I sat in the shower, rosemary shampoo in my hair, water falling on me, replaying my last exchange with New Guy. Since I started dating at fourteen, I\u2019ve had more breakups than I care to admit. They\u2019ve come with a reason\u2013 a clear reason X guy and I aren\u2019t together. There was the possessive guy who couldn\u2019t stand it when I made eye contact with another man, or the guy who left me for the petite girl who looked just like me minus thirty pounds. With New Guy, it felt frustratingly vague. Listening to Rosalia\u2019s Lux album on repeat, hoping my imported Colombian shampoo would absorb into my scalp and fix all my problems, I was overcome by intense sympathy for Bill Clinton.\n<\/p>\n
Okay, hear me out. I know I lost you there, and, really, that\u2019s more about general lack of understanding of the Oslo Accords than my abrupt left turn into geopolitics. I\u2019ll elaborate.\n<\/p>\n
The year is 1993. Israel didn\u2019t officially want to negotiate with the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), the effective government of the Palestinian people. The PLO wanted that maybe less. So, the Oslo Accords began in secret, in a secluded manor in the Norwegian countryside, giving both sides a chance to explore the relationship without the immediate pressure of public opinion or political backlash. Which is probably why I never met New Guy\u2019s friends.\n<\/p>\n
In August 1993, after eight months of heavy petting, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat were ready to define the relationship and make it public, which meant bringing in the world\u2019s most powerful mediator: President of the United States, Bill Clinton.\n<\/p>\n
The Scandinavian romance novel that were the Oslo Accords, the most significant breakthrough we\u2019ve had to date in the Israeli\/Palestinian conflict, happened without the United States in the room. Feeling pumped and excited to be a part of this blossoming new relationship, Bill put all of his personal and political capital into bringing both sides together for an engagement party. It was then that on US soil, Rabin and Arafat, two people who had spent their entire lives as enemies, shook hands.<\/p>\n
\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/dims.apnews-400x250.webp\")
\n\t\tIsraeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, left, and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, right, shake hands as President Bill Clinton presides over the ceremony marking the signing of the 1993 peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians on the White House lawn, Sept. 13, 1993. (AP Photo\/Ron Edmonds)<\/p>\n
Imagine being Bill Clinton for a moment. No, not that part. Not the part you\u2019re thinking of. Imagine being President Bill Clinton on September 13th, 1993, watching one of the world\u2019s most controversial, oversimplified, misunderstood conflicts come to a tentative end on the South Lawn of the White House. After that, Bill would spend seven years trying to turn the engagement into a marriage. This could land him a Nobel Prize, or at least a Best Man speech. That night, Bill and I went to sleep laying on the chest of the man\/geopolitical quagmire we were invested in and telling ourselves bedtime stories of what the future held.\n<\/p>\n
Except, then someone left. They decided they didn\u2019t want the future they had spent a couple of months\/the better part of a decade negotiating toward. Yasser Arafat, for reasons people still argue about, I guess, was just not feeling it. Depending on who you ask, Arafat walked away from the best offer he\u2019d ever get, or from bare minimum behavior. Either way, Bill woke up to an empty bed without the future he\u2019d been imagining.\n<\/p>\n
How do you make sense of someone leaving when the explanation doesn\u2019t feel coherent to what you\u2019ve experienced? That\u2019s the question Bill, the world, and I have had to grapple with. At least my breakup didn\u2019t define international affairs for the next three decades, though it\u2019s too soon to tell.\n<\/p>\n
Understanding is not a prerequisite for accepting someone\u2019s decision. I was completely blindsided, but I accepted the simple truth that no is no. Bill did not. In his defense, there was much more at stake. When Arafat declined the proposed framework that had been negotiated for years, Bill tried to make it work, hoping Arafat would seize the opportunity or, at least, commit to working on the relationship. The talks collapsed in 2000, and within months, the Second Intifada broke out, igniting a larger wave of violence in the region, and, in Bill\u2019s heart.\n<\/p>\n
Relationships change you, no matter how short. If you come out of something completely unchanged, I don\u2019t believe you let yourself open up to it at all. Likewise, the Oslo Accords set a framework, a temporary arrangement meant to create a sense of stability as negotiations moved forward. Imagine breaking up with someone but deciding to share the apartment. You get the kitchen for meal prep on Mondays, they get it on Tuesdays, and you share the living room to fold your laundry. That\u2019s essentially what Oslo did. The breakup happened. The logistics didn\u2019t. The West Bank was divided by the governing bodies into areas A, B, and C, which seemed like a good idea at the time. It was meant to last five years. With neither party at the table, the interim map became a practical reality.\n<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the irony of the breakup. Unprocessed, it led both sides to greater instability, giving us an emotional landscape too convoluted for any therapist to make sense of. New Guy was probably glad I never left anything at his place. The Oslo framework left millions of Palestinians and hundreds of thousands of Israelis living inside an arrangement that was never meant to become permanent. However abrupt New Guy\u2019s ending was, at least it wasn\u2019t that.\n<\/p>\n
Bill still talks about that breakup to this day. I think he truly believed peace in the Middle East was a defining aspect of his legacy. Not the\u2026other stuff. He thought both sides had the same long-term goals. I did, too.\n<\/p>\n
I still don\u2019t understand why New Guy left, no matter how much I remind myself that the reason doesn\u2019t matter. The hardest part is realizing that the future you started to imagine won\u2019t metabolize, which is probably how Bill felt as his dreams of world peace were shattered. Still, he got a presidential library out of it. Me? I got back on Hinge.\n\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tJessica Ghitis is a Jewish-Colombian writer and educator based in Los Angeles. An alum of the American Film Institute Conservatory, she swapped the traditional entertainment track for something far less scripted after the October 7 attacks, blending storytelling and advocacy to push for sharper and more nuanced coverage of Israel in Latin American media. She collaborated with networks like NTN24, Telemundo, and Univision\u00a0to amplify the voices of hostages and their families during the war, including organizing delegations of hostage families to meet with American politicians and press.
\n
\nJessica has worked with organizations such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Fuente Latina to combat antisemitism, and has taught Hebrew school while serving on the Executive Committee for ANU: A New Union in the World Zionist Congress.
\n
\nShe is an IPF Atid Charles Bronfman 2025 Convener and currently works with Hayes Brothers Films and First-Look, a platform helping screenwriters get discovered. On her Times of Israel blog, she writes about geopolitics and modern dating with equal obsession\u2014unofficially calling herself \u201cCarrie Bradshaw of the Middle East.\u201d
\n
\nA historical fiction writer, Jessica believes stories don\u2019t just reflect reality\u2014they shape it. Still, she\u2019d often prefer fictional drama to the real kind.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I sat in the shower, rosemary shampoo in my hair, water falling on me, replaying my last exchange…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191843,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[9581,10856,9860,57221,57222,39437,17914,4314,50416,2338,37,11783,7376,21445,49,28456,6905,18886],"class_list":["post-191842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-american-jewry","tag-annexation","tag-arab-israelis","tag-blogs-and-blogging","tag-couples","tag-dating","tag-east-jerusalem","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-home-demolitions","tag-intifada","tag-israel","tag-israel-us-relations","tag-israeli-foreign-policy","tag-jewish-arab-violence","tag-middle-east","tag-oslo-accords","tag-west-bank","tag-yitzhak-rabin"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116870338616968998","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191842\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}