Norway Releases Oslo Process Archive: Thousands of Pages on the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process Now Public
The National Archives of Norway and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced on November 5, 2026, that a substantial collection of documents relating to the Oslo process is being made available to the public. The documents had been kept at the home of Terje Rød-Larsen and Mona Juul, the Norwegian diplomats who played a central role in facilitating the secret Israeli-Palestinian talks of the 1990s.
With Rød-Larsen's consent, material assessed as relevant to the Oslo process has been transferred to the National Archives and made available to the public; individual documents originating from Juul have also been released with her consent. The National Archives and the Foreign Ministry have digitised the material, which can now be consulted by anyone on the Digitalarkivet.no platform.
The released collection runs to several thousand pages dating from 1983 to 2003 and concerns the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians during the period when Rød-Larsen worked at the Fafo research foundation and subsequently at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It includes draft letters and faxes, unfinished and handwritten notes, and a small number of original documents on Foreign Ministry letterhead. The ministry has declassified and sorted the documents, with archival expertise provided by the National Archives.
The Foreign Ministry said the documents concern an important part of the history of Norwegian foreign policy, and that making available documents that would not normally form part of a public archive is an unusual measure rather than standard practice. It cited the historical value of the material, considerable public interest, and the fact that the decades-old documents are no longer subject to foreign-policy considerations requiring them to be withheld. A small number of documents cannot be published for copyright or privacy reasons, and researchers who need physical access may apply to the ministry.
The Oslo process produced the agreements reached through Norway's secret back channel in the early 1990s; in September 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles at the White House, a milestone in Middle East peacemaking. (Source: Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
Source: Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 1993年奥斯陆协议白宫签署仪式（美国国家档案馆公共领域照片，经 Wikimedia Commons）
