Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THE OSLO ACCORDS
The defeat of Iraq in Kuwait together with reduced Arab support for the PLO, the divisions
opened up in the Arab world, and the growing questioning of traditional Arab policies seemed
to benefi t Israel. Given the failure of PLO efforts to destroy, defeat, or severely damage Israel
over several decades, as well as the PLO's more immediate losses, the assumption was that the
Palestinian movement might alter its course. Moreover, the United States, the world's sole su-
perpower, had just saved most of the Arabic-speaking world from potential Iraqi domination.
The time seemed ripe for a major peace effort.
After the war ended, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker visited Israel, Egypt, and Syria to
promote the idea of a regional peace conference based on UN Security Council Resolution
242. Syria, fearing U.S. global hegemony and bereft of its Soviet patron, agreed for the fi rst
time to participate in direct negotiations with Israel. It was further agreed that PLO members
would be excluded from the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, but Israel accepted nominally
independent Palestinians whom it knew were secretly Fatah members. On August 4, 1991, the
Israeli cabinet agreed to participate in a peace conference on the worked-out terms.
The international conference began with a session in Madrid in October 1991. An attempted
Syrian walkout failed when none of the other Arab states joined in. Afterward, negotiations
bifurcated. Three sets of bilateral talks were held between Israeli and Syrian, Lebanese, and
Jordanian-Palestinian delegations. Another group of talks, held by various combinations of
delegations, were organized around specifi c regional topics, including arms control, economic
cooperation, Palestinian refugees, water resources, and the environment. Little actual progress
was made in any of these talks, which continued into 1992, even though Israel made the ad-
ditional concession of meeting the Palestinians without a Jordanian presence. It later emerged
that the PLO had given the Palestinian delegates no authority to agree to anything.
In the June 23, 1992, elections in Israel, the Labor Party, led by Yitzhak Rabin, won forty-
four Knesset seats compared to Likud's thirty-two. Rabin was able to form a narrow left-center
coalition with sixty-two seats. During the campaign, Rabin had called for “separation” between
Israel and the Palestinian-inhabited territories. Along with his foreign minister, Peres, Rabin
intended to fi nd out whether conditions and experiences had forced the PLO to change its
worldview and goals.
The Israeli leaders began secret exchanges with the PLO in Norway and reached a basis for
agreement. Then they informed the United States of this development. The actual signing of
the Declaration of Principles (informally known as the Oslo Accords) took place in Washing-
ton, DC, on September 13, 1993. In a historic moment, Rabin and Arafat shook hands, with
U.S. President Bill Clinton, host and sponsor of the agreement, looking on.
For Israel, the agreement was a test of the two-state proposition: Was the PLO ready to
make peace with Israel by accepting the existence of two states, one Israeli, one Palestinian, in
the Middle East? If all went according to plan, the PLO would be in a hurry to reach a compre-
hensive compromise, with the existence of a Palestinian state in territory currently occupied
by Israel as the eventual goal. The fi ve-year interim period specifi ed in the Oslo Accords, to
