I. THE LAWN
On 13 September 1993, on the South Lawn of the White House, Yitzhak Rabin shook a hand he did not want to shake, and the photograph went around the world as the image of peace arriving. What was actually signed that morning was not a peace treaty. It was a Declaration of Principles, a five-year interim arrangement, and its real substance sat in two letters exchanged four days earlier.
In his letter of 9 September, Yasser Arafat committed the PLO to a short list of specific obligations. He recognised the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security. He accepted Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. He undertook to resolve every outstanding issue through negotiation. He renounced the use of terrorism and other acts of violence. He assumed responsibility over all PLO personnel to ensure their compliance, prevent violations, and discipline violators. And he declared the clauses of the Palestinian National Covenant denying Israel’s right to exist to be inoperative and no longer valid, undertaking to have the Palestine National Council formally amend the text.
Rabin’s reply was a single sentence recognising the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. Israel then delivered the rest in kind: territory, in six successive withdrawals; a police force it armed with tens of thousands of rifles; a tax-collection mechanism under the Paris Protocol that funded the new administration; and the diplomatic legitimacy that turned a proscribed guerrilla organisation into an internationally underwritten government receiving one of the highest per-capita aid flows on earth. Thirty-three years later, of the obligations Arafat signed, not one has been fully honoured, and the Covenant he promised to amend has never been amended. This is not a story of a process that broke down. It is a story of a contract that one party never intended to perform.
II. THE FILE ON THE MAN WHO SIGNED
It is worth remembering what Israel was asked to accept as a partner. On 1 March 1973, eight operatives of Black September stormed the Saudi embassy in Khartoum and seized the American ambassador Cleo Noel, the American chargé d’affaires George Curtis Moore, and the Belgian chargé Guy Eid. The next evening all three were machine-gunned in the basement. For thirty-three years Washington declined to say who had ordered it. Then, in 2006, the State Department declassified an intelligence memorandum, published in the Foreign Relations of the United States series, which states in its opening summary that the Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PLO and head of Fatah. Two American diplomats were murdered on the orders of the man who would stand on the White House lawn twenty years later.
Khartoum was not an aberration in the record; it was a routine entry. Black September, a Fatah instrument, murdered eleven Israeli athletes at Munich in September 1972 and hijacked Sabena Flight 571 that May. On 11 March 1978, a Fatah squad landed north of Tel Aviv, murdered an American photographer on the beach, seized a bus on the coastal highway, and left thirty-eight civilians dead, thirteen of them children. Its commander, Dalal Mughrabi, has since been honoured by the Palestinian Authority with schools, squares and summer camps bearing her name. Other PLO constituents kept the same accounts: the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine machine-gunned a school bus at Avivim in May 1970, killing twelve, nine of them children, and four years later seized a school at Ma’alot and murdered twenty-two teenagers. Arafat chaired the umbrella under which all of this was organised, financed and celebrated from 1969 onwards.
The Lebanese chapter is the one most systematically forgotten, and the one Europe should find hardest to read. Expelled from Jordan in 1970, the PLO rebuilt itself in Lebanon as a state within a state, and in January 1976 it took part in the destruction of Damour, a Maronite town on the coast road south of Beirut. Fatah units, alongside the Syrian-run Sa’iqa and the Mourabitoun, overran the town; estimates of the civilian dead run from roughly a hundred and fifty to close to six hundred. The church was desecrated and the cemetery dug up. Damour followed by two days the Phalangist massacre at Karantina, and the Lebanese civil war produced atrocities in every direction, including against Palestinians. That sequence explains the chronology. It does not convert the killing of a Christian town into an act of resistance, and it does not explain why the organisation responsible was, seventeen years later, handed the keys to a territory adjacent to Israel’s coastal plain.
The last entry before Oslo is the Achille Lauro. In October 1985, hijackers from the Palestine Liberation Front, whose leader Abu Abbas sat on the PLO Executive Committee, shot Leon Klinghoffer, a sixty-nine-year-old American in a wheelchair, and pushed him and his chair into the Mediterranean.
III. THE MOSCOW FILE
The Soviet dimension of Arafat’s career is often waved away as Israeli folklore. It is documented, though the documentation requires care. The Mitrokhin archive, the handwritten copies of KGB First Chief Directorate files smuggled out by the archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and published by Cambridge’s Christopher Andrew, records Arafat as a cultivated contact under the codename Aref, assigned a dedicated liaison officer, and it records the KGB’s private contempt for him: an internal note dismissed his information as thin and self-serving. The same archive is far more categorical about Wadie Haddad of the PFLP, the architect of the hijacking era, listed as a recruited agent codenamed Nationalist, with the Soviets funding and arming his organisation and, on Andrew’s reading, having advance knowledge of and almost certainly sanctioning the multiple-aircraft hijackings of September 1970. When Haddad was poisoned in 1978, Arafat asked the KGB for help and the Stasi hid him in an East Berlin hospital under a false name.
The more colourful claims — that the KGB fabricated Arafat’s Palestinian birth certificate, trained him at the Balashikha special-operations school, and funnelled him two hundred thousand dollars a month in laundered cash — come from Ion Mihai Pacepa, the defecting head of Romanian foreign intelligence, and rest on his testimony alone. They should be cited as what they are. The documented core does not need them. Mitrokhin’s notes also identify Mahmoud Abbas as a KGB agent recruited in Damascus in 1983 under the codename Krotov, the Mole; Fatah has called it a smear. What is not in dispute is that Abbas took his doctorate at Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University and that his 1982 thesis, later published, minimised the scale of the Holocaust and advanced the claim that the Zionist movement collaborated with the Nazis in the destruction of European Jewry. That is the intellectual formation of the man the international community has spent two decades describing as the moderate.
IV. A NATION DECLARED IN CAIRO, 1964
The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in Cairo in January 1964, at the initiative of the Arab League and under Egyptian sponsorship. This is three and a half years before Israel held a single square metre of Judea, Samaria, Gaza or eastern Jerusalem. Whatever the PLO was created to liberate in January 1964, it was not the West Bank, which was held by Jordan, and it was not Gaza, which was held by Egypt.
The founding Charter says so in terms. Article 24 of the 1964 text states that the organisation exercises no territorial sovereignty over the West Bank within the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, over the Gaza Strip, or over the Himmah area. Defenders of the movement answer, not unreasonably, that Article 24 was a diplomatic courtesy to Amman, Cairo and Damascus rather than a renunciation, and that Article 2 already defined Palestine by the boundaries of the Mandate. Take the objection at full strength; it changes nothing that matters. For nineteen years, from 1948 to 1967, Jordan ruled Judea and Samaria and Egypt ruled Gaza, and in those nineteen years no Palestinian state was established, none was demanded, and no liberation movement fired a shot to obtain one. Article 24 was quietly deleted in the revised Charter of 1968 — the year after Israel took the territories. The claim to Judea, Samaria and Gaza did not produce the conflict. The conflict produced the claim.
The most candid witness on this point is not Israeli. Zuheir Mohsen sat on the PLO Executive Committee and led the Syrian-backed Sa’iqa faction. In an interview with the Dutch daily Trouw on 31 March 1977, he told the journalist James Dorsey that “the Palestinian people does not exist”, that there was no real distinction between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese, and that a separate Palestinian identity was asserted for tactical reasons because Arab national interests required a distinct people to set against Zionism. Mohsen was a pan-Arabist making a pan-Arabist argument, and he was arguing for the erasure of Palestinian particularity in favour of a greater Syria. His candour is nonetheless on the record, from the leadership itself, in a European newspaper. Identity is not the point in dispute. The point in dispute is what the movement was built to accomplish, and its own founders keep saying that the state was the instrument and the war was the objective.
V. THE CONTRACT
The Interim Agreement of 28 September 1995, Oslo II, is a hundred-page legal instrument, and it is worth stating precisely what it required of the Palestinian side, because the obligations are almost never enumerated in the coverage that treats the process as something Israel did to somebody.
Article XV obliged the Authority to take all measures necessary to prevent acts of terrorism, crime and hostilities directed against Israelis, and to take legal measures against offenders — not to condemn, not to deplore, but to arrest and prosecute. Article XIV established a monopoly of force: apart from the Palestinian Police and the Israeli army, no armed force was to be established or to operate in the territories, and no organisation, group or individual was to manufacture, acquire, possess or import weapons or explosives outside the enumerated, registered and capped inventory of that police force. Article IX(5) withheld foreign relations from the Council altogether, naming embassies, consulates and other foreign missions, and the appointment of diplomatic staff, as spheres it would not possess. Article XXII(1) required both parties to abstain from incitement, including hostile propaganda, and to take legal measures to prevent incitement by any organisation, group or individual within their jurisdiction; Article XXII(2) required their education systems to contribute to peace and to refrain from introducing any material that could damage reconciliation. Article XXXI(7) provided that neither side would initiate or take any step altering the status of the West Bank and Gaza pending the outcome of permanent-status negotiations. Article XXXI(9) required the Palestine National Council to convene within two months of the Council’s inauguration and formally approve the changes to the Covenant. And the Declaration of Principles bound both parties to resolve disputes arising from the accords by negotiation, through the joint liaison machinery — not in third-party forums.
Read together, these are not vague aspirations. They are a set of enforceable undertakings: stop the killing, monopolise the guns, stop the incitement, teach peace in the schools, do not conduct foreign policy, do not prejudge the outcome unilaterally, and rewrite the founding document that calls for the destruction of the other party. Every one of them has been breached, most of them continuously, and several of them as declared policy.
VI. THE BREACHES
Start with the Covenant, because it is the simplest test and the one no one can blame on circumstance. In April 1996 the Palestine National Council voted to annul the clauses inconsistent with the letters of recognition and to task a legal committee with drafting a new charter. The committee never produced one. President Clinton flew to Gaza in December 1998 to obtain a show of hands reaffirming the annulment. Thirty years on, there is no amended Palestinian National Charter. The single obligation that required nothing but a pen was never completed.
On the monopoly of force, the record is worse than non-compliance. In January 2002 Israeli commandos boarded the Karine A in the Red Sea and found fifty tonnes of Iranian ordnance — Katyushas, mortars, anti-tank missiles, explosives — procured through Fuad Shubaki, the senior financial officer of the Palestinian Authority’s security apparatus. Arafat wrote to President Bush denying all knowledge. Shubaki was later convicted. Meanwhile the signatory party itself ran an armed wing: the Tanzim and the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which the United States designated as a terrorist organisation in 2002, were Fatah, not some uncontrollable rival. During the Second Intifada more than a thousand Israelis were murdered, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, in buses, cafés, discotheques and at a Passover seder, by an insurgency in which the ruling party of the Authority was a direct participant.
On incitement, the Authority has never even feigned compliance. It names streets, schools, squares and youth tournaments after the perpetrators of the coastal road massacre and the Sbarro bombing; its official media have run the celebration of “martyrdom” as a continuous editorial line; and the review of Palestinian textbooks commissioned by the European Union and carried out by the Georg Eckert Institute, published in 2021, found material inconsistent with UNESCO standards on peace and tolerance still embedded in the state curriculum a quarter of a century after Article XXII was signed.
On unilateralism, the strategy has been open. Having undertaken to determine status only by negotiation, the Authority joined UNESCO in 2011, obtained non-member observer state status at the General Assembly in 2012, acceded to the Rome Statute in 2015 and immediately referred Israel to the International Criminal Court, drove the advisory proceedings at the International Court of Justice, and in September 2025 harvested a wave of European recognitions. Each of these steps is an attempt to obtain the permanent-status outcome from third parties while giving nothing that a permanent-status agreement would have required in exchange. That is precisely the conduct Article XXXI(7) and the negotiation clause were drafted to prohibit, and the Authority has pursued it as its principal foreign policy for fifteen years — while formally possessing no foreign-policy powers at all.
And on the democratic architecture the accords were supposed to build: the last presidential election was in January 2005, the last legislative election in 2006, the Legislative Council was dissolved in 2018 by a court Abbas appointed, and the elections scheduled for May 2021 were cancelled when Fatah looked likely to lose them. Mahmoud Abbas is in the twenty-first year of a four-year term. Municipal ballots were held in April 2026 and presented as evidence of renewal.
The obvious rejoinder is settlements, and it deserves an answer rather than a silence. Critics of Israel invoke the same Article XXXI(7) against the growth of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, and the argument is not frivolous. But the accords contain no settlement freeze; the parties expressly deferred settlements, along with Jerusalem, borders and refugees, to permanent-status talks; and Israel has twice offered to evacuate them wholesale as part of a final agreement, which is what a deferred issue looks like when it is finally negotiated. Above all, the two categories are not commensurate. A housing tender is reversible, and in 2005 Israel proved it by removing every settlement in Gaza in a fortnight. A bus bombing is not reversible. No apartment block in Ariel has ever detonated in a pizzeria.
VII. THE PRICE LIST
Of all the breaches, one deserves separate treatment, because it is not a failure of control but a budget line. Under Law No. 14 of 2004 and the Law of Prisoners and Released Prisoners of 2013, the Palestinian Authority paid monthly salaries to Palestinians imprisoned for attacks on Israelis, and to the families of those killed carrying them out, on a scale that rose with the length of the sentence. The longer the sentence, the larger the payment. That is not welfare. Welfare is calibrated to need. This was calibrated to the gravity of the crime, which makes it a tariff, and a tariff is an incentive. The United States responded with the Taylor Force Act in 2018, named for an American army veteran stabbed to death in Jaffa; Israel responded the same year with a law deducting the sums from the tax revenues it collects on the Authority’s behalf.
In February 2025, under sustained American and European pressure, Abbas issued a decree revoking the relevant laws and transferring the function to a new body, the Palestinian National Foundation for Economic Empowerment, on a purported needs basis. Eight days later he dismissed Qadura Fares, the head of the Authority’s prisoners’ commission, for objecting. He then told Fatah’s Revolutionary Council that if a single penny remained, it would go to the prisoners and the martyrs. On the strength of that decree, France recognised a Palestinian state at the General Assembly podium in September 2025, with Emmanuel Macron citing the pledge explicitly; the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Belgium, Luxembourg and Norway followed within days.
In April 2026 the State Department submitted its mandatory report to Congress under the Taylor Force Act. It found that the Authority continues to run a system of compensation supporting terrorism through new mechanisms and “under a different name”, identifying the new welfare foundation as one of the vehicles. It put the sums paid during calendar year 2025 — the year of the decree, the year of the recognitions — at roughly $156 million, of which $126 million went to imprisoned attackers and $30 million to the families of those who died committing attacks. It recorded that in February 2026, a year after the decree, the Authority’s own finance minister publicly reaffirmed the commitment and acknowledged that the payments had not stopped. Palestinian Media Watch traced distributions through the postal system and into accounts in Jordan and Lebanon, beyond the reach of Western auditors. When some former prisoners protested in Bethlehem in December 2025 and January 2026 that their money had been interrupted, no Palestinian outlet reported it.
Seven Western governments granted recognition on the strength of a reform that the American government, reading the same evidence a few months later, concluded was a change of letterhead.
VIII. TWICE OFFERED A STATE, TWICE REFUSED
At Camp David in July 2000, Ehud Barak, with Bill Clinton in the room, put on the table all of Gaza, roughly nine-tenths of Judea and Samaria, Palestinian sovereignty over the Arab neighbourhoods of eastern Jerusalem and a form of control on the Temple Mount that no previous Israeli leader had contemplated. Arafat refused, and — this is the detail that matters — he tabled no counter-proposal. In December, Clinton reduced the terms to written parameters, more generous still, with 94 to 96 per cent of the territory and swaps for the remainder. Israel accepted with reservations. Arafat did not. Two months after Camp David, the Second Intifada began. Clinton’s own verdict on Arafat, recorded in his memoir, was that the chairman had made a failure of him; Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington and no friend of Israel, described the refusal as a crime against the Palestinians and against the whole region.
Eight years later the offer was repeated and improved. Between 2006 and 2008 Ehud Olmert met Mahmoud Abbas thirty-six times. On 16 September 2008 he presented a map: 93.7 per cent of Judea and Samaria, with 5.8 per cent of sovereign Israeli territory transferred in compensation and a corridor linking the West Bank to Gaza; all of Gaza; the Arab neighbourhoods of Jerusalem as the capital; the Old City and the holy sites removed from Israeli sovereignty and placed under a five-member trusteeship of Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United States, an arrangement that guaranteed a non-Israeli majority over the Temple Mount; and a symbolic intake of refugees. Olmert asked Abbas to initial the map. Abbas asked to take it away, was refused, left, and never returned; the thirty-seventh meeting never happened. In May 2009 he told the Washington Post that the gaps had been too wide. In November 2015, on Israeli television, he said plainly that he had rejected it out of hand. Saeb Erekat maintained that the Palestinians deposited a counter-map with the Americans three months later; whatever was in it, no Palestinian leader in fifty years has ever put his signature on a map of the state he says he wants.
Between them, Arafat and Abbas were offered a sovereign Palestinian state on substantially all of the territory captured in 1967, with a capital in Jerusalem, three times in eight years. Each time the answer was no, and on no occasion was the no accompanied by a yes to anything else. A national movement that declines statehood three times is not being denied a state. It is declining one, because accepting it would mean signing an end to the claim, and the claim is the enterprise.
IX. THE FAMILY BUSINESS
The other reason the Authority cannot make peace is that peace would end the arrangement it exists to protect. In September 2003 the International Monetary Fund published a study of Palestinian public finances which found that some $900 million in revenues from the Authority’s commercial holdings had been diverted between 1995 and 2000 into a special account controlled by Arafat and his financial adviser. The same review found that $34 million of the $74 million allocated to the presidency’s own 2003 budget went out as unexplained transfers to unnamed organisations and individuals. Arafat’s wife lived in Paris on a reported allowance of $100,000 a month; in 2003 French prosecutors opened a money-laundering inquiry into $11.4 million transferred into her accounts over fourteen months. She denied wrongdoing, and no charges followed. The Authority’s commercial life — cement, fuel, flour, tobacco — ran through monopolies administered by Arafat’s adviser Mohammed Rashid, later convicted in absentia of embezzlement by a Palestinian court.
Under Abbas the method changed and the substance did not. His sons Yasser and Tarek built the Falcon consortium, spanning tobacco, construction, engineering, media and investment, alongside insurance interests; both took American-funded contracts in the West Bank, including from USAID, and a lawsuit against one journalist who wrote about it went nowhere. The Panama Papers named a holding of Tarek’s in a company linked to the Authority, and the Palestinian anti-corruption coalition AMAN called for an investigating team that was never seriously constituted.
The most damning testimony is Palestinian. A survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in October 2025 found that eighty per cent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza want Abbas to resign. In January 2026, Tawfiq Tirawi — former head of Palestinian General Intelligence, a member of Fatah’s Central Committee, and a man with no discernible sympathy for Israel — published an open appeal to Abbas denouncing the institutional corruption of the Palestinian leadership, the seizure of public and private land by regime-connected brokers, and a moral collapse of Palestinian institutions, and accused the president’s own entourage of concealing the state of affairs from him. When the man who ran your intelligence service says the institution is rotten, the accusation cannot be filed under Israeli propaganda.
X. THE VERDICT
On 3 August 2026, Justice Sonia Sotomayor refused to halt enforcement of a $656 million judgment against the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, obtained under the Anti-Terrorism Act by American families killed and maimed in Jerusalem in the early 2000s. The Authority’s argument to the Supreme Court was that paying would destabilise its provision of government services in the West Bank. Set that alongside the State Department’s finding four months earlier. An institution that cannot afford to compensate the American dead has found $156 million a year for the people who killed them, and it says both things in public, in the same year, to different audiences, and expects neither audience to check.
There is also a control experiment, and it has already been run. In 2005 Israel withdrew every soldier and every settler from Gaza, uprooting its own citizens by force to do it. The Authority lost the 2006 election and then lost Gaza itself in the 2007 coup. What grew in the vacuum was not a Singapore on the Mediterranean but a garrison that spent eighteen years building tunnels instead of sewers and produced the 7 October 2023 massacre. Today Gaza is administered by a transitional authority under Security Council Resolution 2803, because after all of it neither the Authority nor Hamas can be trusted to hold it. That is the answer to the question of what a sovereign state under this leadership would have become, and it is not a hypothesis.
Oslo was not killed by Israeli housing tenders. It was killed by a leadership that signed a renunciation of violence and kept an armed wing, signed a ban on incitement and named schools after bus bombers, signed away foreign relations and built a diplomatic campaign against the other party, signed a promise to amend a charter and never amended it, and was offered the state three times and refused it three times while paying salaries to the men who made the state impossible. The Palestinians do have a national tragedy. Its authors are buried in Ramallah, or governing from it.