Oslo Accords

The Oslo Accords are a pair of agreements between the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO): the Oslo I Accord, signed in Washington, D.C., in 1993;^[1] and the Oslo II Accord, signed in Taba, Egypt, in 1995.^[2]

The first ideas regarding the Oslo Accords started in the Madrid Conference for Peace in 1991. The Oslo negotiations were planned in secret and ultimately led to an agreement after nine months. The accords were meant to create a new relationship between Palestine and Israel on a long-term basis. The Oslo Accords intended to create three changes. The first one is that the accords would give the Palestinian people the right to have political control over its own territories, to have a return of Palestinian leadership. The second one is that the Palestinian national movement PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) could resume their struggle with an open mind. The third one is that the accords brought hope to the Palestinians with them, for the first time since the Nakba.^[3]

The Oslo Accords were to create a Palestinian state. However, there was never a mention of a state in both of the documents signed in 1993 and 1995. There has never been a mention of a Two-State solution, but it had been assumed that there would come a two state solution by the Israeli side led by the Labor party.^[4]

The Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to cancel or delay the Oslo Accords, but because of pressure from the United States and Europe the Oslo Accords were continued.^[4]

The Oslo Accords marked the start of the Oslo Peace Process. The 1994 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin "for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East.

1. ↑ Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (DOP), 13 September 1993. From the Knesset website
2. ↑ Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, 28 September 1995. From the Knesset website
3. ↑ Cite error: The named reference :1 was used but no text was provided for refs named (see the help page).
4. ↑ ^{4.0 4.1} Shahaf, Emanuel (2018). "A Jewish-Palestinian Federation, an Evolutionary Development of the Oslo Process". Palestine-Israel Journal. 23: 87–96 – via EBSCO.