The 'Oslo Spirit'
HABERMAN, CLYDE
The 'Oslo Spirit' The Process: 1,100 Days That Changed the Middle East By Uri Savir Random. 336 pp. $27.95. Reviewed by Clyde Haberman New York "Times" columnist; former Jerusalem bureau...
...Make no mistake...
...Yet, looking back, Savir feels Israel's negotiators did not treat the Palestinians as equals, making the mistake of trying to micromanage their internal affairs and failing to take Arafat's political needs into account...
...But then we'll be left with Hamas, an intifada and terror...
...The Rabin-Peres era was not Camelot for many Israelis...
...he shrieked...
...former Jerusalem bureau chief Uri Savir's account of the secret Oslo peace talks is mostly a nuts and bolts look at how Israeli and Palestinian leaders struggled to end their 100 years' conflict...
...he screamed...
...The process in Savir's title has indeed become precisely that over the last two years: a process, which churns on and on, but never comes close to real peace...
...Peres struggled to absorb the new reality as he rode back to Jerusalem after the rally with Savir next to him...
...We must live side by side in peace, equality and cooperation...
...I'm telling you that we can break Arafat, if that's what you want," Peres went on...
...What do you want to do...
...The killer, to the shock of almost every Israeli, was not an Arab but a Jew, a Rightwing religious fanatic...
...And it was none other than Netanyahu, an opponent of Oslo from the start, who presided over the removal of Israeli forces from most of Hebron...
...By the spring of 1993, when secret talks between Israel and Yasir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization kicked into high gear in Oslo, most Israelis had grown weary of occupying the West Bank and, far more so, the impoverished Gaza Strip...
...For decades, Peres and Rabin had bitterly battled within Israel's Labor Party, calling each other the nastiest names imaginable...
...Above all, Oslo's architects forgot that a reconciliation between national leaders must be felt as well by the man in the street, whether that street is in Tel Aviv or Nablus...
...After a harsh exchange of words, they managed to do it...
...So did his immediate boss, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, now suddenly acting Prime Minister...
...The new tone was set in Savir's first meeting with his opposite number, Ahmed Qurei, a senior PLO figure known as Abu Ala...
...But that was it...
...At one important juncture in 1995, he blew up at Israeli generals who he felt were worrying too much about how Jewish settlers in Hebron wouldreacttoplanned troop withdrawals...
...That is not how life in the Middle East runs, however...
...the Israelis agreed that some sort of international presence was needed to restore calm to that volatile West Bank city...
...Even the normally unflappable Peres had his breaking point...
...Eventually, he calmed down, and the two sides agreed to bring in unarmed foreign observers—not nurses—to patrol Hebron's streets...
...They're burning my portrait in the streets of Hebron, and the Israelis are talking about injections...
...It would be nice to say that from these flashes of self-awareness flowed one agreement after another...
...Then Peres broke it, saying, "I am on my own...
...Because they could not bring themselves to support him in the elections of May 1996, they ended up with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who plays to his country's worst fears, not its bravest hopes...
...But the talks were always hard and sometimes explosive...
...The negotiations were long and acrimonious over every inch of where and when and how Israel would pull its forces out of the main Palestinian centers in the territories...
...Never again would we argue about the past...
...So it isn't surprising that his book has more microscopic detail than poignancy...
...Savir calls it the "Oslo spirit...
...For his part, Savir began to understand that there was no such thing as an "enlightened occupation," a self-serving term that enjoyed wide currency in Israel...
...Arafat went ballistic...
...What gall...
...That realization was the way to Israel's heart...
...Israel had become a strong, self-confident nation, able to forge new relationships with its neighbors while remaining well aware that all enemies had not vanished...
...More than anything, the major breakthrough of Oslo—famously symbolized in September 1993 by the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn— was the recognition by both sides that the other was here to stay...
...he bellowed, crimson with rage in Savir's description...
...You want to humiliate me, humiliate me...
...It meant that step by tentative step, Rabin, Peres, Arafat, and their lieutenants rose above old hatreds and mutual demonization...
...I can't V be hearing this right...
...This was an important step, for it moved us beyond an endless wrangle over right and wrong...
...If anything, the parties are sliding backward toward an abyss of recriminations and, if recent history is a guide, renewed violence...
...Discussing the future would mean reconciling two rights, not readdressing ancient wrongs...
...The Palestinian reality was quite different from the Israeli myth...
...The Red Cross...
...In the end, agreements were reached...
...You want 150,000 Hebronites to remain under our control because of 400 Jews...
...Savir, the chief Israeli negotiator in Oslo, attended the rally...
...It is the recollection of a career diplomat, a man whose life has been spent keeping his cards close to the chest, not baring his soul...
...But partnership was a real possibility...
...It came on the devastating night of November4, 1995, when Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin was assassinated as he left a jubilant peace rally in Tel Aviv...
...Perhaps Red Cross units, Savir suggested at one point...
...And for a while it looked as though it might work...
...Each had wasted too many years trying to convince the world that it alone was the true victim, history's orphan...
...So Savir's book, while mostly a straightforward rehash of the negotiations he helped shape during "1,100 days that changed the Middle East," as the subtitle puts it, leaves a sympathetic reader thinking wistfully about the what ifs: What if Rabin had not been shot...
...Some like Yigal Amir, Rabin's assassin, were willing to kill in the name of what they saw holy...
...We had arrived at our first understanding," says Savir, who wrote his book in English, the lingua franca of the peace negotiations...
...He is irreplaceable...
...They'd had it with sleepless nights worrying whether their sons would come back alive...
...Hardliners branded the two men traitors for their willingness to give up most of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights —a betrayal, angry critics said, of Israeli security and the Biblical destiny of the Jewish people...
...Abu Ala had his own formulation for the break with the past: "We have learned that our rejection of you will not bring us freedom...
...He was the only Israeli leader prepared to travel the risky road towardpeace and also able to persuade most of his countrymen that he would do his damnedest to keep them safe...
...The greatest weakness of the three-year negotiation effort," Savir says, "was that its messages did not filter down enough to the people...
...Wouldn't Rabin or Peres, or both, still be in power pushing peace forward with the Palestinian Authority...
...Savir suggests one was at hand in 1996, although he provides little hard evidence to support such optimism...
...Arafat, in turn, kept underestimating the absolutely overwhelming importance most Israelis attached to security, and did not do nearly enough to clamp down on Islamic terrorists until it was too late to save his partner, Peres, from electoral defeat...
...Friendship was too much to ask, especially between Rabin and Arafat...
...As everyone knows by now, troop withdrawals did take place, starting in 1994 in Gaza and Jericho and continuing after Rabin's death in the major Arab citiesof the West Bank...
...As of this writing, in mid-June 1998, the process has been paralyzed for 15 months, a victim of Hamas bombs, provocative construction in Jerusalem by the Netanyahu government, and a relentless seepage of the good will that was the Oslo spirit...
...What if Islamic suicide bombers had not wreaked so much havoc inside terrorstricken Israel...
...You can see that your control of us will not bring you security...
...But at that initial session they had to get beyond the game of victim one-upmanship that each side preferred...
...Peres did not inspire the same confidence...
...But the majority of Israelis, even if nervous about whether their leadership was moving too fast, agreed with its basic premise: that the time had come for Israel and the Palestinians to reconcile...
...The weight of those sad words sinks in ever more deeply as the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations struggle to stay alive...
...In a burst of bullets, Rabin was gone...
...After a Jewish settler killed 29 worshiping Muslims in Hebron in February 1994...
...Still, one tormented moment is sure to touch anyone whose heart has been broken by the unfulfilled promise of Oslo...
...If they could only feel safe, the Israelis were prepared to grant the Palestinians a degree of self-governance and prosperity no Arab state was ever willing to give...
...Savir and Abu Ala were destined to become good friends...
...He was too much of a pie-in-the-sky dreamer for pragmatic Israelis, who saw themselves stuck in the familiar Middle East of bombs and terror, not in Peres' ideal of a "new Middle East" where Jew and Arab would walk arm-in-arm...
...Mutual fatigue, Savir suggests, was the key to the peace talks...
...Might there have been an agreement, too, with Syria...
...There was a long silence, Savir writes...
...Savir, who now runs an Israeli peace center named after Peres, blames the present Israeli government for much of what has gone wrong...
...He does not let the Palestinians off the hook, though, or even the Rabin-Peres team...
...And the whole of the population had, at some time, been grossly humiliated by us...
...Yitzchak Rabin was indeed irreplaceable...
...Rabin was the hard-boiled details man, impatient with flowery language and anyone who did not get straight to the point...
...But in the twilight of their careers this odd couple managed to join together, bound by a mutual vision of an Israel strong enough to make peace with its immediate Arab neighbors, above all the Palestinians, with whom they were destined to share the same patch of land...
...The two parties went to Oslo in May 1993 ready at last to focus on future possibilities instead of dwelling on the painful past...
...Peres, he writes, saw the Oslo process as the next stage of "the Zionist revolution," an attempt to "remove the ghetto from the Jewish ethos decades after it had disappeared from Jewish history...
...The excitable Palestinian leader was not the only one to buckle under the enormous pressures of peace-making...
...His sad conclusion is why disappointed believers in the Oslo process will read this book not only as a recounting of what was but also as a tantalizing hint of what might have been...
...The Red Cross...
...Bring in nurses to give people injections...
...About a third of the Palestinian population in the territories had, at one time or another, been detained or imprisoned by Israel," Savir writes...
...In Savir's written account, the first by an Oslo participant, Abu Ala's team began to understand that Israel's security fears were not bogus, that its legitimate needs in this area had to be addressed...
...Peres was the big-picture thinker, fond of quoting Chinese proverbs and French aphorisms...
...They were sick of sending their soldier children to patrol Arab towns and refugee camps that few Israelis had any desire to visit...
...And if Israelis were tired, imagine the despair of the Palestinians, whose nationalist ambitions kept growing but could never be fulfilled as long as the Israeli occupation remained intact...
...Arafat, an extraordinary political survivor, comes across more than once as about as grounded as a helium balloon...
Vol. 81 • June 1998 • No. 8
