Palestinian actions mean Israel is no longer bound by the Oslo Accords, according to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Photo: Wikimedia

A leading Israeli think-tank has concluded that “Israel has the legitimate right to declare that the Oslo Accords are no longer valid and to act unilaterally in order to protect its essential legal and security interests.”

Signed in September 1993 between the late Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and the late PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, the Oslo Accords – which earned both men a Nobel Peace Prize – committed Israel and the Palestinians to a land for peace deal and an end to terrorist attacks. The Accords stipulated that a final agreement would be negotiated after an interim five-year period; by 1998, however, the Palestinians were shifting away from negotiations, and by 2000, had wrecked the peace process by launching a second intifada.

More than a decade later, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has published “Ten Points Regarding the Fundamental Breach by the Palestinians of the Oslo Accords,” by Ambassador Alan Baker, a former deputy director-general of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Baker described the accords as a “contractual framework of obligations between Israel and the Palestinians, signed as witnesses and guarantors by the King of Jordan, the Presidents of the U.S. and Egypt, the Foreign Ministers of the Russian Federation and Norway, the EU and endorsed by the UN.” But now that the Palestinian Authority is aggressively pursuing a unilateralist strategy, Baker said, by “petitioning the UN, the International Criminal Court and international organizations to recognize them and accept them as a full member state, and by their unification with the Hamas terror organization, the Palestinians have knowingly and deliberately bypassed their contractual obligations pursuant to the Oslo Accords in an attempt to prejudge the main negotiating issues outside the negotiation.”

Baker argued that, as the “injured party,” Israel “is freed from any further obligations pursuant to the agreement or contract.”

Wrote Baker: “The fundamental breach of the Oslo Accords by the Palestinians is indicative of their conscious decision to undermine them and prevent any possibility of their implementation. As such they have rendered the Accords void…Israel has the legitimate right to declare that the Oslo Accords are no longer valid.”