Neil Rogachevsky on the Story Behind Oslo

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2017

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On September 13, 1993, at a historic ceremony on the White House lawn, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), shook hands as they signed the Oslo Accords and kicked off a peace process that would last the better part of a decade. The story of that day and of the subsequent events that ultimately led to the peace process’s failure, are well known. But the remarkable series of events that led to the historic agreement remains obscure to many.

In 2016, the story behind the Accords was dramatized on stage in the award-winning play Oslo. The following year, Yeshiva University’s Neil Rogachevsky reviewed the play in Mosaic Magazine, highlighting the many ways it distorts history in the interest of reinforcing the conventional wisdom of Western elites. In this podcast, Dr. Rogachevsky joins Jonathan Silver in order to analyze the unlikely story behind the Oslo Accords. Using Yigal Carmon’s 1994 Commentary essay, “The Story Behind the Handshake” as a roadmap, Rogachevsky and Silver analyze how secret negotiations organized by low-level government officials led to one of the most consequential, and disastrous, shifts in Israeli diplomatic history.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble, as well as Ich Grolle Nicht, by Ron Meixsell and Wahneta Meixsell.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tikva podcast and Great Jewish Essays and Ideas. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.
0:12.8	If you enjoy listening to our podcast, you can subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher, and I hope you
0:17.6	leave us a rating and a review. If you want to learn more about our work at Tikva,
0:21.9	you can visit our website, tikvafund.org, and follow us on Facebook or Twitter. In May 2017,
0:27.9	Dr. Neil Rogachevsky reviewed a contemporary play in Mosaic magazine about the Oslo Accords,
0:34.1	the 1993 agreement between Israel and the PLO brokered in secret and then signed
0:39.0	to near universal acclaim on the lawn of the Clinton White House. Dr. Rogachevsky's perceptive
0:44.7	review about how Oslo happened, how it is remembered, and how it's misremembered, brought to mind
0:50.5	a classic step-by-step account of the negotiations that led to the Oslo Accords.
0:55.9	That essay, the story behind the handshake, was written by Yigal Carmon and published in Commentary Magazine.
1:02.4	My guest, Neil Rogachevsky, holds a PhD from Cambridge University.
1:06.1	He's a research fellow at the Strauss Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yusheva University.
1:12.0	His political analysis has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Mosaic, the Jewish Review of Books, Atlantic Magazine,
1:17.7	Foreign Policy, Haarets. Neil teaches university students on topics ranging from Zionism and Israel
1:23.6	to European political history. Neil, it's a pleasure to have you. Welcome. Thanks very much
1:28.1	for having me. I'm delighted to be here. So just to begin, who is Yigal Kharmone?
1:33.0	Yigal Kharmone is a figure who has been involved in Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Arab
1:39.1	affairs for many years. He's currently the chairman, I believe, I don't know, his actual title of
1:44.9	memory, which is a wonderful think tank actually, which does miners' work of translating
1:50.0	newspaper articles, television shows, many things in the Arab world, which pertain to political
1:56.2	facts related to Israeli Arab affairs or Arab affairs simply put. So its goal is to shine light on
2:03.2	political discourse amongst Palestinians and other Arab people. So a very valuable organization.
	...

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