The first Intifada and the Oslo Accords

What the specification asks for

“The impact of the first Intifada. Attempts to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians, including the motives of Arafat, Rabin, Netanyahu, Hamas, Hezbollah and the USA. The terms and results of the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993.” — examined through causation and change. Incandio is aligned to specification 4HI1; it is not published by, endorsed by or affiliated with Pearson.

1 · Understand it

The Intifada

The first Intifada began in December 1987 in Gaza and spread through the occupied territories. It was substantially a popular movement rather than one directed from outside: strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, refusal to pay taxes, and stone-throwing by young people against soldiers. The PLO leadership, in Tunis since 1982, did not initiate it and worked to associate itself with it afterwards.

Its effects were disproportionate to its means. Israeli forces found that an army trained for war was poorly suited to policing a civilian uprising, and the images that resulted were damaging internationally and divisive domestically. The occupation, which had been comparatively low-cost for twenty years, acquired a continuous political and military price.

Two consequences shaped what followed. Inside Israeli politics the argument that the territories could simply be held indefinitely became harder to sustain, which made a negotiated separation thinkable. And in Gaza, Hamas was founded in 1987 as an Islamist movement rejecting negotiation with Israel, so the Intifada that made a peace process possible also produced the organisation that would work hardest against it.

What Oslo actually was

Secret talks in Norway between Israeli and PLO representatives produced a Declaration of Principles, signed in Washington in September 1993. Israel and the PLO recognised each other — a mutual recognition neither had previously offered — and a framework was agreed for a five-year transitional period.

The terms should be stated precisely, because the argument about Oslo depends on them. A Palestinian Authority would be established with self-government in Gaza and parts of the West Bank; Israeli forces would withdraw in stages; and negotiations on permanent status would begin within a set period. The permanent-status questions were listed and deferred: borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements and security arrangements.

So the agreement contained the recognitions and the process, and none of the substance. It was designed on the assumption that trust built during the transition would make the hard questions soluble at the end of it, and it contained no mechanism to compel a final agreement if that trust did not appear.

The architecture as a cause of failure

That design is the strand's central argument and it is what makes Oslo more interesting than a story of good intentions defeated by extremists. The five-year gap between signature and permanent status was time in which each side's opponents of the agreement could act — and both had them.

Settlement construction in the West Bank continued during the interim period, which Palestinians read as the deferred questions being decided on the ground while they were still deferred on paper. Attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on Israeli civilians during the same years destroyed Israeli confidence that the agreement was producing security. Each side could point to the other's conduct as proof that the process was being abused, and both were describing something real.

It is worth stating what Oslo did achieve, because an answer that treats it as pure failure is inaccurate. Mutual recognition happened and has not been withdrawn; a Palestinian Authority was created and exists; and for a period in the mid-1990s a negotiated end to the conflict was more nearly in prospect than at any time before or since. The judgement to reach is about a process that achieved real things and was built in a way that let its hardest questions be answered by events instead of by negotiation.

2 · Learn it — the notes

The dates that earn marks

December 1987

The first Intifada begins in Gaza; Hamas is founded in the same year. Why this date: The uprising that made a peace process thinkable also produced the movement most committed to preventing one.

September 1993

The Oslo Declaration of Principles is signed in Washington, with mutual recognition. Why this date: Recognition between Israel and the PLO is the achievement, and it is separable from everything that failed afterwards.

1993–99

The interim period, during which permanent-status talks were to be concluded. Why this date: The gap between signature and substance is when both sides' opponents of the agreement were able to act.

The figures, and how far to trust them

• Five years — The transitional period Oslo set before permanent status was to be settled.
• Five questions deferred — Borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements and security arrangements. (The formulations differ slightly between the Declaration of Principles and later agreements.)
• 1987 — The year both the first Intifada began and Hamas was founded.

The people to place

• Yitzhak Rabin — Israeli Prime Minister; signed the Oslo Declaration of Principles in 1993.
• Yasser Arafat — PLO chairman; signed for the Palestinians and headed the resulting Palestinian Authority.
• Bill Clinton — American President; hosted the signature and sponsored the process.

How historians disagree

Attributed interpretations, never voiced — the AO4 seam.

• The 'architecture' reading: Oslo deferred every hard question to a final negotiation it had no means of compelling, so the five-year gap became a period in which facts on the ground and violence decided what talks were supposed to. Contested by The reading that no agreement on borders, Jerusalem or refugees was available in 1993 at any price, so deferral was the only way to obtain mutual recognition at all — which makes the architecture a necessary compromise rather than a flaw..

What students say — and what is actually the case

Not this: Oslo created a Palestinian state.

This: It created a Palestinian Authority with self-government in parts of the territories during a transitional period, and left statehood, borders and Jerusalem to a permanent-status negotiation that did not conclude.

Not this: The first Intifada was organised by the PLO.

This: It began as a popular movement in the territories while the PLO leadership was in Tunis, and the organisation associated itself with it afterwards.

Two things students merge

Blurred: Recognition and settlement.

The distinction: Oslo achieved mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO, which was genuinely new and has not been withdrawn. It settled none of the substantive questions, and confusing the two makes both the achievement and the failure unintelligible.

Blurred: Opponents of the process and the process's own design.

The distinction: Hamas attacks and settlement construction both damaged Oslo, and both were possible because five years passed with nothing substantive agreed. Blaming only the opponents leaves the architecture unexamined.

What a Grade 9 answer holds here

A Grade 9 answer separates what Oslo achieved from what it postponed. Mutual recognition between two parties that had denied each other's existence is a real and permanent change, and it was bought by listing the five questions that mattered and agreeing to answer them later — so the process's enemies did not have to defeat it, only to fill the years it had left empty.

3 · How it is examined

This strand is genuinely set through: Paper 2 Section B (a) (6 marks — “Explain TWO ways in which … was different from ….”); Paper 2 Section B (b) (8 marks — “Explain TWO causes of ….”); Paper 2 Section B (c)(i) or (c)(ii) (16 marks — “How significant was … in …, in the years …? / How far were … responsible for …, in the years …? You may use the following in your answer: • [prompt] • [prompt]. You must also use information of your own.”).

What earns marks: The five deferred questions listed, with the absence of any mechanism to compel a final agreement. It turns a claim about failure into a description of how the failure was possible.

The cap that bites here: The 16-mark question requires three aspects; two is a Level 3 ceiling.

4 · Prove it — the questions

Answered inside Incandio, where a marker checks what a correct answer must contain and tells you which half was missing. The marking stays in the app; the questions are here.

1. Explain TWO ways in which the first Intifada was different from earlier Palestinian resistance. [6 marks · Paper 2 Section B (a)]
2. Explain TWO causes of the Oslo Accords. [8 marks · Paper 2 Section B (b)]
3. Explain TWO causes of the difficulties faced by the Oslo process after 1993. [8 marks · Paper 2 Section B (b)]
4. How significant were the Oslo Accords in the search for peace in the Middle East, in the years 1917–2012? [16 marks · Paper 2 Section B (c)(i) or (c)(ii)]
5. How far did the Oslo Accords fail because of their own terms? [16 marks · Paper 2 Section B (c)(i) or (c)(ii)]

Decide it

This lesson feeds a Decide History judgement — a position you commit to, an objection you answer, a criterion you name: What has done most to prevent a settlement in the Middle East since 1917: the promises, the wars, or the peace processes themselves?.

Carry on through the option

• Previous lesson, in key topic 4: The war widens into Lebanon
• Next lesson: Rabin's assassination, the second Intifada and the Roadmap
• Key topic 5 · The attempts to find a lasting peace, 1987–2012 · The Middle East: conflict, crisis and change, 1917–2012 · the option's timeline · Incandio History
• The other key topics of The Middle East: Build up of tension in Palestine, 1917–46 · The creation of Israel, the war of 1948–49 and the Suez Crisis of 1956 · Tension and conflict, 1956–73 · Diplomacy, peace then wider war, 1973–83