What are Areas A, B and C?

Areas A, B and C are the three administrative zones into which the Oslo Accords divided the West Bank in 1995. Area A (about 18 percent, the Palestinian cities) is under full Palestinian Authority civil and security control; Area B (about 22 percent) is PA civil control with joint security; Area C (about 60 percent, where the settlements and most of the open land are) is under Israeli control. The map was never meant to be permanent: it was the signed, interim scaffolding for a final-status deal that Palestinian leaders declined at Camp David in 2000, at Taba in 2001, and again in 2008. Presenting the interim map as a design for permanent fragmentation reverses what the document says and who signed it.

Where the map comes from

The division was created by the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, universally called Oslo II, signed in Washington on 28 September 1995. It implemented the 1993 Declaration of Principles between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, the handshake-on-the-White-House-lawn agreement in which the PLO recognized Israel and both sides committed to resolving the conflict by negotiation. Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat signed Oslo II personally; Rabin was assassinated five weeks later, on 4 November 1995.

The three-letter scheme itself has a named author: Joel Singer, the Israeli legal adviser who drafted the agreement, who has written that he deliberately chose the neutral labels A, B and C, borrowed from the zone names used in the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty for Sinai, precisely so that neither side would fight over politically loaded names. The zones answered a practical question left open since Israel took the territory from Jordan in the Six-Day War of 1967: who runs what, day to day, while a permanent settlement is negotiated.

What each letter means

Area A, roughly 18 percent of the West Bank, contains the major Palestinian cities: Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jericho. The Palestinian Authority holds both civil government and internal security there. Israeli civilians are barred from entering by Israeli military order, and the red warning signs at the entrances say so.
Area B, roughly 22 percent, covers some 440 Palestinian towns and villages. The PA runs civil affairs (schools, health, courts, planning); security responsibility is shared, with Israel retaining the overriding security role.
Area C, roughly 60 percent, is under Israeli civil and security control. It contains every Israeli settlement, the military installations, the Jordan Valley and most of the West Bank’s open and sparsely populated land. Some 450,000 Israelis live there, alongside a Palestinian population variously estimated between 150,000 and 300,000, a small fraction of the roughly three million West Bank Palestinians. Over 90 percent of them live in Areas A and B, under PA government.

The percentages were not fixed on day one. At signing, Area A meant only the cities themselves, about 3 percent of the territory; the Wye River Memorandum (1998) and the Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum (1999) transferred further land until the map settled near its current proportions. Hebron got its own protocol in January 1997, splitting the city into H1 (PA, about 80 percent) and H2 (Israeli control, covering the old Jewish quarter and the Cave of the Patriarchs).

One practical consequence follows from the letters: when critics say Israel “controls every Palestinian’s daily life,” the map itself answers. The PA has governed the civil life of the overwhelming majority of West Bank Palestinians, their cities, schools, police, courts and media, since the mid-1990s.

Why it exists: an interim deal, not a border

Oslo II says on its face what it is: an interim agreement for a transitional period, with permanent-status negotiations on borders, Jerusalem, refugees and settlements to conclude by May 1999. The zones were scaffolding. Further transfers of Area C to the PA were scheduled, and some happened, until the process collapsed.

What collapsed it is a matter of record, not interpretation. At the 2000 Camp David summit, Ehud Barak offered a Palestinian state on roughly 92 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza with a capital in East Jerusalem; Arafat refused and made no counter-offer. The Taba talks and Clinton Parameters of 2001 narrowed the gaps further; no acceptance. In 2008 Ehud Olmert offered Mahmoud Abbas roughly 94 percent with land swaps and a shared Jerusalem, drawn on a map; Abbas never responded. Between the first refusal and the second came the Second Intifada, in which PA-armed forces and factions murdered about 1,100 Israelis, and Israel re-entered Area A cities in 2002 to dismantle the bombing networks. The interim map froze because the war on the final-status process, not the map, was the choice that got made. See who started the intifadas.

The propaganda uses of the map

Two exhibits recur. The first is the word “bantustans”: the A and B enclaves, drawn as brown islands in a sea of C, presented as an apartheid design for permanent Palestinian fragmentation. This inverts the document. The enclave map is the interim snapshot of an agreement the PLO negotiated and signed, whose stated purpose was further transfers and a negotiated final border; every comprehensive Israeli offer since drew a contiguous Palestinian state covering over 90 percent of the territory. A temporary deployment map is not a constitution, and calling a co-signed agreement one side’s racial design requires hiding the second signature.

The second exhibit is the “shrinking Palestine” graphic, four maps of green turning white, in which the Oslo map appears as a stage of Palestinian “land loss.” The graphic’s third panel typically presents Areas A and B as “Palestinian land” being taken, when those areas are in fact the land Palestinians gained self-government over in 1995, transferred by Israel under the agreement. The sequence also treats land Jews never governed and land ruled by Britain, Jordan and Egypt as “Palestine,” a claim examined at was Palestine ever a country. The map that shows Palestinian governance expanding from zero to most of the population is recut as a story of dispossession.

The real costs in Area C, and where the exit ramp always led

Israeli control of Area C is real and heavy for the Palestinians who live there. Building permits issued to Palestinians by Israel’s Civil Administration are rare, a low single-digit percentage of applications in most years, and unpermitted structures are demolished; families build anyway and live under demolition orders. The World Bank estimated in 2013 that restrictions on Palestinian access to Area C cost the Palestinian economy some 3.4 billion dollars a year, about 35 percent of potential GDP. Israel answers that Area C is where its security presence and settlements are, that planning control there is exactly what the PLO signed, and that the intifada gutted the trust further transfers required. Both things are true at once: the arrangement is legal and consensual in origin, and its prolonged continuation imposes real costs on real people. But the remedy was never a mystery. The exit ramp has been offered three times, at Camp David, Taba and in 2008, and it is still exactly where the document says it is: a final-status agreement Palestinian leadership has not signed.

Oslo Accords, Areas A/B/C · 2000 Camp David Summit · Are the settlements legal, and are they wise? · Two states or one state · The offers refused · The conflict, claim by claim

Sources

From Asked & answered on the main site.