Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin negotiated the first substantial agreement between Palestinians and Israelis at Oslo in 1993.
The Oslo Accords called for mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO and a five-year transitional period during which Israel would gradually remove its troops from major Palestinian population centers. At the end of the transitional period, an agreement would be reached based on UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, which call for the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territories occupied in 1967. In return, Arafat promised to end anti-Israeli violence.
However, the Oslo process failed to lead to a definitive peace agreement, and frustrated Palestinians began and uprising against the occupation in September 2000. Since then, the situation continues to deteriorate and the various efforts towards peace seem to have stalled.
Key Documents
2003
The 1993 Oslo peace accords have generated intense criticism. Yet former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres argues in the
International Herald Tribune that the accords are valuable for establishing a framework for negotiations.
2002
The most important aspect of the Oslo Accords dealt with economic policy: No peace could endure without cooperation around economic development. Muriel Mirak-Weissbach argues that powerful Israeli interests and their US-based allies sabotaged Oslo through economic policies handled by the World Bank. (Executive Intelligence Review)
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres believes the self-rule agreement that grants Palestinian autonomy, as negotiated in the 1993 Oslo accords, places the Palestinians in a worse situation. "We have to give them equal rights, equal recognition," says Peres. (
Associated Press)
2000
Legal Advisor to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East peace negotiations between 1991 and 1993, Francis Boyle discloses that the Israeli government had presented the Oslo document to the Palestinian Delegation in 1992, but was rejected by the Delegation "because it obviously constituted a Bantustan." (
National Press Club)
1995
The legal adviser to the Israeli Foreign Ministry the time of the Oslo Accords, Joel Singer, reveals to Ha'aretz how the agreement was hastily crafted, signed in a hurry, thus resulting in its own contradictions.
The Palestinians expected Oslo to put an end to Israeli occupation and domination, and for Israelis, the Agreement was supposed to mean, first and foremost, an end to terrorism. A year and a half later, the Israeli-Palestinian war is as hotly on as at any time in the past decades. And on both sides, the leaderships which committed themselves to Oslo are steadily weakening. (Other Israel)
