This Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs’ policy compendium exposes, explores, and assesses how the three-decade Oslo Accords’ diplomatic process, particularly Israel’s concessionary approach and policy passivity towards PLO and PA financial incentivization of terror, corruption, and international defamation of Israel’s legal and diplomatic rights, have enabled the PLO-PA to assault Israel and defame its international standing. Simultaneously, the PLO’s cooption of Israel’s legitimacy has enhanced its international profile and standing as a UN non-member observer state. This research and policy initiative recommends a more effective pathway for Israel to correct past policy errors, and hold the PA accountable, to achieve a more secure and viable approach to Israel-PA relations.
The thirty years of the Oslo Peace Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization have resulted in unintended consequences. The internationally-witnessed and -guaranteed Oslo Accords, first signed at the White House in 1993 under the Clinton Administration, were designed to end PLO terrorism, terror incentivization, hate indoctrination, antisemitism, radicalism, and political warfare. Ironically, the Accords have brought the opposite outcome.
The PLO and its internationally-recognized subsidiary, the Palestinian Authority, have intensified their global assault against Israel. The Palestinian Authority’s “Pay for Slay” cash incentive system has fueled terror against Israeli civilians, killing and wounding thousands. Nazi, Soviet, and Islamist anti-Semitic conspiracy motifs have flooded Western social networks, and massive PA corruption has paralyzed the Palestinian economy and thrust the Palestinian public into the arms of the Iran-backed Hamas. Oslo’s mandated “free and fair” Palestinian elections have entrenched the Fatah domination of the Palestinian Authority, with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in the 19th year of his first four-year, PA-law-prescribed, term. Perhaps most far-reaching, the Oslo process has resulted in an inversion of legitimacy whereby international sympathies and support have accrued to the PA-PLO while Israel’s state legitimacy has been denounced, defamed, and Israel itself denied equal treatment in the United Nations and other international organizations.
