The Oslo Accords
The weakness of the PLO after the Gulf War,
the stalemate in the Washington talks, and fear
of radical Islam brought the Rabin government
to reverse the long-standing Israeli refusal to
negotiate with the PLO. Consequently, Israel
initiated secret negotiations in Oslo, Norway
directly with PLO representatives who had
been excluded from the Madrid and
Washington talks. These negotiations
produced the Israel-PLO Declaration of
Principles, which was signed in Washington in
September 1993.
The Declaration of Principles was based on
mutual recognition of Israel and the PLO. It
established that Israel would withdraw from
the Gaza Strip and Jericho, with additional
withdrawals from further unspecified areas of the
West Bank during a five-year interim
period. During this period, the PLO formed a
Palestinian Authority (PA) with "self-governing"
(i.e. municipal) powers in the areas from which
Israeli forces were redeployed. In January
1996, elections were held for a Palestinian
Legislative Council and for the presidency of the
PA, which was won handily by Yasir Arafat. The key
issues such as the extent of the
territories to be ceded by Israel, the nature of
the Palestinian entity to be established, the
future of the Israeli settlements and settlers,
water rights, the resolution of the refugee problem
and the status of Jerusalem were set aside to be
discussed in final status talks.
The PLO accepted this deeply flawed agreement with
Israel because it was weak and had
little diplomatic support in the Arab world. Both
Islamist radicals and local leaders in the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip challenged Arafat's
leadership. Yet only Arafat had the
prestige and national legitimacy to conclude a
negotiated agreement with Israel.
The Oslo accords set up a negotiating process
without specifying an outcome. The process
was supposed to have been completed by May 1999.
There were many delays due to
Israel's reluctance to relinquish control over the
occupied territories, unwillingness to make the
kinds of concessions necessary to reach a final
status agreement, and periodic outbursts of
violence by Palestinian opponents of the Oslo
process, especially HAMAS and Jihad. During
the Likud's return to power in 1996-99, Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu avoided
engaging seriously in the Oslo process, which he
distrusted and fundamentally opposed.
A Labor-led coalition government led by Prime
Minister Ehud Barak came to power in 1999.
Barak at first concentrated on reaching a peace
agreement with Syria. When he failed to
convince the Syrians to sign an agreement that
would restore to them less than all the area of
the Golan Heights occupied by Israel in 1967, Barak
turned his attention to the Palestinian
track.
During the protracted interim period of the Oslo
process, Israel's Labor and Likud
governments built new settlements in the occupied
territories, expanded existing settlements
and constructed a network of bypass roads to enable
Israeli settlers to travel from their
settlements to Israel proper without passing
through Palestinian-inhabited areas. These
projects were understood by most Palestinians as
marking out territory that Israel sought to
annex in the final settlement. The Oslo accords
contained no mechanism to block these
unilateral actions or Israel's violations of
Palestinian human and civil rights in areas under its
control.
Final status negotiations between Israel and the
Palestinians were to have begun in mid-1996,
but only got underway in earnest in mid-2000. By
then, a series of painfully negotiated Israeli
interim withdrawals left the Palestinian Authority
with direct or partial control of some 40
percent of the West Bank and 65 percent of the Gaza
Strip. The Palestinian areas were
surrounded by Israeli-controlled territory with
entry and exit controlled by Israel.
The Palestinians' expectations were not
accommodated by the Oslo accords. The Oslo
process required the Palestinians to make their
principal compromises at the beginning,
whereas Israel's principal compromises beyond
recognition of the PLO were to be made in
the final status talks.
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