The Oslo Accords traded Palestinian core claims for nominal statehood recognition
Evidence
When Yasser Arafat signed the agreement on the White House lawn in 1993, President Clinton told him that he could proclaim a “state” in the Occupied Territories and become its president. In exchange for US and Israeli recognition of this “state,” Arafat was asked to sign away long-standing—and historically just—Palestinian claims on three major issues: the status of Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees and the right of return, and sovereignty over their land. These concessions led Edward Said to call the accords “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles.” Despite the deeply problematic nature of the Oslo Accords from a Palestinian perspective, the neocons considered it insufficiently favorable to Israel and opposed it. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 434
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- SEED: The structure — a compromise deal hated by both the oppressed party AND the maximalist right — is a rich frame for an essay on why ‘moderate’ centrist deals often satisfy nobody and produce the very radicals they claim to forestall.
- XREF: Echoes the pattern noted in Milgrom’s work on bargaining equilibria and in The Defeat of the Spanish Armada that supposedly moderate settlements rarely hold when a powerful party never intended to comply.