Historical recount of Yitzhak Rabin's peace negotiation strategy with Syria and the Palestinians

because we were people with whom Rabin felt comfortable — a counterpoint, I suspect, to the old Labor Party rival whom he had made Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres. Though the two men had grown to respect each another over the years, Rabin neither trusted, nor much liked, Shimon. In fact, though Peres’s support inside Labor had secured him the foreign ministry, Rabin had stipulated that all peace talks would remain under his control. Yet as I'd discover nearly a decade later, when I was Prime Minister, even the most carefully planned negotiating strategies were always subject to setbacks, diversions, or simply what former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once called “events, dear boy, events.” Rabin’s initial plan was not to start with the Palestinians. He did feel it was essential to try to reach a political settlement with them. In one respect, the prospects looked slightly better than before. Arafat’s political position had been weakened: first by an intifada driven as much by local insurgents as by the PLO in faraway Tunis, and then by his decision to break with his longtime Gulf Arab financial supporters and support Saddam Hussein the Gulf War. In 1988, as the entry price for a formal dialogue with the Bush Administration, he had also agreed to a statement in which he renounced terrorism and accepted the principle of a two-state peace agreement with Israel. Still, there remained a yawning gap between the “self- rule” envisaged in the Camp David accords of 1978 and the Madrid conference, and the independent state the Palestinians wanted. Negotiations to bridge it were likely to be fraught and long. So he’d decided to begin with Syria. President Assad was obstinate, and publicly opposed to the idea of making peace with Israel. But he’d been in power for more than two decades and, crucially for Rabin, had lived up to the few, indirect agreements Israel had made with him. The substance in any agreement, though politically difficult, was also more straightforward. We knew what Assad wanted: the recovery of the Golan Heights, in return for the absolute minimum level of political normalization with Israel. We knew what we wanted: security guarantees and assurances regarding water resources, and a full and final peace treaty. For Rabin, there was an additional attraction in beginning with Syria: if we did reach a deal with our main Arab enemy, the pressure would intensify on the Palestinians to follow suit. The dramatic turn of events that ultimately forced him to change tack began in January 1993 in the sitting room of a villa outside Oslo, at an ostensible “academic seminar” convened by the Norwegian diplomat Terje Larsen. It included two Israeli academics with personal ties to prominent Palestinians: 254 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028102