Editor's Pick

ON 13 SEPTEMBER 1993, the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and the chairperson of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat, signed the Declaration of Principles on Palestinian Self-Rule, the first of a series of agreements that came to be known as the Oslo Accords. The declaration set out the parameters of a future peace process, with both sides recognising “their mutual legitimate and political rights” and commencing a five-year transitional period of Palestinian self-governance while further negotiations were to be carried out.

The announcement of the deal made public secret negotiations that had begun at Oslo, on 14 May. The chief negotiators were the PLO’s Ahmed Qurei and the Israeli diplomat Uri Savir—seen here, along with Arafat, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, at a ceremony in Cairo, the following year, to sign an addendum providing for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area, which would come under the newly created Palestinian National Authority. The talks brought to an end the First Intifada, a series of nonviolent protests in the occupied territories that had begun in 1987, during which Israel killed over a thousand Palestinians, including 237 children under the age of 17.

Although Israel and the PLO subsequently signed a more comprehensive agreement, on 28 September 1995, expanding Palestinian self-rule to other regions while delineating three categories of Israeli control over the occupied territories, the Oslo Accords immediately came under attack from hardliners on both sides, including Hamas and Benjamin Netanyahu. In 1996, seven months after a Zionist extremist assassinated Rabin, Netanyahu was elected prime minister of Israel. His government delayed negotiations, further entrenched the military occupation and allowed the expansion of settlements, enabling him to, as he boasted to a group of settlers in 2001, “de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords.”