What happened
The exchange of letters that preceded the White House ceremony was itself the historic act: for the first time, the PLO recognized Israel's right to exist and renounced terrorism, while Israel recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people — after decades in which each side had refused to acknowledge the other's political legitimacy at all. The Declaration of Principles that followed set out an interim period of Palestinian self-government, first in Gaza and Jericho, expanding over five years while Jerusalem, refugees, borders, and settlements — the hardest issues — were deferred to final-status talks.
That five-year interim period was never completed as envisioned. Final-status talks did not conclude until Camp David collapsed in 2000 (see the Barak-era entry in this file), by which point continued settlement growth throughout the 1990s (documented in the following entry) had already begun eroding the territorial contiguity a Palestinian state would need. Whether that erosion was an inevitable feature of any interim period or a specific failure of political will is genuinely disputed among historians of the process — but the accords' architects on both sides, including Rabin, explicitly understood settlement freezes as central to preserving the deal's credibility, which is why continued construction during this same period is recorded here as its own item rather than folded into an uncomplicated positive story about Oslo.