On September 13, 1993, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin stood on the White House lawn and shook hands before the world.

For Palestinians, that image carried a larger hope: that a transitional process would lead to the end of occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state.

The five years that were supposed to be transitional passed.

Then 20 years. Then 20.

Now, 33 years have passed.

Perhaps we do not need the thousands of pages written about Oslo to understand where we have arrived.

We only need to look at the map.

Israeli settlements have expanded. Outposts have spread across the hills. Roads connect many of them to Israel and to one another. Palestinian land has been confiscated or become increasingly difficult to reach.

East Jerusalem is increasingly surrounded by settlements. Area C, more than 60% of the West Bank, remains under extensive Israeli control over planning, construction, and land.

In Area A, which was supposed to be under Palestinian civil and security control, Israeli forces continue to enter Palestinian cities and refugee camps and carry out arrests, demolitions, and road closures.

In Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams refugee camps, more than 33,000 Palestinian refugees displaced since early 2025 remain unable to return home.

And then there is Gaza—part of the same Palestinian territory Palestinians entered Oslo believing would one day become their state.

If two states are made impossible, can anyone defend a permanent one-state reality in which Palestinians and Israelis do not enjoy equal national and political rights?

Between the handshake of 1993 and the map of 2026 lies the story of 33 years.

At its heart is one question: Who controls the land—and who is still able to remain on it?

Less than five months after Oslo was signed, Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein entered the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron during dawn prayers in Ramadan and opened fire on Palestinian worshippers, killing 29.

Less than two years later, Israeli extremist Yigal Amir assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin because he opposed the political path Rabin had pursued.

The events were different, but both revealed early on the strength of the forces opposing any process that might eventually end Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory.

Negotiations continued.

So did settlement expansion.

And this became Oslo's central contradiction: Palestinians were negotiating over a state while the land on which that state was supposed to exist was changing beneath their feet.

Perhaps no place illustrates this more clearly than E1.

The area lies between occupied East Jerusalem and the Israeli settlement of Ma'ale Adumim. Its importance is not simply how many settlement homes may be built there, but what construction would do to the map.

Expansion in E1 threatens Palestinian territorial continuity between the northern and southern West Bank and further separates East Jerusalem from its Palestinian surroundings.

If the international community still speaks seriously about a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, where exactly is that state supposed to exist if the territory itself continues to be fragmented?

Governments can issue endless statements supporting two states.

But maps do not read statements.

They record what is built, who controls the land, and who is allowed to reach it.

The same contradiction appears in Area A.

The division of the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C was meant to be temporary. Yet what was temporary has become almost permanent, while the boundaries created by Oslo do not prevent Israeli forces from entering areas supposedly under Palestinian control.

Since early 2025, large-scale Israeli military operations have displaced more than 33,000 Palestinian refugees from Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams camps. Many remain unable to return.

For me, this is one of the most painful images of the post-Oslo era: A Palestinian refugee, whose family was displaced once before, being displaced again—this time from the refugee camp itself.

There are political arguments about Oslo, security arrangements, and who violated which agreement.

But what language describes a refugee becoming a refugee for a second time?

Settlement expansion, too, is often reduced to an image of houses appearing on a hill.

But for Palestinians living nearby, a settlement is not simply a house.

It is also a road, a checkpoint, a gate, an outpost, a field a farmer can no longer safely reach, and a grazing area a shepherd can no longer use.

During the first eight months of 2026, the United Nations documented more than 1,600 settler attacks resulting in Palestinian casualties or property damage across 275 communities.

But numbers alone do not explain what happens afterward.

Can the farmer return to his field after an attack?

Can the shepherd return to the same hill tomorrow?

Can a family continue to live where every journey to its land becomes a confrontation?

Consider Al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah.

By early September, more than 56 settler attacks resulting in casualties or property damage had been documented there during 2026.

Settlement outposts have expanded around the village, while access to agricultural and grazing land has become increasingly restricted.

On September 2, two Palestinian children were shot and killed by Israeli forces there amid another period of settler attacks and military operations.

At that point, settlement expansion is no longer simply construction on a hill.

It becomes a system of pressure on a village and on the ability of its people to remain.

A Palestinian farmer may legally own his land. But what does ownership mean if he cannot water it?

This question is especially acute in the Jordan Valley.

In Bardala this year, Israeli forces demolished seven agricultural greenhouses covering about 11 dunums and destroyed the water networks connected to them.

It may sound like a small incident beside the headlines of war and killing.

It is not small to a farmer waiting for water to save his crop.

If water disappears for days, he may lose a harvest. If the problem continues, he may lose his income. If access to water becomes a permanent struggle, farming itself may become impossible.

And when farming becomes impossible, a Palestinian does not simply lose a crop.

He loses one of the strongest reasons he has for remaining on his land.

This is why displacement does not always begin with a bulldozer demolishing a........

© Common Dreams