In November 1993, on the lawns of the White House, Israel and the Palestinians signed the Oslo peace agreement. A year later, Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of this historic achievement. In retrospect, it’s easy to say that the decision of the five-person Nobel committee was premature. At the time, however, many people around the world were optimistic that the century-old Mideast conflict was on the way to being resolved. In Chronicle of a War Foretold, Norman Spector documents how the promise of peace in the Mideast gave way to the realities of death and destruction. Based on first-hand experience with the major players, from the Rabin assassination through 9/11 and the war on Afghanistan, Spector analyzes how the same forces and beliefs that led to the downward spiral in relations between Israelis and Palestinians spawned the bombing of the Twin Towers in Manhattan.