Study War No More
Review of Touching Peace : From the Oslo Accord to a Final Agreement, by Yossi. Beilin. 292 pp., London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999.
Avi Shlaim
New York Times Book Review, 20 August 2000.
Appearances are often deceptive. On the face of it, nothing was
achieved by the recent meeting between Ehud Barak, Yasser Arafat, and
Bill Clinton at the presidential retreat at Camp David. Yet everything
has changed. For the first time, serious negotiations took place on the
highly sensitive issues of Jerusalem and refugees. A taboo has been
broken. Jerusalem is no longer a sacred symbol but the subject of hard
bargaining. The right of return of the Palestinian refugees is no
longer just a slogan but an issue in search of a practical solution.
The Camp David summit was
one more station on the long and winding road to peace that started at
Oslo. The accord between Israel and the PLO, signed on the White House
lawn on 13 September 1993 and sealed with the hesitant handshake
between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, represented a reversal of
Zionist strategy in the 100 year-old conflict. Zionist leaders, before
and after 1948, sought to bypass the local Arabs and to reach an
understanding with the rulers of the neighbouring Arab states. Oslo
marked a historic breakthrough because it was the first formal
agreement between the two principal parties to the conflict: Israel and
the Palestinians.
The principal architect
of this revolution in Israel’s foreign policy was a 45 year-old
deputy Foreign Minister named Yossi Beilin. Beilin had worked as a
journalist and as a lecturer in Political Science before going into
politics. He quickly established himself in the Labour Party’s
Young Guard as a militant moderate and as a spokesman for social
reform, equal rights for Israel's Arab minority, and reconciliation
with the Palestinians. Some of his colleagues even criticized him for
his ‘Palestinian obsession’. The Labour Party had been
wedded ever since June 1967 to the so-called Jordanian option which saw
King Hussein of Jordan as Israel’s partner in a peace settlement
rather than the Palestinians. Beilin denied that there was a Jordanian
option: he wanted to tackle the root cause of the conflict. For two
decades he consistently maintained that the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict could be settled on the basis of mutual recognition. He also
argued that talking to the PLO was an essential condition for an
agreement with the Palestinians. The ‘hobby’ he developed,
as he points out in this reflective and revealing memoir, was trying to
split the atom of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, on the assumption
that this would facilitate the attainment of comprehensive peace in the
region (p. 46).
In the first half of this
book, Beilin gives a full and fascinating account of the secret talks
that culminated in the Oslo accord. Two Israeli academics, Dr Yair
Hirschfeld and Dr Ron Pundak, conducted the exploratory talks in the
Norwegian capital with the representatives of the PLO. But it was the
junior minister who took upon himself the awesome responsibility for
initiating the dialogue with the enemy without the authorisation of his
superiors. Beilin did not inform Shimon Peres of the back channel until
the negotiators had drafted a declaration of principles for Palestinian
self-government. Peres immediately grasped the potential inherent in
this semi-academic exercise. He persuaded Rabin to give a green light,
albeit a flickering one, to this unconventional diplomatic venture and
together they steered it to its successful conclusion. Beilin pays a
handsome tribute to all the members of the ‘Oslo Club’ but
it is he who deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the
breakthrough on the Palestinian track.
If the Oslo track was the
breakthrough, the Stockholm track reached the heart of the dispute:
Jerusalem, the rights of the Palestinian refugees, the future of the
Jewish settlements on the West Bank, and the borders of the Palestinian
entity. The secret talks in Stockholm on these issues were conducted by
Hirschfeld and Pundak under the direction of Beilin and two Palestinian
academics under the direction of Arafat’s deputy, Mahmoud Abbas
(Abu Mazen). At a meeting in Tel Aviv on the last day of October 1995
the academics presented the fruits of their labours. Abu Mazen was very
emotional; when they embraced Beilin saw tears in his eyes. In their
hands they held a document comprising a complete or almost complete
solution to the conflict.
The Beilin-Abu Mazen plan
envisaged an independent but demilitarized Palestinian state over 90-95
per cent of the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in Abu Dis just
outside the municipal boundary of Jerusalem as defined by Israel.
Israel would annex a strip of land along the 1967 border where the
great majority of the settlers reside. Palestinian refugees who chose
to do so could settle in the Palestinian state but would not be
admitted to Israeli sovereign territory. An international commission
was to be set up to rehabilitate the refugees and Israel was to make a
financial contribution to the commission’s work.
The Beilin-Abu Mazen plan
met the basic Palestinian demand for independence and statehood. One of
the Palestinian negotiators described the plan as ‘the deal of
the century’. Beilin had every reason to believe that Rabin would
accept it but on 4 November the brave prime minister fell victim to an
assassin’s bullet. Peres, who succeeded Rabin, rejected the plan
and proceeded to lose the elections of May 1996 to Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu spent his three years in power in an attempt to subvert the
Oslo agreements, only to discover that the Oslo process had become
irreversible.
With the election of Ehud
Barak the Oslo process was back on track and Yossi Beilin, now Minister
of Justice, is playing a characteristically creative part in pushing it
forward. At a meeting on 21 June, Beilin presented to the inner cabinet
for the first time the details of the understanding that he had reached
with Abu Mazen in 1995. In the subsequent discussion, according to
press reports, a consensus emerged in favour of handing over around 90
per cent of the West Bank and Gaza to the nascent Palestinian state.
Even Ehud Barak was said to support the plan on the eve of his
departure for the ill-starred summit meeting with Yasser Arafat and
Bill Clinton at Camp David. Some of the bolder proposals put forward by
Barak at the summit were inspired by the five-year old plan. By placing
these proposals on the negotiating table, he shifted the
Israeli-Palestinian dispute from the realm of symbols and dreams to the
realm of reality. The Beilin-Abu Mazen plan was still-born but, despite
the failure at Camp David, it is still the only game in town.
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