Oslo Accords

The accords grew out of a secret back channel in Oslo between Israeli negotiators and PLO officials, while formal talks in Washington stalled. On 13 September 1993, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn. In the accompanying exchange of letters, the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist and renounced violence, and Israel recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people — the first such mutual recognition between the two parties.

The Declaration of Principles set a five-year transitional period, beginning with limited Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and Jericho. The follow-up Interim Agreement of 28 September 1995 (‘Oslo II’) created the Palestinian Authority, provided for Palestinian elections, and divided the West Bank into Areas A and B under Palestinian civil administration and Area C — about 60 percent of the territory — under full Israeli control. The hardest questions were deliberately deferred to ‘permanent status’ talks: Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security arrangements, and borders.

The process unraveled before those talks bore fruit. Rabin was assassinated in November 1995; settlement expansion continued through the interim years; the Camp David summit of July 2000 ended without agreement; and the Second Intifada soon followed. The deadline for a final settlement passed in 1999, yet the accords’ machinery — the Palestinian Authority and the Area A/B/C division — still structures daily life in the West Bank, an interim arrangement that has outlasted its intended lifespan by a quarter-century.

Sources

• The Oslo Accords and the Arab-Israeli Peace Process — U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian
• Oslo Accords — Encyclopaedia Britannica