How successful were the Oslo Peace Accords ?
A big failure for Palestinians. A win for Israelis.
Israeli leaders never accepted the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel or a single state in all of Palestine/Israel with equality for both peoples. Instead, Israel exploited the Oslo negotiations process to cement its control over the occupied territories, while shifting responsibility for the occupied Palestinian population from the Israeli army to the PA. As noted by Amnesty International in a 2003 report: “while Israel retained direct control over most of the land, it no longer had to provide the services which an occupying power is required to provide for the occupied population.” Consequently, while the Oslo Accords were being negotiated between 1993 and 1999:Israel accelerated the expansion of illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land “to an unprecedented level,” according to Amnesty, on territory that was supposed to form the heart of a Palestinian state. As Amnesty noted: “The settlements’ position has ensured that there is no territorial contiguity between Palestinian communities in different areas of the Occupied Territories.”Israel began to impose increasingly severe restrictions on the movement of Palestinians, both within the occupied territories and between the territories and the outside world.Israel accelerated its destruction of Palestinian homes and communitiies, mostly under the pretense they were build without approval from Israel, which was and remains nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain.
The bilateral negotiations framework of Oslo exacerbated the huge power imbalance between Israel, a nuclear-armed regional superpower backed by the U.S., and stateless, dispossessed Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation. This imbalance was further reinforced by the failure of the U.S. to act as a fair mediator. In the words of longtime senior State Department official Aaron David Miller, who was heavily involved in the Oslo process, the U.S. acted as "Israel's attorney, catering and coordinating with the Israelis at the expense of successful peace negotiations.” Israel used these advantages to drag out negotiations to buy time to expand settlements and create “facts on the ground.”
Violent, right-wing Israeli extremists further undermined any possibility of the Oslo Accords leading to a lasting peace. In particular, the February 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians as they prayed in occupied Hebron by a U.S.-born settler, which began a wave of violence that undermined support for negotiations on both sides, and the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 by a Jewish extremist opposed to any negotiations with the Palestinians or withdrawal from occupied Palestinian land.