ABSTRACT
On 13 September 1993, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (DOPOISGA). U.S. President Bill Clinton hosted the signing ceremony at the White House. The declaration was heralded as historic. Clinton called it “an extraordinary act in one of history’s defi ning dramas;”1 Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres called it a revolution in Palestinian-Israeli relations;2 and Arafat explained that because of the declaration Palestinians and Israelis stood on the threshold to a new historic era.3 The international media shared the assessments of political fi gures in deeming the declaration a “Middle East breakthrough”4 and a “landmark peace accord.”5 Not to be outdone, pronouncements in scholarly literature characterized the declaration as “the mother of all breakthroughs”6 and as “one of the most momentous events in the twentieth-century of the Middle East.”7 The cumbersome title of Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements was soon replaced with the phrase, “Oslo Accord,”8 and the negotiations with the phrase, “Oslo Process”— in recognition that the negotiations began in Oslo, Norway.
