What Yossi Beilin Said on the Silver Jubilee of the Oslo Accords

"Looking back on Oslo 25 years later" Al- Monitor

12-9-2018

- The newspaper Al-Monitor is a daily electronic newspaper founded in 2012 by Mr. Jamal Daniel, who was born in Syria, raised in Lebanon, and is an American citizen. The newspaper is published in five languages: Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Turkish and English. Its tagline is "The Pulse of the Middle East." Its board of directors includes some of the senior...former politicians in America and the world...

- Dr. Yossi Beilin, the Israeli, wrote an article on Monday, 10-9-2018 in Al-Monitor...as the title above. Beilin is considered one of the architects of Oslo. He held several positions in the Knesset and in the government, and his last ministerial posts were Minister of Justice and Minister of Religious Affairs in Israel. He resigned from the Labor Party and led the left-leaning Meretz party...

- In his article — which I translated from English — he reviewed a look back on Oslo after 25 years — about the Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).... He wrote that, 25 years ago, in Washington, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, under the auspices of U.S. President Bill Clinton and their deputies Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas, signed a Declaration of Principles aimed at reaching a historic peace agreement..

- After a quarter century, most of the territory of the West Bank remained under Israel's direct military control, Palestinian cities governed by independent administrations — the institutions established for the purposes of a temporary agreement that was supposed to end in 1999 — remain standing to this day. The interim period became permanent, and the optimism that flourished in the early days after the secret Oslo operation and the agreement that emerged from it has been revealed and has changed. In the estimation of many supporters of a permanent solution, it has become less...feasible.

- Here are some questions that I will answer... (i.e., Beilin)

· First question: Why was there a need for the Oslo channel if there were already negotiations in Washington between an Israeli delegation and a joint delegation from Jordan and Palestinian leaders from the occupied territories (alongside negotiations with Syria, Lebanon and Jordan)?

- Answer: The Jordanian-Palestinian delegation was artificial and did not succeed in advancing toward a temporary arrangement as it was supposed to, according to the mandate of the Madrid Summit of 1991. The Palestinians took direct instructions from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Jordanians took instructions from King Hussein, so there was a need to change the model and create an unofficial channel.

· Second question: Why Oslo?

- Answer: The Oslo process was born on April 29, 1992, only weeks before the elections. ...Terry Ruud-Larsen, who runs the Norwegian research institute FAFO, asked to meet with me during a visit to Tel Aviv. I was then a member of the Labor Party in the Knesset. He knew about my diplomatic work on the Israeli-Palestinian issue and suggested that after the elections, if I were appointed to play a role in influencing the diplomatic negotiations, I could use his institute to conduct secret talks to try to solve the problems that were blocking the talks in Washington. After our electoral victory, I explored two other options that were rejected: the United Kingdom and the United States. Oslo was, in my view, the only practical option.

· Third question: Why were Peres and Rabin not aware of the secret channel?

- Answer: The hostile relationship between Rabin and Peres is the key to understanding Oslo. They served together for years, and a deep mutual distrust developed between them. When Rabin was elected prime minister in 1992 he preferred not to appoint Peres as foreign minister..., but in the end he appointed him under two conditions: that Peres would not handle any bilateral diplomatic process or Israeli-American relations. Peres agreed to these strict conditions, but he felt uncomfortable telling me about them...

- In September 1992, on the sidelines of my Norwegian counterpart Jan Egeland's visit to Israel, an informal meeting was held to discuss the option of a secret channel. Present were Ruud-Larsen and his wife Mona Juul, my friend Yair Hirschfeld and the diplomatic adviser Shlomo Gur. The result...was that I should inform Peres of the offer to hold a secret meeting in Oslo between me and Faisal al-Husseini, the most important Palestinian leader in the occupied territories, who was deeply involved in the diplomatic process.

- On the day I intended to raise the subject with Peres, he told me that he had asked Rabin for permission to meet al-Husseini, whom he had known for a long time, but that Rabin refused. That was when he first told me about the conditions under which he had been appointed foreign minister. It was clear to me that I could not propose a meeting between me and al-Husseini because I would have to ask Rabin for permission and Rabin would not allow it. I knew that I could only request that permission if we could succeed in producing a draft agreement with the Palestinians.

- I asked Hirschfeld to open the channel and look for an alternative to al-Husseini. The Palestinian figures we spoke with said that without direct talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) there would be no progress. It was Hanan Ashrawi who suggested talking with Abu Alaa (Ahmed Qurei) — Abu Mazen's deputy — and a meeting was held on December 4, 1992 in London between him and Hirschfeld.

· Fourth question: Were the Oslo talks held in violation of Israeli law?

- Answer: The Oslo talks began on January 20, 1993, immediately after the Knesset passed the law lifting the ban on contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

· Fifth question: Why did Rabin agree to allow the talks to continue, after all that?

- Answer: Despite his previous promises not to negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Rabin agreed because the talks in Washington had failed to make progress, and he had not fulfilled his central promise to reach an agreement with the Palestinians within six to nine months. As expected, the moment we presented Peres and Rabin with a paper agreed with a Palestinian partner, they found it very hard to refuse it.

· Sixth question: What was the nature of Oslo's philosophy..?

- Answer: The Oslo process did not have an original philosophy. I intended to present the results of the secret talks as if they were a miraculous solution, and with full mutual understanding, to ensure that the delegations would sign an agreement in Washington. The fundamental importance of Oslo was the mutual recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel and the ability to resolve many of the tangible problems that had prevented the Washington talks from progressing. But the main element was the continuation of the idea of Palestinian autonomy for five years, which appeared in the Camp David agreement of 1978 between Israel and Egypt and was reaffirmed at the Madrid Summit.

- Oslo's philosophy was not the belief that through a gradual process love would spring up between the two sides and later a peace agreement would be reached, but Rabin's desire to prove that he was continuing something and not violating existing frameworks.

- From my point of view, this was the biggest mistake in the Oslo process. When we understood that we were sitting with people who really wanted to reach an agreement with Israel, we should not have been satisfied with that, because such an opportunity cannot appear every day. I believed then that we should immediately continue negotiations on a permanent arrangement and not allow extremists on both sides to frustrate the process. Rabin told me that if we moved to a permanent arrangement and failed, it would be very difficult to return to discussing a temporary agreement.

· Seventh question: Why didn't Oslo bring peace?

- Answer: Because of the violence that prevented us from having enough time to reach an agreement and the trap of unequal negotiations. The extreme right in Israel and the extreme Islamist Palestinian groups used...violence that we did not expect to thwart the process and to tarnish its reputation in the eyes of the public. The first lethal incident was in Febuary 1994, when a religious Jewish doctor from the Kiryat Arba settlement, a reserve officer, entered the Ibrahimi Mosque cave in Hebron in his military uniform, and massacred 29 people in cold blood and wounded many others.

- The second event was the most dramatic: the assassination of Rabin in 1995 by an extremist Jew who did it explicitly to stop the process. The third was the provocative 2000 visit by then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount — his name for the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound —

- Forty days after mourning the Hebron massacre, Hamas began suicide attacks. A day after Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount — his name for the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound — the Second Intifada began. Arafat was not strong enough to stop it, and at one stage he was also at the head of a wave of violence — according to Beilin's claim.

- When such an uneven negotiation takes place, the stronger party must be careful not to gain too much. We succeeded in convincing the Palestinians not to mention freezing settlement construction, but Israel continued building settlements after the Oslo Agreement, and that was the greatest deadly Israeli provocation. Likewise, we obtained an agreement to hand over Palestinian residents (and not only Israeli citizens who happened to be in the areas), but in most cases the Palestinians did not do so. This made it easy for the right to declare that the Palestinians were violating the agreement.

- In 1996, after Rabin’s assassination and Peres’s defeat in the elections, Benjamin Netanyahu was elected Prime Minister. The leader of the opposition also promised to annul the Oslo Agreement that had been signed only two and a half years earlier, and as prime minister at the time he succeeded in turning the interim agreement into a permanent situation. Netanyahu understands that the agreement gives him the best possible conditions to preserve the status quo. Under his supervision he can delay the transfer of the majority of the West Bank to the Palestinians and take pride in concluding an international agreement.

- The fact that the most right-wing government at any time in Israel clung to the Oslo Agreement is in itself its greatest failure. This is what the Palestinians feared from the beginning, and we erred when we reassured them that this would not happen.

- Oslo brought the peace agreement with Jordan, gave Israel a decisive strategic advantage in the Middle East, and revolutionized its diplomatic position after several countries established diplomatic relations and it generated economic growth through unprecedented foreign investments.

- The most important lesson in Oslo is the necessity of seizing a diplomatic opportunity to reach a permanent arrangement such as the Clinton parameters and the Geneva Initiative, and not to be tempted into believing that a diplomatic window, once opened, will remain so for a long time.
The most important lesson in Oslo is the necessity of seizing a diplomatic opportunity to reach a permanent arrangement such as the Clinton terms and the Geneva Initiative, and not to be tempted into believing that any diplomatic window that opens will remain so... for a long time.

·      My interventions....

- While Yossi Beilin acknowledged that the Israelis succeeded.....in convincing the Palestinians..in no case..to refer to freezing Israeli settlement..!!!.and this was the death of the Palestinian negotiator....!! But Israel continued settlement..after the agreement. And this was a deadly provocation by the Israelis against the Palestinians... ....and he admitted that the Palestinians genuinely wanted peace..while the Israelis missed this opportunity that will not recur!!, and did not build peace. Always. with the Palestinians.. He also said that many acts carried out by Israeli extremists, including the Ibrahimi Mosque/Cave of the Patriarchs massacre and the assassination of Rabin, etc., undermined on their part... the continuation of the agreement..which was temporary for a period of five years..yet it became a de facto permanent situation, due to the behavior of the Israeli right....where most of the West Bank is still occupied by the Israeli army.. However he pointed to the Hamas suicide operations at that time, which complemented – in his words – the acts of Israeli extremists... to undermine the peace process...

- Despite all that, the Oslo Agreement brought strategic victories for the Israelis. Israel gained recognition from the representative of the Palestinian people, namely the Palestine Liberation Organization... while Israel’s recognition of the PLO was not implemented... and the Palestinians were not regarded as equals with Israel... In addition.... Jordan signed a permanent peace agreement with Israel—Wadi Araba—immediately after Oslo was signed.... Recognition of Israel by many countries followed, and it brought many economic investments to Israel.

- As for the Palestinian side... Oslo, contrary to what Israel reaped from it as mentioned and what was not mentioned—and that is much—was a blessing in Arabic terms... the Oslo Agreement for the Palestinian side was a curse and brought other calamities... The Israelis set for them a low ceiling for movement and hope. The Israelis breathed for a quarter of a century from the lungs of the Palestinians!!.. They also besieged them in classified areas... and these Palestinians’ fate became not in their own hands, as Oslo had promised....

- Negotiation in politics is a right... but reaching results within the stipulated time is also a duty at the same time... Otherwise the Palestinian cause is on the verge of departure from the agenda of priorities to a lower classification... amid the events in the region..and the world.!

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