In his 2005 book, The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege, Kenneth Levin coined the phrase “The Oslo Syndrome” to describe the relentless, irrational pursuit of peace at all costs by the Israeli public and its political leadership that began with the 1993 Oslo Accords. The name references The Stockholm Syndrome, a better-known Scandinavian ailment that manifests when a captive develops an emotional bond with their captor.
Levin postulates that back in the 1990s and 2000s, Israel developed a similar emotional dependency on the conflict with the Palestinians by internalizing the Palestinian narrative, viewing itself through a “battered child” analogy, and considering appeasement as its only available defensive strategy.
Since then, the Israeli public, and most of its political leadership, have moved on from that naive, defeatist, and catastrophic viewpoint. Yet the rest of the world, or at least parts of it, has not. Nowhere has the Oslo bug found more fertile ground than among the dwellers of the White House and their immediate surroundings.
Every American president since the advent of the Oslo Accords, with the notable exception of Joe Biden, has been bitten by the bug: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. It is very likely that if the Hamas-led massacres in Israel on October 7, 2023 had not triggered a wider war in the Middle East, Biden’s administration would have joined that list, but brutal reality made dreaming an impossible exercise.
The list of summits, declarations, roadmaps, peace plans, and other presidential attempts to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict is almost endless. Most produced nothing but an immense paper trail and a lifetime’s worth of frequent-flyer miles for the participants. A few produced results completely opposite to what their naive architects intended, leading to increased bloodshed and pushing a solution even further away.
The Camp David Summit in July 2000 and the Taba Summit in January 2001 – hosted by Clinton and featuring Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat – gave us the Second Intifada. The US guarantees from George W. Bush – a piece of paper of no historical significance and no political weight beyond having been produced by a sitting president – led to the disengagement from Gaza. The Oslo bug does not discriminate; even otherwise strong leaders like the late Ariel Sharon became infected and never recovered.
The bug has not affected its victims equally. Some have more or less recovered, feeling subdued with only periodic mild fevers returning. For others, the infection ran so deep and intense that they almost needed to be institutionalized. John Kerry, secretary of state under Obama, was and still is the most severe patient of the syndrome.
Under his tenure, the Arab-Israeli conflict became his sole preoccupation; Russia, China, North Korea, and other hot spots or strategic issues took a back seat. Kerry spent his time in office trying to convince Israelis that losing loved ones is far better than abandoning a dream of peace, and convincing Arabs that they can always count on the Oslo Syndrome to move Israel where no war or terrorism ever could.
Former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon offered the most succinct and precise assessment of Kerry’s state and a possible cure, noting that Kerry was operating with “misplaced obsession and messianic fervor.” Ya’alon added: “The only thing that can ‘save’ us is for John Kerry to win his Nobel Prize and leave us alone.”
Jared Kushner, the latest victim of Oslo syndrome
The bug has not gone away, and no vaccine has been found. New victims keep showing up, oblivious to their affliction and ready to forge peace. The latest patient appears to be none other than Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. Kushner’s official government title is “United States Special Envoy for Peace Missions.” Never has a patient embraced his affliction so wholeheartedly and energetically.
For Kushner, the first symptoms appeared with the “Peace to Prosperity” plan presented between 2019 and 2020. It overshadowed all previous plans in the sheer scope of its dreams and hallucinations. The plan envisaged resolving not only the conflict between Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, but also all outstanding issues with Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan.
Its grandiose size did not prevent it from meeting the same fate as its less ambitious predecessors. Historical lore suggests the plan somehow helped bring about the Abraham Accords, but those accords, much like the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty decades earlier, were local initiatives that the US merely helped facilitate in their later stages.
In October 2025, the bug led Kushner to meet with representatives of Hamas during negotiations over a Gaza ceasefire. A few weeks ago, he met again with senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya. The official line is that the talks are necessary to discuss the details of Hamas handing over power to an independent body. One has to be extremely naive and completely ignorant of precedent to believe that Hamas would hold direct negotiations simply to give up power and hand over its weapons.
Instead, Hamas gains legitimacy and a seat at the table in Gaza’s future governing authority. Kushner is yet another victim struck by the Oslo Syndrome, believing that he can convince a genocidal movement bent on destroying Israel to become a partner for peace.
“Every difficult problem has a solution that is elegant, simple, and wrong,” goes the old saying. Until the world understands that no simple solutions exist for the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Oslo Syndrome will continue to claim victims on both the Left and the Right. It will take decades of painstaking work to rid the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank and Gaza of toxicity, to build infrastructure, and to educate children not to hate Jews.
Only then can there be viable paths to peace – whether based on two, three, or five states or territories. Peace is not an accord, a plan, or a declaration; it is the hard labor of people who genuinely want peace.
The author lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. He is a founding member of San Francisco Voice for Israel.