Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- 1 More Important than Other Conflicts
- 2 1967–79: A ‘Marvellous Opportunity’ Opens Up for the EC’s Emerging Foreign Policy
- 3 1980–91: Forward-thinking on the Long Road to Oslo
- 4 1991–2000: Peace through Regional Cooperation
- 5 2000–9: The Israeli–Arab Conflict in the 9/11 Era
- 6 2009–19: Upholding the Sacred Flame of the Two-state Solution
- 7 Conclusions: The Past Fifty Years – and the Next?
- References to the Bulletin
- References to EU Declarations, Press Releases and Other Publications
- References to Other Literature
- Coding Schedule
- Index
3 - 1980–91: Forward-thinking on the Long Road to Oslo
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- 1 More Important than Other Conflicts
- 2 1967–79: A ‘Marvellous Opportunity’ Opens Up for the EC’s Emerging Foreign Policy
- 3 1980–91: Forward-thinking on the Long Road to Oslo
- 4 1991–2000: Peace through Regional Cooperation
- 5 2000–9: The Israeli–Arab Conflict in the 9/11 Era
- 6 2009–19: Upholding the Sacred Flame of the Two-state Solution
- 7 Conclusions: The Past Fifty Years – and the Next?
- References to the Bulletin
- References to EU Declarations, Press Releases and Other Publications
- References to Other Literature
- Coding Schedule
- Index
Summary
Too much passion, suffering and hate has accumulated in a land which had seemed promised a future of concord and fraternity between its peoples. It is time for an end to the language of violence and for all the parties to start talking to one another as equals. And it is time to move from rhetoric to the negotiation of terms and arrangements for restoring peace. It is in this context that the declaration issued at Venice is to be regarded. (Gaston Thorn, President of the Council and of European Political Cooperation, quoted in Bulletin of the EC 7/8-1980: 86)
It is certainly possible to view the 1980s as a lost decade for the Israeli–Arab conflict, as it provoked a major war in Lebanon in the first half of the decade and an intifada in the occupied territories in the second half. Adding to that, it was also clear early on in the decade that the much-celebrated Israel–Egypt peace treaty would not solve the Palestinian part of the Israeli– Arab conflict. In the wider region, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was vigorously condemned by the EC and regarded as a threat to peace, security and stability in the Middle East (Bulletin of the EC 1-1980: 7). This meant that the Cold War period of détente, which had characterized the 1970s, was replaced by the ‘New Cold War’ (1979–86). While the tightening of the bipolar structure that followed is widely interpreted to have made it harder for the EC to have an active, alternative policy to that of the United States, the 1980s was also a decade when the EC's diplomacy was very successful in legitimizing the two ideas that came to underpin the Oslo peace process: mutual recognition and the ‘land for peace’ principle. The EC's most important declaration ever on the Israeli–Arab conflict, the 1980 Venice Declaration, established the EC as a fairly independent international actor in the shadow of the Cold War rivalry. Four decades after it was issued, it still constitutes the basic principles of the EU's policy towards the conflict. When the Declaration of Principles (DoP) was finally signed in 1993, thirteen years after the Venice Declaration was issued, it looked much closer to the Venice Declaration than anything the US, the Israelis or the Arab side, including the Palestinians, had previously outlined.
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- Information
- EU Diplomacy and Israeli-Arab Conflict, 1967–2019 , pp. 40 - 69Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020