The Oslo Accords (1993-1995)

The Oslo Accords are two agreements, the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (13 September 1993) and the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement, known as Oslo II (28 September 1995), signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization to create a five-year transitional Palestinian government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip while the two sides negotiated a permanent settlement. They are the reason a Palestinian Authority exists at all, and the reason the West Bank is today divided into Areas A, B and C. The permanent settlement they promised within five years has never been reached.

What they are

The Declaration of Principles (DOP), sometimes called Oslo I, is a nine-article framework agreement. It did not resolve the conflict; it set a procedure for resolving it. It created a Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority, later formalized as the Palestinian Authority, and scheduled Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank city of Jericho as a first step. Oslo II, the far longer and more detailed follow-on agreement signed two years later, divided the West Bank into three zones: Area A (full Palestinian civil and security control, the main population centers), Area B (Palestinian civil control, Israeli security control) and Area C (full Israeli civil and security control, roughly 60 percent of the West Bank’s land, including the Jordan Valley and settlements). See what Areas A, B and C actually are. Both texts are on the public record: the DOP at Yale’s Avalon Project and Oslo II through the UN’s own treaty archive.

Who signed, and who did not

The DOP was signed on the White House lawn on 13 September 1993 by Mahmoud Abbas for the PLO and Shimon Peres for Israel, witnessed by US Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, with President Bill Clinton presiding. Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s prime minister, and Yasser Arafat, the PLO’s chairman, shook hands afterward in the photograph that defined the moment. Two days earlier, on 9 September 1993, the two men had exchanged letters that made the ceremony possible: Arafat wrote that the PLO “recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security,” renounced terrorism, and declared that the clauses of the PLO Charter calling for Israel’s destruction were “inoperative”; Rabin wrote that Israel recognized the PLO as “the representative of the Palestinian people.” Oslo II, signed 28 September 1995, carried the same core signatories. Neither Hamas nor Palestinian Islamic Jihad was party to either agreement, and both rejected it outright, a rejection Hamas has never formally reversed; see what the Hamas 2017 document did and did not change.

Why it happened

The accords grew out of a secret channel, not the official track. Public negotiations opened at the 1991 Madrid Conference went nowhere. In parallel, Norwegian diplomats Terje Rød-Larsen and Mona Juul, backed by Foreign Minister Johan Jørgen Holst, hosted quiet Israeli-PLO talks in Oslo starting January 1993, run by academics and mid-level officials rather than principals, which is what let both sides negotiate without the political cost of being seen to negotiate. The conditions were ripe on both sides. The PLO’s 1990 backing of Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War had cost it Gulf state funding and Arab legitimacy, leaving Arafat weaker and more willing to deal. Israel’s electorate had put Rabin’s Labor government in office in 1992 on a platform of pursuing a negotiated settlement, after six years of the First Intifada had made clear that indefinite direct rule over the Palestinian population had a real cost. Both leaderships concluded a phased, mutual-recognition deal beat the alternative of open-ended confrontation.

What the text actually says

The DOP’s Article I states the goal plainly: to establish a Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority “for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, for a transitional period not exceeding five years, leading to a permanent settlement based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.” Article V set the clock: permanent status negotiations “will start as soon as possible, but not later than the beginning of the third year of the interim period,” and listed the hard issues left for that later stage by name: Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security arrangements and borders. Article VII created the elected Palestinian Council. None of those five issues were resolved in the DOP itself; they were deliberately deferred. The first concrete implementation followed on 4 May 1994, the Gaza-Jericho Agreement (Cairo Agreement), which withdrew Israeli forces from Gaza and Jericho and stood up the Palestinian Authority’s first institutions. Oslo II then extended self-rule across the rest of the West Bank through the Area A/B/C division and scheduled elections for a Palestinian Legislative Council, first held in January 1996.

What happened as a result

Rabin, Peres and Arafat shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize for the DOP. On 4 November 1995, five weeks after signing Oslo II, Rabin was assassinated at a Tel Aviv peace rally by Yigal Amir, a Jewish extremist who opposed the accords; see Jewish Virtual Library’s account of the assassination. On 22 April 1996 the Palestine National Council met in Gaza and voted, by a reported 504 to 54 with 14 abstentions, to nullify the charter clauses that contradicted Arafat’s 1993 recognition letter and to task a legal committee with drafting a fully revised charter within six months. That revised charter was never brought back for a final vote; the PLO Charter itself was never formally rewritten. The five-year interim period the DOP promised expired in 1999 with no permanent agreement in place. The Camp David 2000 summit tried and failed to close the remaining gaps, and the Second Intifada broke out that September, ending the Oslo-era momentum for good. Israeli settlement construction continued and expanded through the Oslo years despite the spirit of the process, a genuine Palestinian grievance that honest history concedes. The Areas A, B and C map, meant as a transitional arrangement lasting a few years, still governs the West Bank today, more than thirty years on, with security coordination between Israel and the Palestinian Authority continuing on and off through the present.

How it is misrepresented

Oslo gets rewritten from both directions. Palestinian rejectionists, led by Hamas, describe it as a total surrender that legitimized occupation while yielding no sovereignty, ignoring that the accords explicitly built toward a negotiated end-state that both sides, not just Israel, walked away from at Camp David in 2000. A separate, common claim on the pro-Palestinian side treats the Areas A/B/C division as a permanent apartheid architecture Israel designed; the text itself frames Areas B and C as transitional zones scheduled for further transfer to Palestinian control as the interim period progressed, a transfer schedule that stalled once the broader process collapsed after 2000, not a division built to last forever by design. On the other side, critics of Oslo inside Israel have long argued Arafat’s recognition of Israel was cosmetic because the PLO Charter itself was never formally rewritten, which is accurate as far as the charter text goes, though the 1996 PNC vote to nullify the offending clauses was real and recorded, not invented. What did not survive the decade was the five-year timeline: the interim period is now the permanent condition, and every deferred question in Article V, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security and borders, remains unresolved.

Areas A, B and C explained · The PLO Charter of 1968 · The Hamas 2017 document · Yitzhak Rabin · Yasser Arafat · Who started the wars