To this challenge on the PLO to deliver, we should add a series of more immediate causes that brought the PLO to the table of negotiations with Israel. First of all, Arafat's perception of time. Things were changing in the middle east and the world at large that created an unusual sense of urgency for the PLO and the for Arafat as the organizations leader. In the early 1990's the Soviet Union, the great supporter of the PLO for decades collapsed. There were no longer two superpowers, there was just one and that one was the United States of America, Israel's greatest ally. The balance, therefore, was shifting in a way that was most uncomfortable, strategically and historically for the PLO. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to other changes as well. The most critical from the Palestinian point of view in this regard was the massive immigration of Soviet Jews to Israel. The numbers that were first spoken of were in the hundreds of thousands. Within later years, in the decade of the 1990s, this turned into one million Soviet immigrants to Israel, which created a real fear amongst Palestinians. That the numbers game was no longer working in their favor. The possibility that hundreds of thousands of Soviet immigrants would be settled in the West Bank added to the PLO sense of urgency that something ought to be done about this new situation. In 1991 along with these other changes, Iraq was resoundedly defeated by the United States as it was pushed out of Kuwait that it, it had invaded just a few months earlier, in August 1990. The destruction of the Iraqi military was a serious change in the balance of power in the Middle East, generally speaking. If it was on a country like Iraq that Arafat had relied as a strategic hinterland this was no longer a realistic possibility. The Intifada, the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank in Gaza that had begun in 1987, which had given so much added impetus to the Palestinian national endeavor in the early 1990s was losing steam. There was a need and an urgent need to address the needs of the insider constituency, that is, the people in the West Bank in Gaza. How to translate the Intifada from an expression of disapproval and opposition to the Israeli occupation into a real political tool, for real political gain. Added to all of these, the financial bankruptcy of the PLO. After Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, Arafat made the terrible mistake of supporting Saddam Hussein and by doing so aroused the hostility and the anger of the PLO's traditional bank rollers, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other gulf states. And as a result of his support for Saddam Hussein this financial backing was removed very suddenly, putting the PLO also into serious financial straits. Within the PLO, even radicals like Faruq al-Qaddumi was speaking of the danger that if the PLO did not engage in some kind of political negotiation with Israel it would find itself, on the trash heap of history. There was the constant fear, that if the PLO did not initiate some kind of political move, the leadership inside the west bank in Gaza, may create a leadership of its own to challenge and replace the PLO. Even though this was not a realistic fear, it was a fear all the same and inside the West Bank in Gaza, political changes were taking place that were not really in the PLO's best interest. And the most important of these was the rise of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement which had gained a great deal of strength during the Intifada and had come out into the open at the beginning of the Intifada and was a serious challenge to the PLO's leadership. So for all these reasons, the PLO was moving toward a direction of greater willingness to negotiate with Israel. What were the causes that brought Israel to the table? Israel under Yitzhak Rabin the prime minister of the country as of the labor victory in early 1992. So it's place in the region as in the center of concentric circles from which derived a need for a strategy of peace. Rabin's analysis was as follows Israel needed peace with the inner circle of states that were on its borders. That is, Egypt and Syria and Lebanon and Jordan and the Palestinians, to create an inner circle of peace that would keep the more radical states in the outer circle like Iran and Iraq at bay and at a safe distance from Israel without the provocation of the Arab Israeli conflict to have them interfere in Israel's affairs. So Rabin seriously believed in the urgent need for some kind of progress in the peace process with Israel's neighbors that did not have peace with Israel yet, and key amongst these were of course, the Palestinians. Rabin's analysis of the Palestinian Intifada was another contributing factor. The Intifada was a drain on Israel's resources financially and politically. It seriously damaged Israel's international standing and it had brought Robin to the conclusion that this was a time to do Israel's level best to bring an end to the occupation. The Madrid process that had begun in late 1991 under the auspices of the United States was not going anywhere in terms of the negotiations with the other Arab players particularly the Palestinians. So Israel also just like the PLO had an interest in the early 1990s for a historical breakthrough and this historical breakthrough came in the summer of 1993, with the fruition of secret negotiations in the Norwegian capital of Oslo.
