Oslo, 1993: A Handshake on the White House Lawn
On 13 September 1993 Yitzhak Rabin took Yasser Arafat’s hand while Bill Clinton stood between them. The Declaration of Principles did not bring a final peace, but it changed what could be said aloud.
On the thirteenth of September 1993, on the White House lawn, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements. Shimon Peres signed for Israel and Mahmoud Abbas for the PLO, with the United States and Russia as witnesses. Then Yitzhak Rabin, after a visible moment of hesitation, shook Yasser Arafat's hand.
The Declaration set out a Palestinian interim self-government in the West Bank and Gaza for a transitional period of up to five years, and a timetable for talks on the hardest questions. Those talks did not reach a final settlement, and the years that followed brought violence as well as hope. An honest account has to say both.
"The one radical solution is peace." Yitzhak Rabin, Nobel Lecture, 10 December 1994.
The cost
Rabin, Peres and Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize for 1994. On the fourth of November 1995, at the end of a peace rally in Tel Aviv, Rabin was shot dead by an Israeli extremist in Kings of Israel Square, which now bears his name. King Hussein of Jordan, who had made peace with him a year earlier, spoke at his funeral.
Oslo is a reminder that a signature is a beginning, not an ending. Peace has to be carried by people after the ministers go home. That is the work this community exists to do.
Written by
Editorial desk
Contributor, Abrahamic Ambassadors
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