What emerged was not to be the end of the conflict, but the beginning of the end. They lived together for days in Oslo, meeting late into the night, their talks lubricated by wine and fuelled by home cooking (the wife of Norway’s foreign minister prepared some of their meals). At first his opposite number was Yair Hirschfeld, an Israeli academic, and then later Uri Savir, the director-general of the foreign ministry. The Palestinian team was led by Ahmed Qurei (known as Abu Alaa), a mild-mannered apparatchik who was close to Arafat, the Palestinian leader. But Norwegian officials convinced Yossi Beilin, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, to pursue secret meetings with his longtime enemies.

At the start it was illegal for Israelis to talk to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which their government saw as a terrorist group.

The accords emerged from a series of meetings in early 1993 in the Norwegian capital.

The Oslo process was always flawed-yet it could not have happened any other way. The accords worked as they were designed to, which is to say, they did not work at all.

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