shared the Messianic beliefs of many Jews that God intended every inch of Palestine
for the Jews alone. For a moment, Amir’s action forced Israelis to confront the fact
that both societies in historic Palestine suffered from self-righteous extremism.
Peres, Rabin’s long-time rival for Labor Party leadership, succeeded the assassinated
prime minister. A decade earlier, Peres had served as prime minister for almost two
years as part of a power-sharing deal with Yitzhak Shamir following the indecisive elec-
tions of 1984. This time, he was buoyed, temporarily, by a wave of public support and
sympathy in the wake of Rabin’s death. At the urging of President Clinton, Peres turned
his attention to renewed negotiations with Syria, which dragged on for several incon-
clusive rounds through February 1996. In the meantime, Israel withdrew from several
large and small West Bank towns, and the Palestinians held their first elections under
the Oslo Accords on January 21, 1996. The elections produced overwhelming victories
for Arafat, who was elected president of the Palestinian Authority, and his Fatah fac-
tion, which won most of the seats in the new Palestinian Legislative Council.
The promise of the Oslo peace process began to unravel in late February 1996
with a series of suicide bombings by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which opposed any
peace with Israel. Four bombings in nine days killed fifty-nine Israelis and quickly
undermined public support in Israel for peace talks, as the bombers intended. With
his public standing plummeting, Peres called for early elections in May. In April, fight-
ing broke out on another front when the Lebanese-based Islamist group Hizballah
launched rockets against villages in northern Israel for the first time in nearly three
years. Israel responded with an attack on Hizballah bases in southern Lebanon; one of
the attacks killed 107 Lebanese civilians in a refugee camp run by the United Nations
in the town of Qana.
Renewed Palestinian suicide bombings—in defiance of a security crackdown by
the Palestinian Authority—undermined Peres politically in the run-up to the May 29
elections, the first to be held under a new law providing for the direct election of the
prime minister by the voters rather than by the Knesset. Peres lost narrowly to
Netanyahu, who had played to public fears about the bombings.
Despite Netanyahu’s earlier pledges to repeal the Oslo agreements if given the chance,
upon entering office in July, Netanyahu bowed to what he called “the reality” of the
agreements and said he would comply with them—but he also said he would “freeze”
the negotiating process. The next step in that process proved to be one of the most dif-
ficult, involving Israel’s military redeployment from Hebron, the location of shrines of
historic and religious significance for Jews and Muslims (Hebron Protocol, p. 259).
Following are the texts of letters exchanged on September 9, 1993, by Palestine Lib-
eration Organization (PLO) chairman Yasir Arafat and Israeli prime minister
Yitzhak Rabin, plus a letter from Arafat to Norwegian foreign minister Johan Jor-
gen Holst; the text of the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government
Arrangements, or the Oslo Accord, signed in Washington, D.C., on September 13,
1993, by Israeli foreign minister Simon Peres and PLO negotiator Mahmoud
Abbas; the text of an agreement between Israel and the PLO signed in Cairo on
May 4, 1994, concerning Palestinian self-rule in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank
city of Jericho; and the text of the main body of the Interim Agreement on the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip between Israel and the PLO, or Oslo II, signed in Wash-
ington, D.C., on September 28, 1995.ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS 217