In an Israel Hayom opinion piece on Sunday marking the 25th anniversary of the Oslo Accords, Professor Eyal Zisser wrote that the agreement has forced Israel to contend with endless political and security challenges. There is quite a bit of truth to this statement, but that is because there were those who prevented the interim agreement, which was to supposed be replaced with a permanent settlement by May 4, 1999, from transitioning into a peace deal.
I would have expected these challenges to be compared to a situation in which there was no agreement at all between Israel and the Palestinians, and consequently no peace deal with Jordan. The implicit assumption in this lack of comparison is that the Palestinians were prepared for another 25 years of violence, and at a level that Israel could have contained, just as it contained the First Intifada. I am far from believing this, and that is without taking into account the conflict's demographic aspects.
But there was an even odder assertion in Zisser's article. He wrote that anonymous associates of then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres had testified that the decision to hold the talks in Oslo was "aimed at improving Peres' chances of winning the Nobel Price Prize, which is awarded in the Norwegian capital every year." Where and when did these supposed sources make such a claim?
It is important that the truth be told. The Oslo process began on April 29, 1992, when Terje Rod-Larsen, then head of the Fafo Research Foundation, asked to meet me in Tel Aviv. He told me a little about his background and said he was fascinated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He said that if the Labor party came to power in the upcoming Israeli elections, and I was appointed to a position related to the diplomatic process, he would offer his foundation as a covert channel if I wanted it.
I thanked him for the surprising offer and said that in light of the freeze in talks in Washington between the Jordanian-Palestinian and Israeli delegations, I was convinced of the need for a back channel through which it would be possible to solve some if not all of the issues under dispute. But I did not commit to Oslo. We arranged another meeting two weeks later, which was attended by my friend Dr. Yair Hirschfeld and to which Larsen invited Palestinian politician Faisal Husseini.
Following Labor's election victory, I was appointed deputy foreign minister. I examined two other options for establishing a covert channel, one in Washington and another in London. It was only once it had become clear to me that both were very problematic that I returned to the Norwegian option, which was, in retrospect, optimal from our perspective. The fact, which I learned of only two months after taking on the position, that then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin kept Peres from engaging in bilateral channels between Israel and Jordan-Palestine and between Israel and Syria led me not to speak to Peres of the Norwegian channel before I knew if it would lead to an agreement. Peres could not have hidden from Rabin a process that contradicted his instructions, and Rabin could not have allowed him to lead such a process.
I don't know who Zisser's anonymous sources are, but they are incorrect. It was Oslo that offered itself up as the site of the peace talks, and when I accepted that offer, a Nobel Prize was the farthest thing from my mind.
