The Oslo Accords (1993) are widely held to have been a failure, and their collapse in 2001 is uncontested by scholars and politicians alike. Many have addressed the unequal playing field on which the negotiations were held. Israel had the clear upper hand, and Palestinians were expected to make equal if not greater concessions from a starting point that was stacked against them. Palestinians refused to concede more of their territory and rights to Israel, and many point to these reasons to explain the failure of the negotiations without seeking to understand the wider circumstances of the process. Alternatively, the deleterious effects of the Good Friday Agreement (1998) are often covered up by its advertised success. Though the agreement was signed by the conflicting parties, it failed to reconcile or reverse over 400 years of British settler colonialism in Ireland, and the agreement not only maintained inequalities but also exacerbated them. The agreement was no decolonization measure; the British occupation of Northern Ireland was fortified, and to this day the civil rights of the native Irish remain under assault. This paper compares the Oslo Accords and the Good Friday Agreement and is based upon an analysis of unequal power relationships during peace processes. It details the impact of such inequalities in negotiations on life after they end. While the Good Friday Agreement is touted as the great success of the peace process era and the Oslo Accords are seen as its worst failure, there are many similarities between Northern Ireland and Palestine/Israel in the realms of settler colonialism, majority/minority power dynamics, and the lived experiences of Palestinians and the Irish. For example, wealth inequality widened in both locations, while the spatial fracturing of the less powerful group heightened in both instances. Despite these similarities, Ireland's peace agreement is seldom used to compare to Palestine's Oslo process. This paper provides a comparative lens through which to view the Oslo process and advances a fresh perspective on the 1990s era of peace processes. In doing so, it emphasizes the similar lived experiences of people who witnessed different formal outcomes. To demonstrate this, the research relies on semi-structured interviews with negotiators and leaders of peace-building NGOs as well as primary documents collected in Palestine, Israel, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland. The novel findings of this fieldwork situate it within the literature on settler colonialism and conflict resolution.

I intend to explore how archaeology in the parts of Jerusalem annexed by Israel following the Six-Day War has, over the last view decades, increasingly come under the purview of ideological non-governmental organizations, including the political and economic processes that informed transfers of authority from the Israeli government to private settler groups. In investigating the phenomenon of ‘settlement through excavation,’ I will consider, for example, what led to the Israeli government transferring total control for the historically-significant and politically-sensitive City of David park to Elad—whose stated mission is to settle Jews in occupied East Jerusalem—in 1997, a year after a dispute over archaeology in the Old City sparked severe violence that led to the deaths of numerous Palestinians and Israeli security forces. Further, I will consider the 1981 Protection of Jewish Holy Places act, which designates as a holy site any above-ground or underground passageway that can be entered from the Western Wall plaza, in the context of archaeological excavations conducted in contested territory. My paper also seeks to place archaeology in East Jerusalem within the broader context of identity and nation-making in the Israeli-Palestinian setting. It has been well established that the ideological organizations that have gained a foothold in Jerusalem’s archaeological scene have emphasized Jewish biblical history while excluding the histories of non-Jewish communities. Equally, there has been significant exposure of recent municipal plans to, for example, bulldoze parts of East Jerusalem’s Al-Bustan neighborhood in the interests of establishing the so-called “King’s Garden,” in an attempt to recreate a pre-exilic landscape from the time of King David and Solomon. The highlighting of Jewish biblical history in the interests of demonstrating Jewish connection to the land, and the occlusion of non-Jewish histories in the same territory, must be understood within the broader Israeli nationalist narrative of return and the consequent negation of the exile. Seen from this angle, then, archaeology as it is employed by ideological groups in East Jerusalem—with the implicit and explicit support of various arms of the Israeli government—contributes to a double erasure: on the one hand, the interim history of the “homeland,” whose main subjects were and are Palestinian Arabs; and on the other hand, the history of the diaspora, whose liquidation was held to be an instrumental part of the establishment of the modern State of Israel.