OSLO AGREEMENT

Failure Of Oslo Agreement

Failure Of Oslo Agreement

Introduction

Oslo Accords were a series of agreements in the Middle East peace process. The first agreement, the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements took place in Oslo on 20th August 1993. The representatives of the accords were Israel and the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization). The accords were signed at the White House on 13th September in a ceremony attended by President Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. Subsequent agreements included the Cairo Agreement on the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area (1994), the Washington Declaration, the Agreement on Preparatory Transfer of Powers and Responsibilities between Israel and the PLO (1994), the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip ('Oslo 2') signed in 1995, the Protocol on Redeployment in Hebron (1997) and the Wye River Memorandum (1998).

The initial agreement granted self-government to the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho from 1994, which was extended to a further seven towns and 450 villages through the 'Oslo 2 Accord' (Shlaim, 2007, 21). It stipulated a phased withdrawal of Israeli forces from the occupied area. These agreements were for an interim period of five years during which the permanent status of the disputed area had to be resolved. Other contentious issues, such as Jewish settlements on the West Bank, the future of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees, security and borders were not part of the initial agreements. Following the 1996 Israeli general election implementation of the agreements slowed as Binyamin Netanyahu's government took a more cautious approach. With the election of Ehud Barak's government in 1999, talks with the Palestinians broke down completely. Implementation of the Oslo Accords effectively ended in the autumn of the year 2000 when the second intifada started between Israel and Palestine. This paper will discuss the failure of Oslo Agreement by making reference to the concepts party intervention and Power-sharing (partition) (Savir, 2008, Pp. 56).

Background

Negotiations on the agreement were the result of the 1991 Madrid Conference, which took place in London and then in Oslo. The main architects of the agreements were Johan Jorgen Holst (Minister of Foreign Affairs of Norway), Terje Rod-Larsen and Mona Juul. However, in its early years until the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Zionism only reflected the opinion of a small minority of Jews. It was denounced as blasphemous by the rabbis, as “anti-Semitic” by liberal Jews, and as a nationalist diversion by the socialists. From 1881, when the massive wave of pogroms was unleashed in Russia following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, until the outbreak of World War I in 1914 about 1.5 million Jews fled the Russian empire. Of these, about 15,000 made their way to Palestine and half of these left again within a year. It is a myth that Jews had a strong urge to immigrate to Palestine and even at a time of tightening immigration controls and incipient racism the overwhelming majority preferred to go to ...