Jerusalem has functioned within Palestinian national discourse as both locus and emblem of national space. After the Oslo accords, and increasingly during the high Oslo years (1993-2000) , it became central in official Palestinian national discourse. Jerusalem as "the key to peace in the region' became a motif, displacing the refugees as the determining issue of the national trajectory. Evidenced in particular through the programs of the Palestinian radio, in which specific programs were devoted to Jerusalem, the modalities in which this discourse was produced were responsive to the political problems engaged on the ground at a number of critical points, including the elections of 1996, the Palestinian census of 1998, and the Israeli implementation of the Center of Life Law which functioned to edge Palestinians out of the city. Thus, Palestinian discourse over Jerusalem during this period responded to lived trajectories and Israeli colonial practices, and expressed the paradoxical accommodation which was embedded in the Oslo turn. In the sharpened struggle over the future of the city that emerged in the context of the colonial balance of power, this discourse fashioned a distinctive articulation of the relationship of property rights with national space, the political with the legal, secular religious pluralism with the 'sacred', the present with the past, 'will' and 'right' and citizenship with national identity. The paper will explore the strands of this complex discourse on Jerusalem, and the often paradoxical and laminated ways it constituted place, space, identity, agency and political action, through a contextualized discourse analysis of materials drawn from various programs, newscasts and references to Jerusalem broadcast over the Voice of Palestine during the Oslo period. The radio materials come from a personal archive of over 700 PBC broadcasts collected by the author between 1994-98, which is perhaps the only original surviving Palestinian collection of these materials after the destruction of the PBC archives themselves by the Israeli army during the invasion of the West Bank in 2002 (although the author has now made copies of these). The project will contribute to our understanding of the politics of place and space in the colonial encounter, and in the constitution of the 'national' generally, and the ways that Jerusalem in particular has been constituted as both locus and singular emblem of such a politics in the Palestinian case.