retracted at any time, without for it to become binding.
