Sitting on the South Lawn of the White House on Sept. 13, 1993, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Under a brilliant, cloudless sky, an uncomfortable Israeli prime minister and a beaming Palestinian leader clasped hands in pursuit of peace as an exuberant U.S. president embraced the duo, smiling like a proud parent.

The occasion was the signing of the first agreement of what came to be known as the Oslo Accords, which established an interim framework that, if implemented successfully, might actually lead to final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Even with all the challenges that lay ahead, I was convinced that the Arab-Israeli peace process was now irreversible.

Efraim Halevy, who in just a few years would become the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, would later write to me questioning my faith in that irreversibility and fearing the confrontation that could follow. Halevy’s analysis proved all too prescient. Today, 30 years after that historic day, what remains of the spirit and much of the substance of the Oslo agreement lies bloodied, buried, and betrayed across an Israeli-Palestinian landscape that seems to leave little room for hope and none for illusions.

The most right-wing and fundamentalist government in Israel’s history sits in Jerusalem, committed to the annexation of the West Bank in everything but name only, as well as expanding settlements and enabling settler terror and violence against Palestinians. The Palestinian national movement is deeply divided, resembling a kind of Noah’s Ark where there are two of everything—constitutions, governments, security services, patrons, and even visions of Palestine. In Gaza, Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad plan and encourage terror attacks against Israelis, while in Ramallah, a weak and discredited Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority is unable or unwilling to control terror emanating from the northern West Bank.

Yet the lessons of Oslo still have some relevance, whatever the future holds for Israelis and Palestinians. Having had a ringside seat during those fateful years, four key takeaways stand out for me personally.

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1. Interim can’t be final.

On paper, the Oslo Accords seemed logical and compelling. Territory would be transferred gradually to the Palestinian Authority in exchange for its assumption of security responsibilities. As we’ll see, the perverse dance between the occupier and the occupied would doom this approach. But it might have survived had the two sides been willing to make it clear from the outset what final outcome the interim period was supposed to produce, and then taken mutually reciprocal actions on the ground to prepare for it.

For Palestinians, that final outcome was an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital. For Israelis, it was TBD—to be determined. Driven by domestic politics and their own doubts about the Palestinians’ capacity for statehood and what it might mean for Israeli security, neither Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin nor his successor Shimon Peres were prepared to commit to any agreed outcome—even as an aspirational vision. You can look long and hard for the term “Palestinian state” in the Oslo documents, but you won’t find it. It would take another half-dozen years before the idea of statehood worked its way into Israel’s negotiating assumptions. Not until 2001, as U.S. President Bill Clinton left office, did the United States formally and publicly articulate support for a two-state solution.

With no clear end goal to work toward, the process floundered. By 1999, not a single Oslo deadline had been met. Negotiations on permanent status had begun three times but produced nothing, and neither Israelis nor Palestinians could see where things were headed. But both had grown weary and wary of a seemingly never-ending interim process punctuated by Palestinian terrorist attacks and Israeli settlement expansion.

The result was the situation we have now: a strategic cul-de-sac in which the two sides are stuck and the gaps on issues such as borders and Jerusalem are as wide as the Grand Canyon, with no shared vision and no faith that one will ever materialize.

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2. Leaders—and not just their negotiators—have to be willing to yield.

It seems like another world now given the state of relations between Israelis and Palestinians today, but back then, the negotiators for both sides actually worked hard together to solve problems and manage the ones they couldn’t. It was less so for the leaders who had to deal with the politics of the negotiating process and defend what they could—and punt and parry the issues they couldn’t.

In the early Oslo years before Rabin’s murder in November 1995, the Israelis and Palestinians doing the negotiating laughed, yelled, and cried together against the backdrop of a roller coaster environment that included agreements, missed deadlines, Palestinian and Israeli terror attacks, and continuing frustrations and suspicions. They became friends. I saw security officials from both sides—hard men with blood on their hands—engage with one another with respect and even affection. At one negotiating session at the Laromme Hotel in Jerusalem, an exhausted West Bank security chief Jabril Rajoub laid down in the same bed with Israel Defense Forces’ central commander Shaul Mofaz, jokingly pretending to take a nap.

For the negotiators, Oslo was not about zero-sum advantage but mutual benefit. That view was best embodied by Oslo’s two lead negotiators, Uri Savir and Abu Ala (both of whom have since died), who would become fast friends. Interviewing them both in 2013 on the 25th anniversary of Oslo, that sense of partnership was front and center. Abu Ala, also known as Ahmed Qureia,  opined about the promise Oslo held: After decades of bitter struggle, during which both saw each other only through a barrel of a gun, they realized that it is possible to overcome hatred, misgivings, denial, and their own red lines. Neither man was a dreamer, but both saw the opportunity that Oslo offered to better understand the needs of the other and to humanize the adversary.

I sometimes thought that, had the decision-making been left to Abu Ala and Savir, Oslo would have had a better chance of delivering. But in the hard and cruel world of Israeli and Palestinian politics, leaders had their own personal and political constraints with which to reckon.

For Rabin, dealing with the Palestinian issue was never his first choice. It is true that as defense minister during the First Intifada, Rabin began to understand that the conflict had no military solution, and by the spring of 1993, he had reached the conclusion that no one—not Jordan,