The Oslo Accords, 1993 and 1995

What happened

On Sept. 13, 1993, the Declaration of Principles was signed on the White House lawn, with President Clinton hosting. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat shook hands at the ceremony; the document itself was signed by PLO negotiator Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. ² It came with letters of mutual recognition attached: the PLO recognized Israel's right to exist, and Israel recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. ² Neither side had done that before.

The deal, which came to be called Oslo I after the Norwegian city where negotiators had met in secret, set a five-year interim period during which a permanent peace settlement was supposed to be negotiated, covering Jerusalem, refugees, borders, and settlements, questions the interim agreement didn't try to answer. ² A follow-on agreement created the Palestinian Authority as a body to run day-to-day Palestinian affairs in the meantime. ²

Oslo II, signed in 1995, filled in the details. It divided the West Bank into three zones. Area A gave the Palestinian Authority full civil and security control, mostly in cities and towns. Area B gave the Palestinian Authority civil control with Israel and the Palestinian Authority sharing security. Area C, some 60% of the West Bank, stayed under full Israeli military and civil control. The agreement anticipated gradually shifting Area C to Palestinian jurisdiction over time; that transfer never happened at anything close to the scale envisioned. ² Oslo II also set up a Palestinian Legislative Council, elected in January 1996, to replace the Authority. ²

On Nov. 4, 1995, Rabin was assassinated at a peace rally in Tel Aviv attended by more than 100,000 people. The shooter was Yigal Amir, a 25-year-old Israeli law student and religious nationalist who opposed the Oslo process and believed withdrawing from the West Bank would betray Jewish claims to the land. Amir invoked a Jewish legal concept, din rodef, the law of the pursuer, to argue Rabin's policies endangered Jewish lives and that killing him was therefore justified. Rabin died of blood loss and collapsed lungs within hours. ³

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres took over as prime minister and called early elections for May 1996. He lost narrowly to Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government slowed and, in critical respects, reversed momentum on the Oslo process. ³ The process limped on for several more years before collapsing for good after the Camp David Summit failed in July 2000 and the Second Intifada broke out that fall. ¹ Looking back at the whole decade, the record isn't a single clean failure so much as a string of them: commitments both sides didn't fully keep, political opposition on each side strong enough to slow or block implementation, no real progress on the final status questions the interim period was supposed to lead to, and periodic violence that eroded public trust faster than negotiators could rebuild it. ¹

Why it still matters

Oslo is the reason there is a Palestinian Authority at all, and the reason the West Bank is carved into Areas A, B, and C rather than governed as a single unit. Anyone reading about a West Bank checkpoint, a settlement outpost, or a PA police raid is reading about the world Oslo built, whether or not the article says so.

It also marks the last time Israeli and Palestinian leadership signed something that both sides called a step toward peace and meant it, at least at the moment of signing. The failure of what came after, the assassination of the Israeli prime minister who brought it about, the collapse of the follow-on talks, the intifada that followed, is why "Oslo" gets invoked on both sides of Israeli and Palestinian politics as a cautionary tale rather than a template. Israelis who opposed further withdrawals point to the years that followed Oslo as proof that land-for-peace didn't buy peace. Palestinians who wanted statehood point to Area C, still under Israeli control three decades later, as proof the interim arrangement became permanent by default.

The words you'll hear

Declaration of Principles. The formal name of the September 1993 agreement, sometimes called Oslo I, that started the process. ¹

PA / Palestinian Authority. The governing body Oslo created to administer Palestinian civil affairs, first in Gaza and Jericho, later expanded across parts of the West Bank. ²

Area A, Area B, Area C. The three-tier division of the West Bank set up by Oslo II in 1995, based on which side controls civil administration and security in a given area. Area C, still under full Israeli control, covers the majority of the West Bank's land. ²

The Rabin assassination. Shorthand for Nov. 4, 1995, when Yigal Amir killed the prime minister behind the Oslo Accords, at a rally supporting the peace process. ³

Second Intifada. The Palestinian uprising that broke out in the fall of 2000 after the Camp David Summit failed, generally treated as the point at which the Oslo process ended for good. ¹