Amid Israel-Hamas War, Revisit ‘Shattered Dreams of Peace’

October 20, 2023

Patrice Taddonio

It’s difficult to imagine right now — in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel, and the war and humanitarian crisis that’s currently unfolding in Gaza as Israel retaliates — but there was a time in the not-so-distant past when peace in the region seemed possible.

That moment in time comes to life in Shattered Dreams of Peace: The Road From Oslo, a seminal 2002 FRONTLINE documentary that is now available to watch on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, the PBS App and the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel.

The Peabody award-winning film features candid interviews with both Israeli and Palestinian leaders, diplomats and negotiators who participated in the peace process set in motion by the 1993 Oslo Accord.

“At the end of the day, I know Palestinians and Israelis can make peace,” Saeb Erekat, the former Palestinian chief negotiator who died in 2020, told FRONTLINE in the documentary. “My heart aches because I know we were so close.”

“We are talking here about the toughest and most sensitive issues that humankind has ever dealt with. It’s not only nationalism, statehood, refugeeism, colonization — or settlements, as it were — holiness, sanctity, religion, Islam versus Judaism,” the former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami told FRONTLINE in the film.

The documentary charts the process that began in 1993, when the Oslo Accord, signed by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat, was heralded as a historic turning point in Arab-Israeli relations. Palestinians and Israelis agreed that “it is time to put an end to decades of confrontation and conflict” and “strive to live in peaceful co-existence and mutual dignity and security and achieve a lasting peace.”

Over the course of two hours, Shattered Dreams of Peace examined how the Israeli-Palestinian peace process begun at Oslo unfolded — and then was undermined in the following years by violence and major setbacks, including the assassination of Rabin by a Jewish extremist. The documentary, which is embedded above, explored the growing threat to the peace process posed by radical nationalist factions among both Jews and Palestinians — groups, including Hamas, that opposed all compromise between the two peoples.

The documentary also examined the U.S. role in the peace process and included interviews with key figures from both sides of the negotiating table, among them Arafat himself; Israeli Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak; and Erekat and another key Palestinian negotiator, Ahmed Qurei (known as Abu Ala), who would go on to serve as Palestinian Authority Prime Minister. Produced and directed by Dan Setton and Tor Ben Mayor, Shattered Dreams of Peace provides an extraordinary, firsthand window into the complexities and tragedies of a conflict that continues to take lives — and that some Israelis and Palestinians once had hope was on the verge of resolution.