Dr. Dan Diker and Jason Greenblatt offered a sharp rebuke of the Oslo Accords and efforts to revive the two-state solution, while strongly defending US President Donald Trump’s Middle East visits and overall Middle East strategy, at The Jerusalem Post Annual New York Conference.
Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, began by declaring: “Empirically, we put out a book called The Oslo Accords at 30: Lessons Learned. And one of the greatest lessons we learned is that Oslo, in our view, was one of the greatest strategic catastrophes, maybe the greatest strategic catastrophe, since the founding of the State of Israel.”
He continued: “The reason is not because it offered a compromise solution but because we actually inverted our own legitimacy with the PLO… We handed a Nobel Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat, and he then became the moral standard so that we could not act against terror because you were then acting against a Nobel Prize winner.”
Diker argued that this inversion continues to shape international perceptions of Israel today. “The PLO and, today, Hamas have become, in large part, in many circles, the new Israel… Israel is today considered the pre-October 7 Hamas.”
Greenblatt, who served as Trump’s special envoy for Middle East peace in his first term, similarly rejected international pushes for Palestinian statehood. “Let’s understand why the Trump administration never used the word ‘two-state solution’… If a Palestinian state means that the Palestinians could attack Israel, how could you ever argue for a Palestinian state?”
He warned against misinterpreting Trump’s recent trip to the region. “I know some people are upset that President Trump didn’t visit Israel… I’m not bothered that the president didn’t visit Israel. He had a certain agenda: his US-Gulf relations, the US economy… His strengthening of ties with the Arab countries only helps Israel.”
A two-state solution is a Western idea, not realistic in the Middle East
Both speakers emphasized the need for a new strategic approach grounded in regional realities. “The idea in the 70s,” said Diker, “was that the Middle East… is defined by families, clans, and tribes… The idea of a Palestinian state is a Western idea, and we were superimposing that.”
“We must speak Middle Eastern,” he added. “We don’t talk about ceasefires, we talk about hudnas (armistice). We don’t talk about Palestinian statehood, we talk about security first, [then] diplomacy.”
This article was written as part of media coverage of the Jerusalem Post’s New York Conference