"The 1993 Oslo Accords, in contrast, made no mention of that right whatsoever, let alone of “independence” or “liberation.”60 Instead, the Oslo Accords stipulated PLO recognition of the legitimacy of Israel as a state established on Jewish-colonized Palestinian lands. Thus, the Oslo Accords were in effect the best expression of the century-old Berlin Conference’s “right” of the Palestinians “to dispose of themselves” through ceding their “hereditary” right to their “soil” to a foreign power.61 Upon the orders of the United States and on the occasion of U.S. president Clinton’s visit to Gaza in 1998, the Palestinian Authority (PA) convened the PLO’s Palestinian National Council (PNC) to modify the Palestinian National Charter, for the express purpose of canceling articles Israeli officials found objectionable in it, including Article 19, which based itself on jus soli, though the PNC did keep Article 24, which bases itself on jus sanguinis.62
What emerges from the colonial and anticolonial use of the principle of self-determination in the Palestinian-Zionist context is its dependence on the same legal references to the question of nationality, not least the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act of 1914, and its 1918 amendments, namely, the two main definitions of the right to nationality: blood and land, or, jus sanguinis and jus soli.63 These became the two bases invoked by the British Mandatory authorities and the Zionists to establish a Jewish claim to Palestine."
