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The Oslo Accords: What Palestinians Gained and What They Lost

In September 1993, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the South Lawn of the White House. The image traveled around the world. For many Palestinians, it arrived weighted with complicated feeling — not quite hope, not quite trust, but something that resembled both. Thirty years later, the ledger of what the Oslo Accords actually delivered to Palestinians looks very different from what that handshake promised.

An honest accounting requires setting aside the nostalgia that has calcified around Oslo in some quarters, and the reflexive dismissal of it in others. The agreements did produce real, if limited, gains. They also locked Palestinians into a structural arrangement that foreclosed sovereignty, accelerated settlement growth, and deferred every question that actually mattered — indefinitely, as it turned out.

What the Accords Actually Said

The Declaration of Principles, signed in September 1993 and followed by Oslo II in September 1995, established a framework for a five-year interim period during which a Palestinian Authority would exercise limited self-governance in parts of the West Bank and Gaza. Oslo II divided the West Bank into three administrative zones. Area A — covering the main Palestinian population centers — fell under full Palestinian civil and security control. Area B, covering smaller towns and villages, placed civil administration under the PA and security under joint Israeli-Palestinian control. Area C, comprising roughly 60 percent of the West Bank, remained under full Israeli civil and military control.

The arrangement was explicitly described as interim. Final-status issues — Jerusalem, refugees, borders, water rights, and the settlements — were formally deferred to negotiations that were supposed to begin no later than May 1996 and conclude within five years. They have never been resolved.

What Palestinians received was an Authority without sovereignty. The PA could issue identity cards, collect some taxes, run schools and hospitals, and police its own population. What it could not do was control its borders, airspace, electromagnetic spectrum, or the movement of its own people between cities. Israel retained overriding security authority across all zones, including the right to operate militarily in Areas A and B — a right it has exercised repeatedly.

Edward Said’s Warning, Delivered Immediately

The ink on the Declaration of Principles was barely dry when Edward Said published his essay “The Morning After” in the London Review of Books in October 1993. It remains one of the most precise early critiques of what Oslo actually was, as opposed to what it was said to be.

Said, the Columbia University literary theorist and Palestinian intellectual, did not oppose negotiation in principle. What he opposed was the specific shape of the deal Palestinians had accepted. He argued that the PLO had recognized Israeli sovereignty, Israeli security needs, and Israeli control over the terms of the interim period, while receiving in return only Israeli recognition of the PLO as a negotiating partner — not recognition of Palestinian rights, not recognition of a Palestinian state, not a settlement freeze. “The Palestinians,” Said wrote, “have in effect recognized Israel’s right to most of the land.”

Said identified the structural problem with Oslo’s design that would prove fatal: it created no mechanism to compel Israel to reach a final-status agreement, no timeline with consequences, and no prohibition on Israel continuing to build settlements throughout the interim period. The entire framework, he argued, resembled less a peace agreement than a form of administered occupation — one in which Palestinians would be responsible for governing and policing their own people while Israel retained control of land, resources, and movement.

History has not been kind to the critics of Said’s critique.

Settlement Growth: The Definitive Measure of Oslo’s Failure

If a single metric captures what the Oslo period meant for Palestinian territorial aspirations, it is the trajectory of the Israeli settler population in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem.

At the time of the Oslo I signing in 1993, approximately 110,000 Israeli settlers lived in the West Bank. By the time the Camp David summit collapsed in 2000 — the nominal end of the Oslo interim period — that number had grown to roughly 200,000. By 2003, it exceeded 230,000. By the mid-2000s it had passed 250,000. The figures come from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics and have been tracked consistently by Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project.

This was not a covert operation. Settlement construction proceeded openly throughout the Oslo years, under both Labor and Likud governments. The accords contained no settlement freeze. Israeli officials argued, with technical accuracy, that the status of settlements was a final-status issue — meaning it could not be addressed until the negotiations that Oslo had deferred. The circularity was not incidental. It was structural.

The scholar Rashid Khalidi, in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), describes Oslo’s settlement provisions — or rather their absence — as central to understanding why the process failed. The continued colonization of the territory that was supposed to become a Palestinian state was not a violation of Oslo; it was permitted by it. That permissiveness, Khalidi argues, reflected the fundamental asymmetry of the negotiations: one party arrived as a state with an army; the other arrived as a stateless people led by an organization in exile.

What Palestinians Did Gain — and Why It Wasn’t Enough

Fairness requires acknowledging the real, if constrained, changes Oslo produced. The Palestinian Authority’s establishment in 1994 brought Palestinian civil administration to Gaza and the major West Bank cities for the first time since 1967. Palestinian schools operated under Palestinian curriculum oversight. Palestinian health institutions received international funding and expanded services. Palestinian police forces — however much their later role as instruments of security coordination would be criticized — replaced the direct presence of Israeli military in Area A population centers.

For Palestinians who had lived under direct military occupation since 1967, the daily texture of life in Area A cities did change. Israeli soldiers were no longer routinely present on the streets of Ramallah or Nablus. The PLO, after years in Tunis, returned to Palestinian soil. For Arafat’s generation, that return carried enormous symbolic weight.

But the PA’s authority was, from its inception, contingent and revocable. Israel maintained the capacity — and repeatedly exercised it — to operate militarily inside Area A. The siege of Arafat’s Ramallah compound in 2002 was perhaps the starkest illustration: the Israeli military besieged the headquarters of the Palestinian leadership that Oslo had installed, in the zone that Oslo had designated as under full Palestinian control. The PA’s authority existed at Israeli sufferance. It was not sovereignty, and Oslo had never promised that it was.

UNRWA, which continued to provide education, health, and relief services to Palestinian refugees throughout the Oslo period, noted that the accords produced no improvement in the status or rights of the approximately 3.5 million registered Palestinian refugees at the time — those living in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the occupied territories. The right of return, listed as a final-status issue, was deferred along with everything else.

The Framework That Outlasted Its Deadline

Oslo’s interim period was supposed to end by May 1999. It did not end. No final-status agreement was reached at Camp David in 2000, at Taba in 2001, or in any negotiation since. The interim arrangements became permanent arrangements — the only framework governing Palestinian political life in the West Bank.

Area C, that 60 percent of the West Bank over which Israel retained full control, has seen Palestinian construction systematically restricted and demolished while settlement infrastructure expanded. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA oPt) has documented for years the near-total denial of Palestinian building permits in Area C and the routine demolition of Palestinian structures built without permits that were not issued.

What Oslo created, in the end, was a Palestinian administration without a Palestinian state: an Authority with the responsibilities of governance and none of its powers, presiding over a territory whose boundaries, resources, and future remained entirely subject to Israeli decisions. Edward Said called it, in 1993, “the PLO’s Versailles.” The comparison was hyperbolic and it was also, in its essential point, correct. The weaker party had signed away its strongest cards — recognition, legitimacy, security cooperation — and received in return an interim arrangement that never ended.

The Palestinian people deserved a reckoning with what Oslo actually delivered, not what it promised. That reckoning is still incomplete.

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