A Negotiating Table Built on Unequal Ground: The Madrid Conference 1991 and Palestine
On 30 October 1991, the ornate halls of the Royal Palace in Madrid hosted what was billed as a historic breakthrough: the first face-to-face, multilateral peace conference between Israel and its Arab neighbors, including, for the first time in any formal international forum, a Palestinian delegation. Convened under the co-sponsorship of the United States and the Soviet Union, the Madrid Conference 1991 emerged from a world reshaped by the Gulf War — a moment when the administration of President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker judged that American leverage over the region had never been greater. Baker had spent months in shuttle diplomacy across Arab capitals and Jerusalem, pressing all parties to attend. The Palestinians arrived, but the terms under which they did so would cast a long shadow over every negotiation that followed.
The Conditions of Palestinian Participation: No PLO, No Jerusalem
The Palestinian delegation did not arrive as a sovereign representation of its own people. The United States and Israel had refused to permit the Palestine Liberation Organization — the body Palestinians had recognized as their sole legitimate representative since 1974 — to participate openly. Instead, Palestinians were required to attend under a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, their representatives formally drawn from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and explicitly excluding anyone from Jerusalem, any Palestinian in exile, and any figure publicly identified with PLO leadership.
As Rashid Khalidi documents in The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, these structural constraints were not incidental. They reflected a consistent pattern in which Palestinians were admitted to negotiations only after accepting conditions that pre-emptively narrowed what those negotiations could achieve. The framing of the conference — built on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which address Palestinian rights only indirectly through the language of “refugees” and “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” — left the core question of Palestinian self-determination formally outside the terms of reference. Khalidi argues that this architecture reflected a foundational weakness in Palestinian diplomatic positioning: the absence of juridical statehood meant the PLO and its representatives were perpetually negotiating for the right to negotiate, rather than from a position of recognized standing.
Haidar Abdel-Shafi and the Palestinian Madrid Speech
Despite these constraints, the Palestinian delegation that entered the conference hall was led by one of the most principled figures in Palestinian public life: Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi, a physician and longtime political leader from Gaza and founder of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in Gaza. His opening address to the conference — delivered on 31 October 1991 and preserved in the UN UNISPAL documentary record — remains one of the most carefully argued statements of Palestinian rights in the diplomatic canon.
Abdel-Shafi opened by grounding the Palestinian claim not in grievance alone but in international law and shared humanity. He described the Palestinian people as “the architects of our own future,” acknowledged the suffering of the Jewish people while insisting on the distinction between that history and the dispossession of Palestinians, and called explicitly for an end to Israeli settlements, for the release of Palestinian prisoners, and for Palestinian sovereignty. He framed the goal plainly: a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem — the territories occupied by Israel since 1967. He did not equivocate on these positions. The speech, recorded and archived through UNISPAL, stands as the clearest articulation of what the Palestinian delegation brought to Madrid: principled, legally grounded demands that the conference’s own architecture was not designed to accommodate.
What Madrid Rejected — and Oslo Absorbed
The bilateral talks that followed the Madrid opening produced little of substance. Israeli delegations, operating under the Shamir government, refused to halt settlement construction or engage on the question of Jerusalem’s status. The multilateral tracks — covering water, refugees, economic development, and regional security — moved separately and slowly. By 1992, the formal Madrid process had effectively stalled.
What replaced it was the Oslo channel: secret, bilateral talks between PLO officials and Israeli representatives, facilitated by Norway and concluded in August 1993. As Khalidi and the Institute for Palestine Studies have both analyzed extensively, Oslo inverted the logic of Abdel-Shafi’s Madrid positions in critical ways. Where Madrid had at least established the framework of UN resolutions and international law as the formal reference point, Oslo produced an interim agreement that deferred the hardest questions — Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, borders, sovereignty — to a final-status negotiation that has never arrived. The PLO, desperate for recognition and exhausted by the First Intifada, accepted terms that the principled Madrid delegation had refused to take for granted. The settlement enterprise, which Abdel-Shafi had demanded be halted as a precondition for meaningful talks, continued and accelerated throughout the Oslo years.
Madrid’s Unfinished Question
The Madrid Conference 1991 is often framed in Western diplomatic histories as the moment the Middle East peace process “began.” For Palestinians, it is more precisely the moment the contradiction at the heart of that process became visible: a negotiating table that required Palestinians to accept, as a condition of entry, limitations that foreclosed the outcomes they sought. Haidar Abdel-Shafi and his delegation arrived with clarity. The architecture surrounding them was designed for something else. That gap — between what was said at Madrid and what was structurally possible within its terms — is essential context for understanding not only Oslo, but the decades of impasse that followed.
Sources
- Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Beacon Press, 2006)
- UN UNISPAL — Documentary record of the Madrid Peace Conference, including Haidar Abdel-Shafi’s address, 31 October 1991: https://www.un.org/unispal
- Institute for Palestine Studies — Analysis of the Madrid and Oslo processes
- US National Archives, Baker-Bush diplomatic correspondence: https://www.archives.gov
- UN Security Council Resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973)
