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Jeff Ferrell, Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy (New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press, 2001).

David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000)

Leo Panitch, Renewing Socialism: Democracy, Strategy, and Imagination (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001)

Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, BEN LADEN: LA VÉRITÉ INTERDITE (Paris: Denoël, 2001)

In his retrospective declaration of literary intent, "Why I Write," George Orwell recalled that "What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art."1 This candidly programmatic statement was written in 1946 and the decade referred to brings us back to the pivotal moment of 1936.

Perhaps it is best to start with an anecdote. I can vividly recall that surprising evening of June 23, 1992 when the Israeli Labor Party, headed by Yitzhak Rabin, won the election against the incumbent Likud Party, headed by then-Prime Minister Yizhak Shamir. I was sitting in a politicized Jerusalem pub that was especially overcrowded that evening since many Jerusalemites had chosen to wait for the election results over pitchers of beer. At around 9 p.m. the exit poll results appeared on the TV screen.

Social revolutions are massive progressive processes confronting from below the whole arrangement of power structures. If success- ful, they involve profound changes in class relations, as well as changes in the material and symbolic dimensions of individual and collective life. Social revolutions are the contingent outcome of political, ideological, social, and economic factors at both the national and international levels, resulting from political agency. Revolutionary situations tend to develop when: 1) political oppres- sion and illegitimate rule (i.e.

...Anyone can understand that war and conquest without and the encroachment of despotism within mutually support each other; that money and people are habitually taken at will from a people of slaves to bring others beneath the same yoke; and that conversely war furnishes a pretext for exactions of money and... for keeping large armies constantly afoot.... In a word, anyone can see that aggressive rulers wage war at least as much on their subjects as on their enemies, and that the conquering nation is left no better off than the conquered.

Over the last few years a change of mood has affected German politics with regard to the country's "eastern problem." Until recently it was generally addressed by politicians with bluff confidence, expressing a sanguine faith that the combination of marketisation and state subsidies would rapidly modernise the region. But to an increasingly sceptical eastern electorate, such affirmations of a swift and sure revival are beginning to sound as empty as the promissory slogans of a previous era. Some politicians now feel obliged to adopt a more cautious tone.

I want to look at the text of the Oslo Accords, and to ask whether the intentions of Israel and the Palestinians should have been clear to all concerned at the start-and not just to a handful of critics, most notably Edward Said. I will then see if the Oslo Accords shed light on Israel's response to the Al Aqsa Intifada. Finally, I'll address "What Next?"