It’s been 25 years since the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel signed off on the Oslo Accords, an agreement that was intended to reset relations between Palestine and Israel, offering mutual recognition in the hope that a lasting peace could be built and endure.

On the lawn of the White House and under the smiling approval of the then-United States president Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands to symbolise a new beginning.

Sadly, a quarter of a century on, the lofty ideals offered by the Oslo Accords now are a distant memory and we live in a reality in Palestine that sees Arabs and occupiers more divided and segregated than before — one where Palestinians’ rights are being usurped daily by the actions of Israel, and where that right-wing Zionist cabal is more emboldened than ever before on the basis of their backers in Washington.

The fundamental tenet of the Oslo Accords was to formalise a two-state process, one where Palestinians recognised Israel’s right to exist and one where the government of Israel would work with the Palestinian people to set up its own government, responsible for its own affairs, security, territory and people.

Alas, that now seems so principled and so far removed from the current realities facing Palestinians.

How can Oslo be now deemed a success, when occupation forces gun down scores of Palestinians who try to leave or protest at the barrier that keeps them enslaved in the Gaza Strip? If Oslo was meant to set out the integrity of all Palestinian territories, then the enforced isolation and open imprisonment imposed on those living in the Gaza Strip belies any such notion.

If the Oslo Accords were meant to bring an end to the Israeli policy of colonisation of Palestinian lands, then the reality on the ground in occupied East Jerusalem carves a gaping hole in that notion too. Palestinian lands and holdings have been razed and bulldozed, taken over in a building binge to provide new colonists apartments built on the olive groves of generations of Arabs.

If the Oslo Accords were meant to put every Palestinian on an equal footing with Israelis, then they have been an unmitigated failure. It is Palestinian prisoners who are held on rolling administrative detention orders for protesting their plight.

And it is the Israeli soldiers who go without judicial sanction when they gun down Palestinian protesters or kill them in the alleys of their own homeland.

If the Oslo Accords were meant to formalise a two-state solution, then naming occupied Jerusalem as the sole capital for Israelis is an insult to that agreement of 25 years ago. Israel doesn’t want a two-state solution.