After Oslo: What the Gaza War and Iran Reveal About the Future of Peace

NBC News. 2010. Israeli checkpoint barrier and restricted roadway in the West Bank. Photograph.

Oslo did not collapse in 2000. It collapsed the moment both sides stopped believing that small steps mattered. The violence we see today is not the beginning of something new, but the consequence of something that was never fully sustained.

The Oslo Accords are often treated as a closed chapter, a failed experiment from another era. But recent events suggest otherwise. The war in Gaza and the expanding confrontation involving Iran have not replaced Oslo’s questions. They have intensified them.

If Oslo represented a belief in gradual trust-building, today’s reality reflects the opposite: accelerated distrust, reinforced by regional escalation.

Oslo was built on incremental steps. Israeli withdrawals, Palestinian governance, and security cooperation were meant to create a foundation for a final agreement. Instead, both sides drifted away from that structure. Israeli leadership delayed or avoided key interim commitments, while Palestinian leadership struggled to establish governance and contain violence. Over time, each side interpreted the other’s actions as confirmation of bad faith (Pressman 2003, 11–13; Shikaki 2007).

That erosion of trust never recovered. What we are seeing now is not a new conflict, but a more exposed version of the same breakdown.

The Gaza War has reshaped the conflict environment in two critical ways. First, it has deepened public anger and trauma on both sides. Second, it has expanded the conflict beyond Israel and the Palestinians, pulling in regional actors like Iran in more visible and direct ways.

Human Rights Watch. 2024. Forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza during ongoing conflict. Photograph.

Peace processes do not fail only at the negotiating table. They fail when ordinary people stop seeing evidence that the process is real. When daily life does not improve, when risks are not reciprocated, and when words are contradicted by actions on the ground, agreements lose meaning long before they collapse formally.

Research on protracted conflict shows that escalation at this level tends to harden collective narratives and reinforce zero-sum thinking, making compromise politically and psychologically more difficult (Bar-Tal 2024). This matters because peace processes do not fail only in diplomacy. They fail in the perceptions of populations long before agreements collapse on paper.

At the same time, emerging dynamics complicate the picture. Some Palestinian public opinion continues to support armed resistance, particularly in response to perceived occupation and lack of political progress (Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research 2024). Expressions of support for Iran’s confrontation with Israel, even if situational rather than ideological, may reinforce Israeli perceptions that Palestinian political sentiment is aligned with actors hostile to Israel’s security.

From an Israeli perspective, this further weakens the already fragile assumption that there is a credible partner for peace.

Voice of America. 2023. Israeli Iron Dome missile defense system intercepting incoming rockets. Photograph.

However, Palestinian perspectives tell a different story. Many view external actors, including Iran, through the lens of abandonment by the international system. In that context, support is often less about alignment and more about the absence of alternatives.

Regional dynamics add another layer. While some analysts suggest that broader instability could eventually push actors toward de-escalation, history shows that regional realignments often sideline Palestinian political aspirations rather than resolve them (Siddiqui 2025).

Strategic shifts can change alliances, but they rarely address core issues like sovereignty, security, and political legitimacy.

This brings us back to Oslo, not as a model, but as a warning.

The central lesson is not that peace is unattainable. It is that peace processes require visible, credible progress at every stage. When those steps are delayed, ignored, or contradicted by actions on the ground, the process loses legitimacy. Once that legitimacy is gone, escalation becomes more likely than resolution.

The current conflict environment suggests that large-scale geopolitical developments, including war with Iran, are unlikely to produce a breakthrough on their own. Without grounded, incremental change that both populations can see and believe in, any future agreement risks repeating the same trajectory.

War can shift power. It cannot manufacture trust. And without trust, no agreement, no matter how ambitious, will survive beyond the moment it is signed.

Round Table Community Questions

1. In the current environment, what would “credible progress” actually look like for Palestinians on the ground?

2. From an Israeli perspective, what conditions would be necessary to restore even minimal trust after recent events?

3. Does Iran’s involvement increase the likelihood of long-term escalation or eventual de-escalation? Why?

4. Are incremental peace processes still viable in today’s conflict environment, or has that model fundamentally broken down?

5. How do public perceptions and lived experiences shape the success or failure of peace efforts more than formal agreements?

6. Can regional actors meaningfully support a resolution, or do they tend to complicate and prolong the conflict?

References

Bar-Tal, Daniel. 2024. “On the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Before and After October 7, 2023.” Political Psychology 46: 1419–1439.

Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR). 2024. Public Opinion Poll No. 91. Ramallah.

Pressman, Jeremy. 2003. “Visions in Collision: What Happened at Camp David and Taba?” International Security 28 (2): 5–43.

Shikaki, Khalil. 2007. “With Hamas in Power: Impact of Palestinian Domestic Development on Options for the Peace Process.” Crown Center for Middle East Studies.

Siddiqui, Khurram Shahzad. 2025. “The Abraham Accords and the Strategic Reshaping of the Middle Eastern Order.” Journal of Research in Social Sciences 14 (1): 51–81. Photographs: Displacement Image: Human Rights Watch. 2024. Displaced Palestinians amid conflict conditions in Gaza. Photograph.

Checkpoint Image: NBC News. 2010. Checkpoint barrier and restricted roadway in the West Bank. Photograph.

Iron Dome Interception: Voice of America. 2023. Iron Dome missile defense system intercepting rockets over Israel. Photograph.