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| Volume XIV, Fall 2007, Number 3 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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From Oslo to Jerusalem: The Palestinian Story of the Secret Negotiations
by Ahmed Qurei (‘Abu Ala’). I. B. Tauris & Co., 2006. 319 pages. $45.00, hardcover.
Michael Rubner
Professor emeritus, International Relations, James Madison College, Michigan
State University
No Palestinian official is more qualified to tell the inside story of the secret Oslo negotiations
between the PLO and Israel than Ahmed Qurei, also known as Abu Ala. Long before he served as
speaker of the first Palestinian Legislative Council, and later as prime minister of the Palestinian
National Authority, Qurei led the Palestinian delegation through 14 rounds of secret negotiations
that culminated in the signing of the historic yet controversial Oslo accords in September 1993. He
was intimately involved in each phase of the negotiations, from his initial encounter in London in
December 1992 with Professor Yair Hirschfeld, an activist in the Israeli Labor party with close ties to
Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, to the conclusion of the talks ten months later.
In the introduction to From Oslo to Jerusalem, Qurei explains that he intended to present the
Palestinian version of what had occurred in Oslo in order “to put an end to speculations and to half
truths.” What indeed motivated Qurei to write this book remains somewhat of a mystery, because,
by his own admission, the Palestinian version of the Oslo negotiations had already been ably
documented a decade earlier in Through Secret Channels by his close colleague Mahmoud Abbas.
At the time, Abbas was head of the PLO’s Department for National and International Relations; he
had served as a key adviser to Yasser Arafat during the Oslo talks. The “half truths” that are never
explicitly identified by the author may refer to the Israeli accounts of the negotiations: The Process:
1,100 Days that Changed the Middle East, by Uri Savir and Making Peace with the PLO: The
Rabin Government’s Road to the Oslo Accord, by David Makovsky. As director-general of Israel’s
Foreign Ministry, Savir became his country’s chief negotiator with Qurei beginning at the sixth
round of talks, in late May 1993. Makovsky, the diplomatic correspondent for the Jerusalem Post,
reconstructed the Oslo process through interviews with Israeli, Palestinian, Egyptian, American
and Norwegian officials.
One suspects that Qurei felt impelled to write this book because he had not received sufficient
credit for his pivotal role in the Oslo negotiations. The quest for long-overdue accolades is
abundantly evident throughout this volume, from the author’s reminder in the introduction that
“the Oslo Agreement is especially associated with my name,” to his plaint about being unfairly
excluded by Arafat from a PLO delegation that visited French President Jacques Chirac at the
Elysée Palace. In the same vein, Qurei insists that he, not Hirschfeld, authored the initial document
that eventually emerged after numerous iterations as the Oslo Declaration of Principles (DOP) on
Interim Self-Government Arrangements. The lament of denied glory is also evident in Qurei’s
reminder to the reader that the honor of signing the accords at the White House ceremony went to
Mahmoud Abbas: “For reasons of protocol, I had not been designated to sign the agreement,
although I had negotiated every single word in it.”
It is therefore not surprising that, by reading this work, one learns more about Ahmed Qurei’s
personal aspirations and disappointments than anything new and previously untold about Oslo. As such, From Oslo to Jerusalem merely serves to confirm the published accounts of the PLOIsraeli
rapprochement by Abbas, Savir, Makovsky and British journalist Jane Corbin (in Gaza First:
The Secret Norway Channel to Peace Between Israel and the PLO).
From Qurei’s account we learn that the first five rounds of secret talks, beginning on January
22, 1993, took place between himself, Hassan Asfour and Maher Kurd on behalf of the PLO, and
Yair Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak, two Israeli academics with close ties to Yossi Beilin and Israeli
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. These initial encounters took place despite serious concerns and
uncertainties within the PLO leadership about the extent to which the Israeli interlocutors were
officially authorized to speak for their government. These difficulties were further compounded by
the absence of clarity about the kinds of issues that Israel was willing to negotiate and by the
inability of the Palestinians to determine whether the Norwegian channel was to serve as a substitute
for, or as an adjunct to, the peace negotiations taking place in Washington.
Some of these doubts were laid to rest in late May 1993, when Israel decided to upgrade the
talks to the official level by dispatching Uri Savir to Oslo. Savir and Qurei developed a close
personal friendship and a constructive working relationship that contributed to progress on the
DOP during the sixth round of talks. But the amiable atmosphere of the negotiations turned sour
during the seventh round in mid-June after the arrival of Yoel Singer, the legal advisor of the Israeli
Foreign Ministry. Qurei describes Singer as an aggressive interrogator and Grand Inquisitor who
“behaved, frankly, as if he was the public prosecutor at an Israeli military court ready to pronounce
severe sentences on some hapless Palestinian citizen who had been tortured into confessing a
crime against the Israeli state.”
The Oslo talks began to unravel during the following four rounds. According to Qurei’s
account, the responsibility for the impasse in the talks fell entirely on Israeli shoulders. At the
beginning of the ninth round in early July, Singer introduced a radically revised draft of the DOP
that Qurei deemed unacceptable because it included many provisions objectionable to the Palestinians
and inexplicably excluded items that had previously been agreed to by both parties. As a
result, profound disagreements emerged between the parties on five issues regarding the substance
of the DOP, with the PLO insisting that the DOP contain explicit reference to Security
Council resolutions 242 and 338, a listing of the issues to be deferred to the final status negotiations,
a guarantee that the Israeli withdrawal from “Gaza first” would not end up as a retreat from
“Gaza only,” specification of modalities for the proposed elections to be held in Jerusalem, and
identification of the rights of Palestinians displaced in the 1967 war.
Qurei insists that he was compelled to introduce a new DOP draft with 25 amendments during
the tenth round on July 11 solely in response to the Israeli draft. While accusing the Israelis of
placing on the table for a second time issues that had previously been agreed to, Qurei’s account
stands in sharp contrast to that of his Israeli counterpart Savir, who lamented in The Process the
tendency of the Palestinian negotiators to withdraw earlier concessions and to introduce new demands. Not surprisingly, the eleventh round in late July ended in a shouting match, with Savir
suggesting that the negotiations be terminated and with Qurei announcing his intention to resign.
The five contentious issues were eventually resolved during a six-hour phone call on the night
of August 17-18 between Israeli Foreign Minister Peres in Stockholm and PLO leader Arafat in
Tunis, with Norwegian Foreign Minister Johan Joergen Holst relaying the messages both ways.
While the Palestinians clearly won Israeli concessions on three of these issues, Qurei merely lists
these without identifying them as such, stressing instead the compromises that Israel had successfully
extracted from the PLO. Here, again, Savir’s account of the bargaining is much less one-sided
because it highlights the mutual give and take in Oslo.
The only issue that remained on the table after agreement on the DOP had been reached
involved mutual recognition. Qurei acknowledges that he was very reluctant to accept the notion
because he believed that the least the PLO should have insisted upon, in return for acknowledging
Israel’s right to exist, was an explicit recognition by Israel of the Palestinians’ right to their own
independent state. As it turned out, neither the DOP nor the letters of mutual recognition exchanged
by Arafat and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on September 9, 1993, contain any mention of
a Palestinian state. Yet, despite this glaring and deliberate omission, Qurei inexplicably held on to
the belief that Oslo “would lead inexorably to a Palestinian state.”
Qurei heaps well-deserved praise on several Norwegian diplomats for offering and helping to
sustain the Oslo channel. Establishing a secret and initially unofficial channel between Israel and
the PLO was the brainchild of Terje Larsen, a Norwegian sociologist who, along with Deputy
Foreign Minister Jan Egeland, helped to set up the exploratory discussions in Oslo beginning in
January 1993. Eventually, the Norwegians played a key role in persuading Israel to elevate the talks
to an official level in May 1993. Following the serious deadlock during the tenth round in mid-June,
Foreign Minister Holst and his assistant Mona Juul helped to resuscitate the talks by providing
assurances to Arafat and Peres that the other party was committed to reaching agreement through
the Oslo channel. Qurei notes that, in addition to ensuring utmost secrecy and providing congenial
settings for the talks, Holst’s tact and integrity in relaying ideas and identifying topics for
discussions with both sides contributed greatly to the emergence of trust among the interlocutors
in the late rounds.
Qurei confirms previous accounts that American officials had been made aware of the Oslo
channel long before Shimon Peres presented the agreed-upon DOP draft to Secretary of State
Warren Christopher in California in late August 1993. He notes that Holst’s predecessor as foreign
minister, Thorvald Stoltenberg, and his deputy, Jan Egeland, submitted regular reports to Washington
about the status of the talks. Furthermore, Holst himself delivered a copy of an early draft of
the DOP to State Department officials in early 1993 and sought their comments.
The final chapter in Qurei’s volume, “Philosophy, Strategy and Tactics,” is a very disappointing
conclusion to what could have been an illuminating addition to the literature on the Oslo
negotiations. The subheading, “The Achievements of the Oslo Agreement,” should have been
more accurately named “The Intended Aims of the Oslo Accords” because the achievements
alluded to by the author were ephemeral at best. Thirteen years had passed between the signing of
the Oslo accords and the publication of this book. Hence, it would have been reasonable to expect
Qurei to provide at least a brief explanation of the reasons for the utter collapse of the Oslo process
in the intervening years. Yet, other than a single sentence blaming “certain Israeli governments in
the last ten years” for having failed to abide by the Oslo agreements, one searches in vain for a
somewhat more substantial and less one-sided analysis of the reasons for Oslo’s demise.
Curiously, Qurei finds considerable merit in the step-by-step approach that informed the DOP
— leaving fundamentally critical issues including Palestinian statehood to be resolved by 1998 —
but does not assess its pitfalls, despite acknowledging that the “balance of power drastically favored Israel and worked against the Palestinians.” Mahmoud Abbas was much more prescient
than Qurei when he noted at the meeting of the Palestinian Central Council, which ratified the Oslo
Accords in October 1993, that Oslo “carries within it the possibility of establishing an independent
state, but it could also prolong the occupation for many years.” Indeed, as has been noted
recently by Saeb Erekat, the current chief Palestinian negotiator, when it comes to the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict, “nothing is solved until everything is solved” (New York Times Magazine, July
8, 2007, p. 54). That is a lesson Qurei fails to draw.
Perhaps because he devoted indefatigable effort to bring about an Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation,
Qurei still clings to the illusive hope that what had been accomplished in Oslo “could pave
the way for coexistence, cooperation and a better future, in place of a history filled with hatred,
suffering and blood.” Regrettably, for most Israelis and Palestinians, all that remains of Oslo
nowadays, in addition to shattered dreams, is the indelible memory of the hesitant handshake
between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin eons and eons ago.
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