After a while Arafat realised that the terrorism was not working as well as it once was. Also Arafat saw that he was losing support from his followers as the Israelis were obviously not succumbing to the terrorism and he was no further towards his aim as he was when they made the PLO. In fact they had been kicked out of Jordan because of tension between the PLO and the Arab states as they were seen as threatening to the Jordanian government and also eventually after fierce fighting with the Israelis were kicked out of Lebanon. Although the PLO were accepted by most of the World as the voice of the Palestinian community, the use of force has brought little success.
In 1986 the PLO began talks with the US government using Jordan as the mediator. The American demands were plain: to reject the use of terrorism, recognise Israel and its boundaries and accept UN resolution 242, ‘land for peace’. In return the PLO would be allowed to enter negotiations that might lead to the Palestinian controls of Gaza and the West Bank.
In 1987 the people of the West Bank and Gaza started an uprising called Intifada. This convinced Arafat that the time was right and subsequently publicly agreed to the American demands in 1988. The uprising made it look like Arafat was accepting from a strong position. The American government welcomed them into the peace talks. This understandably angered a lot of Palestinians as accepting Israel went against everything the Palestinians have fought for. The angered Palestinians looked to another group called Hamas this group was not willing to comprimise at all with the Israeli government, Arafat saw that it was important that they found peace soon before they took over and there would be no chance of peace. This all put pressure on Arafat to strike up a peace deal with Israel.
In 1990 Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The USA headed a UN coalition force to throw the Iraqis out. Meanwhile Yasser Arafat was seen to be supporting Saddam as he had critisised Israel in the past. Sadly the other oil-rich states such as Saudi Arabia were unhappy about Arafat’s actions and therefore stopped financially supporting the PLO. This left the PLO very isolated and desperately short of money and added extra pressure on Arafat to go to peace talks and make a deal with the Israelis. All this plus the large amount of pressure the Americans put on the Israelis to make peace in the Midddle East caused a peace agreement to be finally reached in Oslo on the 30th of August 1993, it was the first real substantial peace agreement. It established a Palestinian authority with an armed police force and gave Palestinians control over much of daily life in the Gaza strip and the West Bank. Sadly a lot of Palestinians were not happy with the deal, as it did not get everything they had asked for. The agreement did not remove Jewish settlements from the West Bank; Israeli settlers were not placed under authority of the new Palestinian administration; Arab East Jerusalem was excluded from the agreement; Israeli armed forces remained present in the Palestinian territories and it offered nothing to the Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. All this angered a minority of Palestinians including Hamas and some frections in the PLO.
It is clear from this that the peaceful methods of the PLO brought about this peace agreement in Oslo. All they accomplished through the use of terrorism was aggravating the Israelis so much that they would invade countries just to try and destroy them, in the process the PLO getting kicked out of the country as seen in Jordan and Lebanon. They did manage to gain publicity but some may argue it was the wrong kind and they did manage to gain supporters but then again they lost some when they adopted terrorism as their main offensive. They achieved much more with the use of peace talks and accepting terms set out by the Americans yet they did have to accept Israel as a state an that was against everything they had believed in from the start.
