Through Secret Channels: The Road to Oslo, Senior PLO Leader Abu Mazen's Revealing Story of the Negotiations with Israel
1996; Middle East Institute; Volume: 50; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-3461
Autores Tópico(s)Middle East Politics and Society
ResumoThrough Secret Channels: The Road to Oslo, Senior PLO Leader Abu Mazen's Revealing Story of the Negotiations with Israel, by Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). Reading, UK: Garnet Publishing, 1995. Dist. by Paul & Company, New York. 224 pages. Appends. to p. 246. Index to p. 252. $39.95 cloth; $19.95 paper. Secret Channels presents the background and origins of the Oslo meetings leading to the Declaration of Principles (DOP) signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in September 1993. It is an account by the Palestinian leader who signed the agreement in Washington and who was a leading participant in the secret negotiations. The author, Mahmoud Abbas, traces the origins of the PLO-Israeli relationship to the 1970s, when he and others called for dialogue with Israeli pro-peace factions. Some, including Sa`id Hamami and `Isam Sartawi, were assassinated by Palestinian militants opposed to any contact with Israel or Israelis. Abbas set out to work on this weakness within our ranks (p. 13) by building a constituency within the PLO that favored establishing relations with democratic and progressive Jewish factions (p. 14). These efforts led to meetings with Israelis, including Abie Nathan, General Matti Peled, Uri Avneri, Arie Eliav, and others. During the 1980s, unofficial channels were also opened to the Likud party. These were initiated by Moshe Amirav, a minor Herut official, and led to secret contacts with Ariel Sharon and indirectly with Likud leader Yitzhak Shamir. Far more fruitful were secret contacts established with Israel's Labor party. A major figure in establishing them was `Abd al-Wahab al-Darawsha, a former Arab-Israeli member of Labor's Knesset delegation. His initial contacts led to a series of secret exchanges that included substantive proposals and counterproposals. Abbas presents details of these exchanges, including the contents of many written proposals, as well as verbatim transcripts of meetings between Palestinians and Labor representatives. One of the first such transcripts covers a meeting in July 1993 between Health Minister Haim Ramon and Dr. Ahmad Tibi, an Arab-Israeli who has since become a principal interlocutor between the Israeli government and PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat. These early secret contacts eventually led to the Oslo channel, parallel to the peace process initiated at Madrid following the 1991 Gulf War. While the Madrid process was foundering through the early 1990s, the Oslo channel had opened unbeknown to most Israeli, Palestinian, and American negotiators. …
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