It has been 25 years since Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) signed the historic Oslo Accords in Washington. This was supposed to usher a new dawn. A lasting opportunity for peace. Yet fast-forward to the present and an increasing number of Palestinian voices are calling for their abrogation. To be sure, the Accords under-promised from the offset. For this much-celebrated blueprint for peace failed to include the necessary provisions for a two-state solution. Meaning that guarantees of an independent Palestine was taken off the table even before tea was served. Thereby craftily rendering redundant an agreement on the right to return. All of which resulted in the de facto legitimisation of the Israeli occupation. While Yasser Arafat formally recognised the right of the Jewish state to exist. Thus over the intervening years the Palestinians have learned not to be bulldozed into accepting roadmaps for peace that seek to prioritise Israeli security and a renouncing of armed resistance above all else. With hollow assurances that only when this happens will collective attention turn towards the nitty gritty of the rights of the occupied. This is a lesson that was similarly learned by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the struggle to liberate Northern Ireland from British imperialist rule. Namely, that the downing of arms cannot be a precondition to negotiations when it is the weak and exploited that are coerced into surrendering; while those holding the balance of power in their favour issue ultimatums. This is why the Afghan Taliban continue to battle the US-led international forces along with the Kabul government — which is viewed as being complicit in the prolonged American military occupation — even as the group pushes for direct talks with Washington. Yet this has prompted routine Israeli and American censure; recasting the Palestinians as unpredictable partners for peace. This, sadly, is a message that much of the western media willingly advances. And it is one that links criticism of the Jewish state’s unjust policies towards the Palestinians, including forcing the latter to exist in conditions that have been described as being akin to the largest open-air prison in the world, to manufactured claims of anti-Semitism. As a certain Jeremy Corbyn knows only too well. The international community has a moral duty to stand with the worlds’ only stateless people. And this means unconditionally committing to a two-state solution as a starting point. Not pursuing the path of fundamentalism that has seen the Trump White House unilaterally recognise Jerusalem as the legitimate Israeli capital; thereby leaving the dream of a free Palestinian state dead on arrival. Or retribute the Palestinians for approaching the International Criminal Court (ICC) to probe alleged Israeli war crimes by shutting down the PLO mission in Washington. Or pulling the plug on funding to the UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) to the cool tune of $360 million a year. The bitter truth, however, is that had the major powers wished to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict they would have done so by now. * Published in Daily Times, September 15th 2018.