“The Dreamers of Lost Dreams”

Abstract

In this article, I discuss how several documentaries and films by Amos Gitai provide primary oral and written sources to write a history from below of the Oslo Accords and of their demise. In the first part of the article, I discuss sources from a set of interconnected documentaries (Give Peace a Chance and Arena of Murder) filmed between 1994 and 1996; in the second, I focus on the movie Rabin, The Last Day (2015), and I explore sources from the so-called Gitai-Rabin archive deposited at the Bibliothèque National de France. Overall, this material brings us the voices of various groups within Israeli society and among Palestinians, revealing the complexity of the issues on the negotiating table, and the cultural, social, and political questions that the peace process unleashed.