30 Years Later, Oslo’s Failures Haunt Both Sides
A reflective analysis of the Oslo Accords by Palestinian and Israeli experts and stakeholders reveals how the landmark agreement raised hopes for peace but ended up exacerbating tensions, leading to new rounds of violence
Thirty years after the signing of the historic Oslo Accords, the achievements of that breakthrough peace agreement are hanging by a thread.
On September 13, 1993, a historic handshake took place on the White House lawn as Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin sealed the landmark peace agreement. Millions of people around the world watched an event that a few years earlier seemed unattainable, which was considered the cornerstone of the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians.
“The Oslo agreement was possible because of a tradeoff,” Dr. Ghassan Khatib, a former member of the Palestinian delegation to the Oslo meetings in Washington, told The Media Line. “The Palestinian side gave up the insistence that Israel stop the expansion of the settlements, in return for Israel giving a concession recognizing the Palestinian Liberation Authority (PLO): being willing to negotiate directly with PLO and allow the PLO to be the signatory of future agreement and the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.”
Yossi Beilin, one of the architects of the Oslo Accords, explained that the first meeting of the negotiations took place on January 20, 1993. Within weeks, a first draft of the agreement was presented to Prime Minister Rabin.
“Very soon we saw there was common language, and it was relatively easy to bridge the gaps. Not that there were no crises, but generally speaking we had a partner in Norway, and they believed they had a partner in us,” Beilin said.
There was widespread euphoria on the Palestinian side at the prospect of a peace agreement, as hope spread that a new era of peace in the Middle East was beginning. But this hope was mixed with wariness in Israel from the start.
“There was a sense of very, very guarded optimism throughout much of Israeli society, even among people who were pro-peace,” said Michael Oren, former Knesset member and ambassador to the US.
Oren, who was part of the Rabin government at the time, says three factors played a crucial role in bringing the two sides together.
“One was the First Intifada, which kind of exhausted this country and made us stop and think. The status quo was not sustainable,” he said. “Second was Bill Clinton, a Democrat who was pro-Israel. There was a lot of trust in the president. Lastly was Rabin himself. He had bona fides that few Israeli leaders had.”
Maurice Hirsch, a legal analyst and director of the PA Accountability and Reform Initiative at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, thinks the Oslo Accords breathed new life into the PLO and its leader.
“The PLO was almost wiped out. They had no financial support—the Arab countries had stopped supporting them,” he said.
The agreements contained several fatal flaws, according to those involved in the talks.
Beilin, a former justice minister and lead negotiator with the Palestinians, explained that a freeze on settlements was too sensitive for the Israeli government to agree to. But for one Palestinian negotiator, the record expansion of Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian territory is one glaring sign of the agreement’s failure.
The first flaw was no insistence on complete and total freeze of settlements activities. That meant that they allowed the continuation of the same process that kills the very potential of peace and a two-state solution.
“The first flaw was no insistence on complete and total freeze of settlements activities. That meant that they allowed the continuation of the same process that kills the very potential of peace and a two-state solution,” said Mustafa Barghouti, a former member of the Palestinian official delegation in Madrid and Washington.
According to the European Union statistics, there were roughly 121,000 settlers living in the Palestinian territories when the Oslo Accords were signed. Now the number exceeds 600,000 settlers.
“The second failure was an unequal agreement,” Barghouti continued. “The Palestinian side recognized Israel and its right to existence. But Israel didn’t recognize a Palestinian state. All they did is to recognize the PLO as a representative of the Palestinians.”
He says that deferring contentious critical issues to future negotiations was the essence of what was wrong with Oslo.
“Most importantly, the agreement was an interim one about interim arrangements without identifying the end goal—which should have been a Palestinian state,” Barghouti said.
Many saw the deals as paving the way to the creation of an independent Palestinian state, but the five-year interim period expired without a resolution to the conflict. This has left Palestinians disappointed and disillusioned.
“I feel betrayed the Oslo Accords didn’t deliver what it promised our people, which was a state and independence and an end of occupation,” says Ziad Abuzayyad, a former member of the Palestinian Legislative Council who was Arafat’s point man in contact with Rabin.
That hopeful feeling, which permeated the atmosphere 30 years ago, has been replaced by a dark cloud of pessimism. The hopeful words uttered then disappeared, followed by broken promises, bouts of deadly violence, and successive failed attempts to reach a final peace deal.
By 1995, the deal was unraveling. Many in Israel blamed the Palestinian Authority. And the spike in violence made it extremely difficult for Rabin to win the upcoming election.
“Rabin would come out and say these are victims of peace. And within the government, there were some ministers saying you can’t say that and [calling] to stop the process, let’s reexamine—but Rabin would not do that. We saw our numbers go down at the polls,” Oren said.
“Netanyahu’s victory several months after the Rabin assassination that shocked everybody didn’t shock many of us inside the government because if we had gone to elections right then, we would have lost very badly,” he added.
Hirsch calls the Oslo deal a “desperate mistake.”
“Israel contributed to the failure of the Oslo Accords, and I do say that they failed since they failed to demand Palestinian compliance with the commitments that it had made,” he said.
“The PLO committed to being a democratic society in which there would be regular elections where there would be no participation of terrorists. And yet what we saw is that in the 30 years of the Palestinian Authority, there have only been two elections: one in 1996, and another one in 2005-2006. And that’s it, there’s no democracy,” Hirsch continued.
In November 1995, Prime Minister Rabin, the man whom Arafat called a partner in peace, was assassinated by a Jewish extremist who shot him twice in the back, dealing a fatal blow to the Oslo process.
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres became interim prime minister, but long-time opponent of the agreement Benjamin Netanyahu took office seven months later.
Oren says the government was very unpopular because it didn’t put a stop to the agreement.
“I think his death should have given a tremendous bolster to the peace process—here was the great Israeli hero that gave his life for peace. That was the narrative, and yet even with that, the Labor party couldn’t win. The process by then had become significantly unpopular,” he explained.
As part of the agreement, the PA had full administrative and security control over Area A of the West Bank, and administrative control only over Area B. Israel had full military and administrative control over Area C, which constitutes about 60% of the West Bank and is considered the Palestinian breadbasket. It was supposed to gradually come under Palestinian control.
“The man who aggravated the public against Oslo was elected as the leader for the longest period since 1996. And in the process, everything that related to Oslo was killed except the Palestinian Authority, which became a Palestinian Authority without authority, that’s very weak under Israel’s thumb, under Israeli occupation,” Barghouti said.
“Rabin wanted to prove that he was loyal to his promise to have negotiations with the Palestinians. He supported the idea of the partition of the land. He didn’t trust anybody, especially Arafat,” Beilin added.
The thorniest issues were left to future negotiations. These included the defining of borders between the two states, the status of Jerusalem, and the fate of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
“This allowed people like the leaders of Israel to continue to claim that all we are talking about is a self-governing authority under the constitution of occupation,” Barghouti claimed.
Barghouti says it was clear that the Israeli side was never genuinely interested in establishing a Palestinian state.
“Can you get me one statement where Rabin said he was planning to have a Palestinian state? There was no official Israeli acceptance of a Palestinian state. All they talked about is self-governing authority,” he said.
Former Palestinian minister Nabil Amer reflected that the current Israeli-Palestinian situation is very different from that in 1993, blaming Israeli settlement building for the impasse.
“What undermined the foundation on which the peace process was built was the Likud Party, which came to power to abolish in its own way the principle of peace with the Palestinians. Oslo failed because the Israeli side did not want it to succeed,” Amer said.
Reaching an end to the conflict seems no closer now than it was 30 years ago. Many say that the sliver of hope that came with signing the agreement soon gave way to bloodshed, leading people on both sides to argue that they were worse off.
“I think that there was a misperception on both sides. The Palestinians convinced themselves this process would lead to the creation of a Palestinian state. Though they didn’t succeed in embodying this assumption in the declaration of principles, leaving it ambiguous, there was no mention of how this process would end,” Abuzayyad said. “The Israelis convinced themselves that they are talking about at the maximum about self-governing authority and not about a state.”
The last round of substantive talks collapsed in 2014, and negotiations have remained stalled mainly over the issue of Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, part of the territory claimed by the Palestinians for their future state.
“I think that the Oslo Accords were killed completely by Israel. Firstly, through the insistence on expanding settlements, but secondly by the changes in the political composition of Israel,” said Khatib, the former Palestinian delegation member.
The Oslo process is not dead, but the biggest failure of Oslo is that should be dead. There’s no real reason to keep it. You can’t have an interim agreement forever.
“The Oslo process is not dead, but the biggest failure of Oslo is that should be dead. There’s no real reason to keep it. You can’t have an interim agreement forever,” Beilin added.
The Oslo Accords were seen then as the cornerstone of an imminent peace settlement, but little has changed on the ground. Abuzayyad says Oslo’s promises feel hollow, but that the Palestinians should hold on to the PA.
“I don’t believe that Oslo is dead because the effects of Oslo are still on the ground,” he said. “There is still a Palestinian Authority, there are still some areas no matter how small under Palestinian control. We are still in control of our education system and our national affairs.”
Israelis and Palestinians say the landmark agreements are a distant memory, with direct meetings between top officials from both sides rare. However, there may be some hope on the horizon.
“I believe that Mahmoud Abbas is our partner, and I believe that his successors will be partners,” said Beilin who speaks openly about a possible successor to President Abbas.
“The main successor is somebody who is the most popular Palestinian according to the public opinion polls. He’s accepted by both Hamas and Fatah, and he’s arrested in Israel. His name is Marwan Barghouti. I think Israel will make a mistake not to release him and to negotiate with him,” he continued.
For many Palestinians, the 30th anniversary of the Oslo Accords is an unhappy one.
“At the end when Arafat was under siege, I was speaking with him alone near a window outside the official office where he sat, and he told me something. He said, yes, Oslo was a trap and we fell into it,” Barghouti said. “I think in the end what happened was that Oslo was a trap into which the PLO leadership fell, and the outcome is what we see today.”
A new poll out on the 30th anniversary of the agreement performed by Dr. Khalil Shikaki of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed support for the accords at a historic low.
About two-thirds of Palestinians surveyed describe conditions today as worse than they were before that agreement. According to the findings, 68% believe that the Oslo Accords harmed Palestinian interests while only 11% believe they served Palestinian interests. A large majority of those polled, 71%, believe it was wrong for the PLO to sign the Oslo Accords while 23% believe it was right to do so. And 63% support the Palestinian Authority abandoning the agreements.
