by Shimon Peres
The tragic answer was that he was. Without consulting me, he sent Minister Moshe Arens to Washington to meet with Shultz. Arens explained that if the United States were to present the draft agreement, Shamir would view it as an inappropriate interference in Israel’s geopolitical affairs. Upon hearing this, Shultz concluded that there was no good reason to present the agreements. Why go out on a limb if Shamir was sure to break it?
I learned of the meeting, and its outcome, after the fact. It was a slap in the face to me personally, and a punch in the gut to the country I loved. Ben-Gurion had been gone for nearly fifteen years, but there was never a time I had missed him more. He would have embraced the breakthrough; Shamir strangled it before it could have the chance to breathe. I made one last attempt to save the deal, pleading with Shultz to reconsider. But even as Shultz grew open to it, it was clear that Hussein had closed the door. Where I felt deeply disappointed, the king felt indelibly betrayed. He had taken a sizable risk and, for it, received nothing in return. He had little interest in rekindling the conversation. The London Agreement, as it became known, was dead. What a devastating blow it was to the State of Israel, and to our efforts at seeking peace and cooperation with our neighbors.
The next five years were difficult for Israel and for the Palestinians. Shamir and his Likud party did nothing to further the peace process, save for a halfhearted participation in an international conference in Madrid. In the meantime, a violent uprising called the first intifada began in the West Bank and Gaza, leaving the streets stained with blood, and a country racked by fear and frustration. The masterpiece that the London Agreement could have been was replaced instead by the ugliness of violence, the disfiguration of war. And yet we persevered, as leaders must, knowing that no door stays shut forever—that with concerted effort, even the heaviest can be pried open.
In 1992, those efforts bore fruit. The Likud party was thrown out of power, and Labor once again took the reins of government. Yitzhak Rabin and I ran against each other in the interparty elections for prime minister. We knew the outcome would be close and so we met before the vote and made a deal: whoever was voted in as prime minister would appoint the other foreign minister. We had been political rivals, of course, but we also believed in each other’s leadership capabilities, and the value that would come from our working close together. We were like two great boxers, allies at odds, with great respect for the other even when we often disagreed. He was deeply granular in his thinking, focused intensely on the details in front of him. My head was always tilted higher, toward the horizon and beyond it. We were different in so many ways, but in ways that made the other stronger, smarter, and wiser. In time, the rivalry became a partnership.
When the votes were tallied, Rabin had narrowly won. It was hard not to be disappointed, but it was the work more than the position that captured my focus. It is hard to escape one’s ego, but I’ve seen in others that the greatest accomplishments come from recognizing that the task at hand matters far more than the title. After the election was over, I went to Rabin to congratulate him and to offer myself as a true partner in the efforts to come. “If you will go and work for peace, you won’t have a more loyal friend than me,” I told him. “But,” I warned, “if you turn your back on peace, you will have no worse enemy than me.” I explained that I believed we had arrived at a unique moment. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 had fundamentally altered the world order, changing the circumstances in the Middle East in a powerful way. For nearly all of our state’s existence, our Arab neighbors had seemingly unlimited access to military and political support from the Soviet Union. With its collapse, suddenly they had neither, creating a paradigm shift in the region.
At the same time, the unity of the Arab world began to crumble, as Iraq invaded Kuwait, and an international coalition that included Arab nations took up arms against Saddam Hussein’s regime. The possibility of progress took on a new and hopeful character. But with the “Jordanian option” no longer on the table, we were faced with a difficult question: With whom should Israel negotiate?
The Palestine Liberation Organization certainly was an option, but a deeply controversial one. Founded in 1964, the group was an organized collective of terrorist organizations that had declared and perpetuated a campaign of horrific violence against Israeli civilians and soldiers in hope of bringing about Israel’s ultimate destruction. For more than three decades the PLO had launched attacks from bases in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, indiscriminately targeting the innocent far away from any battlefield. They attacked a school bus in 1970, murdering nine children, then four years later seized a school and massacred twenty-seven students and adults. They were behind the hijacking of airplanes and hostage standoffs in hotels, along with the brutal killings of eleven Israeli Olympians in Munich in 1972. When the first intifada began in 1987, the PLO played a lead role in organizing and encouraging the bloodshed. And yet, despite the seemingly endless violence, the PLO remained the primary representative of the Palestinian people, having earned broad popular support. Its chairman, Yasser Arafat, was likely the most influential person with whom we could negotiate peace, but he was, first and foremost, a terrorist, a murderer of children, and the idea of sitting across the table from him was, for all of us, a hard thing to imagine.
And yet, over time, it became clear that negotiating with Arafat would be the only prospect for peace. When Rabin and I assumed office, Israel was engaged in fruitless discussions in Washington with a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. Technically, the Palestinian team did not include any members of the PLO. And yet in truth, a number of the negotiators in Washington were formerly members of that terrorist organization and, most important, were taking their orders directly from Arafat, then based in Tunisia. During negotiating sessions, this made the Palestinian negotiators impossibly cautious, unwilling to cede any ground or accept any terms without Arafat’s explicit approval. Thus, despite the best efforts of the Americans, the process started already mired in inertia—and remained that way throughout.
“Look, everything we talk to the Palestinians about, they send a fax to Arafat,” I said to my staff, while airing my frustrations about the lack of progress. “I’m fed up with negotiating by fax machine.”
“What do you propose we do?” asked one of my advisors.
“I’m going to talk to Rabin,” I said. “I think it’s time to start negotiations with the PLO directly.”
I didn’t come to the decision easily. Neither Rabin nor I was eager to start peace negotiations with a terrorist organization. Doing so would force us to confront fundamental moral dilemmas, and daunting political challenges at home. Direct contact with the PLO was technically unlawful, but even if it weren’t, it was likely to be universally unpopular. Arafat was a household name in Israel, easily the most hated person in our country. To directly engage such a man risked the appearance of betrayal. And yet at the same time, I knew that Rabin and I were not there to do nothing in exchange for popularity. The security of Israel and the future of its people depended on our willingness to seek peace. And no peace process can begin until enemies are first willing to engage with one another.
And so I went to Rabin’s office to make the case for a change in our strategy. I argued that out of necessity we should begin negotiations with the PLO in secret, but that we would not come to an agreement of any kind until Arafat publicly and forcefully denounced terrorism and demanded an end to violence. If we were going to shake hands with a terrorist organization, we would only do so once they gave up terror for good.
Rabin was skeptical at first, believing that the negotiations in Washington would eventually turn productive. But soon his frustrations about the stalemate of those talks led him to the same conclusion at which I had arrived: if we were going to have a chance at peace, we’d have to be willing to travel an alternate path. We knew how fraught such a choice would be, that even the act of sitting across from the PLO would risk legitimizing an organization that, as its cor
e tenet, sought the destruction of our state. And yet we also knew an unavoidable truth: One does not make peace with one’s friends. If peace is what we seek, we must have the courage to pursue it with our enemy.
•••
In the early 1990s, three academics—Terje Rød-Larsen of Norway and Yair Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak of Israel—started having direct conversations with members of the PLO about the prospect of making peace with Israel. This was a “track two” negotiation, one done informally and largely for the purpose of identifying possibilities for action. Yossi Beilin, by then my deputy, had been made aware of these conversations through back channels with Rød-Larsen and had been kept apprised of developments as they unfolded. For a time, not much had come from them. But by the spring of 1993, we had learned that a close confidant of Arafat, a man named Abu Ala’a, had joined the discussion about whether and how a peace agreement might be reached.
In the preceding years, the PLO had been thrown out of Jordan, and later driven out of Lebanon, which had forced it to relocate its headquarters to Tunisia. After a decade in which the group’s exile moved it farther and farther from Gaza and the West Bank, the PLO leadership had lost its connection to the Palestinians living in those places. As the organization began to wither, its leadership started to consider something unthinkable among its ranks: that peace with Israel might be its only way to regain power and influence. Indeed, Abu Ala’a expressed far greater willingness than we could have predicted to make the critical concessions that a peace process would require. We were told that he and his fellow negotiators had already floated a number of imaginative ideas with the Norwegians, confirming my impression, contra the Washington talks, that the PLO was in fact looking to strike a deal.
“We should enter the conversation,” I said. “I’ll need to talk to Rabin.”
I believed that negotiations would need to occur in stages if they were to be successful. To enter such discussions with the expectation that all issues would be resolved at once was to expect both the impossible and the unnecessary. Our goal was peace, but that did not mean peace at an infeasible pace. I argued that the goal of the negotiation should be to define a set of mutually agreed-upon principles, a set of promises each side would make to the other. On issues where we found agreement, we would set timetables for their implementations. On those unresolved, we would set timetables for future negotiations.
Rabin and I discussed our ambitions for such a declaration. Without question, we would demand that the PLO renounce terror and recognize our right to exist—and to exist in peace. We would demand that, under any circumstance that involved returning land, Israel would retain both its exclusive ability to control its own borders, and the unquestioned authority to defend itself against threats. In exchange for these commitments, we would propose a gradual process: withdrawing from Gaza and the Jericho area of the West Bank first.
Of critical importance, we believed, was bringing Arafat from Tunis to Gaza, and establishing a Palestinian Council, which he would seek to run pending an internationally supervised election. Though the peace process could start with the PLO, permanent status would only be achievable if we had a negotiating partner that represented the Palestinian people, rather than the factions among them who demanded more and more violence.
After multiple conversations, Rabin agreed that it was worth moving forward. I invited Avi Gil, my chief of staff, and Uri Savir, the Foreign Ministry’s director general, to my official residence in Jerusalem. Avi and I were discussing the situation when Uri arrived.
“What can I do for you?” Uri asked.
“How do you feel about a weekend in Oslo?” I replied.
“Excuse me?” he said with a stunned expression, not because he didn’t understand the request, but because he surely did.
I spent the rest of the afternoon defining the strategy for the initial session, peppering Avi with questions about every detail of our approach, which he and I had been coordinating for weeks. We laid out our goals, both ultimate and immediate, and briefed Uri with strict instructions about how we expected him to conduct the initial conversations.
“When you return, based on your report, we’ll decide how you should proceed,” I told him.
Uri left for Oslo shortly after and returned with a hopeful assessment. Abu Ala’a, the chief negotiator of the PLO, had seemed eager to find agreement. “I believe we’ve arrived at the root of the problem,” Abu Ala’a told Uri. “We have learned that our rejection of you will not bring us freedom. And you have learned that control of us will not bring you security. We must live side by side in peace, equality, and cooperation.” In the report he delivered later to Rabin and me, Uri wrote that while we know everything about the Palestinians, it seemed we understood nothing. It was in that space—in the seeking of deeper understanding, in the mutual reaching for empathy across the divide—that I believed peace might very well take root.
Over the course of the summer, the negotiating teams returned to the lodge to push the effort forward, reporting progress back to me, while they awaited my further instruction. As in any negotiation, there were bumps and breakthroughs, important steps forward followed by frustrating setbacks. There were times when it seemed that even these negotiators, who had formed a special bond, would be unable to overcome impasses. Though the discussions had moved much further along than their Washington counterpart, an inability to come to terms would represent just as painful a failure.
But by early August 1993, negotiations had proceeded so well that we believed a declaration of principles could be reached in the next meeting, which would start on the thirteenth of August. Two days into the session, Arafat told us that he was ready to sign the declaration, assuming we could work out final language on a few outstanding issues. Both negotiating teams believed we would be able to find a meeting of the minds; the breakthrough we had dreamed of seemed to be just within our grasp. After hearing the news, I spent the entire night wide awake, unable to slow the gears spinning around and around in my brain. Though I had spent so much of my life with my eyes fixed on the future, in those sleepless hours it was the past that had overtaken my mind. I thought back to the first time I’d met Ben-Gurion, the first time he’d given me a chance to be part of something so much bigger than myself. I thought back to the wars, the loss, the fear, and the uncertainty, to the days of hunger and insecurity, to the questions of our very survival. I thought of Dimona, and the path its deterrent power had created. I thought of the extraordinary work of the IDF, how critical our military strength had been to make this moment possible. And I heard again, in my head, the words of Ben-Gurion: “In Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.”
That morning, I walked into work with eyes that revealed deep exhaustion, but a mind that was racing, energized by the thrill of the work at hand. I opened the door to my office and turned on the lights only to be startled by the shouts of “Surprise!” A small group of staff and close friends were waiting for me. It was only then that I realized it was my seventieth birthday.
It was a beautiful moment of kindness and warmth, even more so given the circumstances. These were people who had worked so hard by my side and in doing so had claimed ownership over a big piece of my heart. They shared my passion for dreaming, the desire to take on the improbable, and they chased the future with a fervor and focus that left me eternally grateful. The negotiations were still a secret, even to them, but I hoped to share good news with them as soon as I could. In the meantime, I thanked them for all they had done. “I have devoted most of my life to security,” I told them. “What’s left to me, now that Israel is strong, is to bring our young people to peace.”
I left the party and went straight into a meeting with Rabin to discuss our next steps. The staff-level negotiations would take us only so far; I believed it was time for me to enter the negotiations directly, in my official capacity as foreign minister.
I told Rabin that I already had a prescheduled trip to Scandinavia, where I�
�d been invited to make official visits to Sweden and Norway. I suggested that I use the timing as an opportunity to join the talks myself so that I could close the negotiations on the outstanding issues. My goal, I said, was to get both teams to initial an agreement before I returned home. When negotiations had first begun, Rabin had wanted me to avoid direct contact, believing that doing so could commit the cabinet—and the country—to a negotiation that was still unknown to all of them. But now, as we stood precariously, yet with an agreement so close in our sights, Rabin had become convinced it was time to step up our efforts.
I arrived in Stockholm with Avi, and was soon joined by Rød-Larsen and Johan Jørgen Holst, the Norwegian foreign minister. The idea was to get Abu Ala’a on the phone, to let him know I was there, ready to negotiate, and that he and Holst would need to serve as the liaisons between Arafat and me. Rød-Larsen finally got in touch with Abu Ala’a shortly after 1:00 A.M.
Holst took the phone from Rød-Larsen and, with me sitting next to him, read through the proposed changes in language, most of which involved slight tweaks of wording, and greater clarity in certain passages. When he was finished, he hung up the phone and told us that Abu Ala’a had asked for ninety minutes to discuss the changes with Arafat. The conversation resumed and continued over a series of short phone calls through the early hours of the morning. By 4:30 A.M., we had done what so many had assumed would never happen: come to terms on a Declaration of Principles between Israel and the PLO. We could hear cheers over the phone line as the negotiators in Arafat’s office burst into shouts and applause. The same emotions that had overcome them had taken the rest of us, too. It was a moment I’ll never forget.
I woke up feeling jubilant the next morning, but those feelings were quickly set aside as I received distressing news. A roadside bomb in Lebanon had killed seven Israeli soldiers. I phoned Rabin to discuss the tragedy. “We are on the verge of something historic,” I told him. “But I fear this news may change the atmosphere for the worse on both sides. Perhaps we should postpone.” Rabin was similarly concerned, but he felt that delay was not an option—there was simply not enough time. We proceeded as planned.
