Rabin and Arafat Shake Hands: Oslo Accords Signed

Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat reached across decades of bloodshed to shake hands on the South Lawn of the White House on September 13, 1993, while Bill Clinton spread his arms behind them in a gesture that became one of the most reproduced photographs of the twentieth century. The Oslo Accords, negotiated in secret through back-channel meetings in Norway, represented the first direct agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization and promised a framework for Palestinian self-governance. The breakthrough emerged from exhaustion as much as hope. The First Intifada, which erupted in 1987, had ground on for six years, killing over a thousand Palestinians and roughly 160 Israelis while draining both societies. The PLO, exiled in Tunis after its expulsion from Lebanon, was losing influence to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was becoming costlier diplomatically and militarily with each passing year. Norwegian diplomats facilitated secret talks between Israeli academics and PLO officials that gradually escalated to official negotiations. The Declaration of Principles signed that September day established a five-year interim framework. The PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist, and Israel recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. A Palestinian Authority would govern portions of the West Bank and Gaza, with final-status negotiations on borders, refugees, and Jerusalem to follow. Those final-status talks never produced agreement. Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli ultranationalist in November 1995. Arafat walked away from comprehensive proposals at Camp David in 2000, and the Second Intifada erupted weeks later. Settlement expansion continued, Gaza came under Hamas control, and the two-state framework that seemed tantalizingly close on that September afternoon receded into what many now regard as a historical artifact rather than a living roadmap. The handshake remains a monument to what might have been.