Review: Ken Brociner on "The Path to Geneva" by Yossi Beilin

ISRAEL HORIZONS - Summer 2006 

REVIEW by Ken Brociner

Road To Peace Still Runs Through Geneva

The Path to Geneva: The Quest For A Permanent Agreeement, 1996-2004 By Yossi Beilin; RDV Books/Akashic Books, 2004, 377 pp., hardcover, $22.95.

Yossi Beilin may well be Israel's leading peace activist. It was Beilin who initiated the secret back-channel talks that resulted in the 1993 Oslo agreement. Throughout the '90s, he played an instrumental role in the peace movement – advocating the urgent need to withdraw Israeli forces from Lebanon and to reach a comprehensive peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. And in December of 2003, it was Beilin, along with his Palestinian counterpart Yassir Abed Rabbo, who launched the Geneva Initiative – a detailed blueprint for a final status agreement between Israel and a future Palestinian state.

Beilin also held ministerial positions in the governments of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak. He was a Member of Knesset representing Labor for eleven years, and in the most recent ballot, Beilin was elected as an MK from Meretz – a party he has headed since 2004.

Beilin's The Path To Geneva, is a dizzying, behind the scenes look at the personalities, memos, meetings, negotiating positions, phone calls and traveling that resulted in many near successes and even more disappointing failures in the quest for peace. He vividly captures how close the two sides came to reaching a final agreement during the last-minute negotiations held at Taba in January of 2001 (prior to Ariel Sharon’s electoral victory in February). By way of illustration, Beilin quotes a leading Palestinian as saying, "If the Taba talks had been held immediately after the Camp David summit, a permanent agreement would have already been signed."

Beilin recounts the private conversations he held with the charismatic Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti in May of 2000. In an anguished tone, Barghouti explained how disappointed he and many of his colleagues were with Barak's seeming unwillingness to be flexible enough to achieve a peace agreenment that, according to Barghouti, Arafat was both ready and eager to sign.

With polls indicating that Barak was about to suffer an overwhelming loss to Sharon, many concerned Israelis urged Shimon Peres to run for prime minister. According to Beilin's painfully candid account: "I found myself in one of the strangest political predicaments of my life.... I saw Peres, even at seventy seven, as the greatest Israeli statesman, and thought he would be a better Prime Minister than Barak. I thought it would be a grave mistake, however, to lend any hand to tearing the Labor movement apart......He [Peres] could not understand why I did not support him....This was the darkest cloud to ever hang over our close relationship."

In the book's final chapter, Yossi Beilin lays out a long list of lessons for both sides to ponder....

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