The Oslo Accords
The textual frame around the Oslo Accords was a contest between rival covenantal claims to the same land. The PLO Charter of 1968, in articles redrafted from the 1964 original, defined Palestine within its British…
Biblical Narrative
The textual frame around the Oslo Accords was a contest between rival covenantal claims to the same land. The PLO Charter of 1968, in articles redrafted from the 1964 original, defined Palestine within its British Mandate boundaries as an indivisible territorial unit and declared armed struggle the only path to liberation — a formulation drawn less from classical Islamic jurisprudence than from third-world anticolonial discourse, but anchored rhetorically in the medieval doctrine that lands once part of dar al-Islam cannot be surrendered. The slogan ״from the river to the sea״ entered Palestinian political lexicon in this period through the Fatah charter of 1964 and was popularized in Arabic by the poet Tawfiq Zayyad.
The Israeli religious-Zionist response, articulated by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook of Mercaz HaRav and his disciples in Gush Emunim from 1974 onward, read Joshua's conquest narrative as halakhically binding: the territories captured in 1967 were not occupied but liberated, and any retreat from them constituted a violation of the positive commandment to inherit the land (yerushat ha-aretz) derived from Numbers 33:53. The 1995 fatwa-equivalent issued by a circle of religious-Zionist rabbis declaring Yitzhak Rabin guilty under the laws of moser (an informer who endangers Jewish lives) and rodef (a pursuer who must be killed in self-defense) drew direct lineage from this textual framework. Yigal Amir, who assassinated Rabin on 4 November 1995, cited these rulings in his courtroom testimony.
On the Palestinian side the religious-textual rejection of Oslo was led by Sheikh Ahmad Yassin's Hamas, whose 1988 charter — heavily indebted to Sayyid Qutb's Milestones and to Hassan al-Banna's writings — declared all of historic Palestine an inalienable Islamic waqf (endowment) that no individual or organization, including the PLO, possessed authority to relinquish. The doctrine of waqf as applied to Palestine had earlier roots in the rulings of the Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Husayni in the 1930s, but Hamas's invocation gave it operative force against the peace process.
The handshake on the White House lawn on 13 September 1993 was thus a moment of deliberate textual ambiguity. The Declaration of Principles spoke of ״permanent status negotiations״ without naming sovereignty, Jerusalem, refugees, or borders — leaving the contested theological-territorial vocabulary suspended. Both Rabin and Arafat, in their respective speeches, quoted the prophets: Rabin invoked Ecclesiastes 3 (״a time for war, a time for peace״), Arafat cited the Qur'anic verse 2:208 enjoining believers to enter peace fully. The textual frame held for two years; the assassin's bullets in Tel Aviv on 4 November 1995 were, in their own ideological self-understanding, an act of textual interpretation.
Enough of blood and tears. Enough.Yitzhak Rabin, White House lawn, 13 September 1993
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The Oslo process unfolded against the strategic vacuum of the post-Cold War moment and the PLO's near-bankruptcy following its support for Saddam Hussein in the 1990–91 Gulf War, which had cost it Saudi and Kuwaiti subsidies and produced what Yezid Sayigh's authoritative Armed Struggle and the Search for State (Oxford, 1997) documents as a 90 percent collapse in PLO revenues by 1992. The first Intifada (December 1987 to 1993), driven by indigenous West Bank and Gaza leadership rather than by the Tunis-based PLO, had simultaneously demonstrated that the diaspora leadership was losing relevance to the local Palestinian population.
The fourteen rounds of secret talks at Borregaard, documented in Uri Savir's The Process (1998) and in Yossi Beilin's Touching Peace (1999), produced the Declaration of Principles initialed in Oslo on 20 August 1993. Mutual recognition was exchanged in letters dated 9 and 10 September: the PLO recognized Israel's right to exist in peace and security and renounced terrorism; Israel recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. The Declaration was signed at the White House on 13 September 1993, with Rabin and Arafat shaking hands at Bill Clinton's prompting on the South Lawn.
Implementation proceeded through Oslo II (the Interim Agreement, signed at Taba and Washington on 28 September 1995), which divided the West Bank into Areas A (full Palestinian Authority control), B (PA civil control, Israeli security), and C (full Israeli control), and established the Palestinian Legislative Council, elected on 20 January 1996. The Hebron Protocol (January 1997) and the Wye River Memorandum (October 1998) handled subsequent withdrawals. The five-year interim period was to conclude with permanent-status negotiations on Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, borders, and security — issues deferred precisely because they were unresolvable within the framework's logic.
The collapse came in stages. Rabin's assassination on 4 November 1995 by Yigal Amir, a religious-nationalist law student at Bar-Ilan University, removed the Israeli political guarantor. The Camp David II summit of July 2000 under Ehud Barak and Clinton failed; the Second Intifada erupted on 28 September 2000 following Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. Robert Malley's contemporaneous analysis (NYRB, 9 August 2001) and Clayton Swisher's The Truth About Camp David (2004) revised the initial narrative that blamed Arafat alone. Rashid Khalidi's Brokers of Deceit (2013) and Itamar Rabinovich's Waging Peace (2004) offer the principal Palestinian and Israeli scholarly assessments respectively.
Oslo was a process predicated on the assumption that postponement would generate trust. It generated, instead, the political space in which the rejectionists on both sides could organize.Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit (2013)