Oslo Accords Signed
Israel and the PLO recognised each other in September 1993 after secret talks in a Norwegian farmhouse. The negotiation happened because the official one in Washington was going nowhere. Norwegian academics and diplomats set up back-channel meetings in Oslo between Israeli academics and PLO officials, which became official as the terms took shape, and neither the Americans nor most of either delegation's own governments knew until it was almost done. The Declaration of Principles was signed on the White House lawn on 13 September, with Rabin and Arafat shaking hands and Rabin visibly reluctant. What was agreed was a framework rather than a settlement: mutual recognition, a Palestinian Authority with limited self-government in Gaza and Jericho first and other areas later, a five-year interim period, and negotiations on the hardest questions — Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, borders, water — to begin within three years and conclude by 1999. Deferring those questions is what the agreement is criticised for from both directions. Oslo II in 1995 divided the West Bank into areas A, B and C with different degrees of Palestinian and Israeli control, an arrangement meant to last five years and still in place three decades later. Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli opponent of the accords in November 1995. Settlement construction continued throughout, the Camp David talks failed in 2000, and the second intifada followed. Rabin, Peres and Arafat shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. The name has since become shorthand for a process rather than a document, and for the argument about why it failed — whether the framework was sound and destroyed by assassination, settlement growth and suicide bombing, or whether deferring Jerusalem, refugees and borders for five years made failure structural. Both cases are made by people who were in the room.
- Year: 1993 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
