the way for Jordan’s King Hussein to negotiate a peace agreement with Israel less than
one year later (Jordanian-Israeli Peace, p. 142).
According to opinion polls, the accords had broad public support among Israelis,
but the Knesset approved it only narrowly, with 61 votes in favor (a bare majority), 50
opposed, and 9 abstentions. The new leader of the Likud Party, Binyamin Netanyahu,
bitterly denounced the agreement as “appeasement” and pledged to cancel it if he and
his party took power in the next election. Palestinians also were divided, with radical
factions denouncing what they called Arafat’s lust for power and his willingness to
accept something less than a genuine, independent Palestinian state. The PLO Execu-
tive Committee approved the agreement, but four members resigned in protest.
The next diplomatic task required the Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate a more
substantive document setting the terms for how the Palestinians would govern them-
selves in the Gaza Strip and the town of Jericho in the Jordan Valley, on the West
Bank—the first two areas from which Israel would withdraw. The negotiations took
twice as long as the two months envisioned in the Oslo Accords, in part because Rabin
assigned this task to military officers who demanded, and got, tough security condi-
tions limiting Palestinian authority. The two sides initialed a preliminary accord in
Cairo on February 4, 1994. Three weeks later, however, Baruch Goldstein, a U.S.-
born Israeli settler, opened fire on worshipers at a mosque in the West Bank city of
Hebron, killing twenty-five people before he was killed. The PLO angrily withdrew
from further talks, and it took more than a month for the negotiating process to get
back on track. With talks again under way, Hamas exploded a car bomb on April 6,
killing eight people, and a suicide bomber a week later killed five people. In Cairo on
May 4, 1994, Rabin and Arafat finally signed the agreement, referred to as the Cairo
Agreement, setting the terms for the Palestinians to take control of Jericho and most
of Gaza. It called for Israel to turn responsibility for governing those areas over to the
Palestinians in three stages, culminating in elections in Gaza and the West Bank for
a legislature and president, who together would constitute a quasi-government.
Israel immediately began redeploying its military forces in Gaza so they could con-
centrate on protecting Jewish settlements concentrated in the northern section of the
strip. About a week after the signing of the Cairo Agreement, a small force of Pales-
tinian police officers—who had been trained and equipped in Egypt—began manning
outposts in Gaza; their presence represented the first visible sign of a transfer of respon-
sibility from the Israelis to the Palestinians. On July 1, 1994, cheering Palestinians
greeted Arafat, the long-exiled PLO leader, upon his arrival in Gaza. Meanwhile in
Jerusalem, a right-wing Israeli rally against the peace agreements deteriorated into
attacks on Palestinian residents of that city. In December, Arafat, Rabin, and Peres
were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work on the Oslo Accords.
Following the logic of the Oslo peace process, the Israelis and Palestinians next turned
their attention to negotiating a detailed agreement incorporating and expanding on the
preceding ones. Despite the complexity of the task—and continuing threats to the peace
process in the form of violence by rejectionist on both sides—Israel and the PLO com-
pleted a comprehensive agreement in slightly more than a year. Rabin and Arafat signed
it at the White House in Washington on September 28, 1995, with President Clinton,
Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and Jordan’s King Hussein acting as witnesses.
This agreement, formally the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip, was immediately dubbed Oslo II by diplomats and journalists. Including its
ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS 215