410 • 20 THE GULF WAR AND THE PEACE PROCESSAfter eight trips to the Middle East, US Secretary of State James Baker
managed to set up a general conference that opened in Madrid in October- The mere fact that Arab delegates were meeting in the same room
with Israeli representatives marked a step toward peace, though hard¬
liners on both sides ensured that the Madrid Conference produced no
breakthroughs. Multilateral talks on various issues concerning the Middle
East as a whole, such as water rights, refugees, economic development, and
arms control, went on during the following years in various locations,
making marginal progress but getting little publicity. Bilateral parleys met,
faltered, and resumed during 1992 and 1993, as first Israel and then the US
elected new and more liberal governments. But most of the news was bad.
Violent resistance to Israel's occupation was carried out by Hizballah in
Lebanon and Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza. Terrorist acts against
Egypt's political leaders, Copts, and foreign tourists asserted the growing
power of extreme elements like the Islamic Group. Terrorism even spread
to the US, as a group of expatriate Egyptians was discovered planting
bombs that blew up part of New York's World Trade Center in February - An exiled Saudi millionaire, Osama Bin Laden, set up terrorist cells
in the Sudan and then in Afghanistan. He is widely suspected of having in¬
spired the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and attacks on the US em¬
bassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. Retaliatory bombing raids
on Bin Laden's suspected base in Afghanistan and on a pharmaceutical
factory in Khartum (which turned out to have no ties to Bin Laden) did
nothing to blunt his appeals to extremism.
Let us take the story back to 1993. Israel continued to bomb Lebanese
villages (leaving a half-million villagers homeless), to expand its West
Bank settlements (illegal under the Geneva Convention, which Israel had
signed), and also to wound or kill Palestinian demonstrators. It could also
subject them to preventive detention and torture, blow up houses, draw
down their water, and impose curfews on the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
Hopes for peace seemed to be receding again.
The Oslo I Accord
Greater progress was made away from public notice, though, under the
auspices of Norway's foreign minister and his wife, as secret talks were held
between representatives of the PLO and of Israel's new government, despite
their protestations to the contrary. After the news leaked out in August
1993, Oslo agreed to turn over its mediating role to Washington. On 13
September, the foreign ministers of Israel, the PLO, and the US met for a
public ceremony, held on the White House lawn, to sign a formal Déclara-