That is exactly what happened five years ago this fall in secret meetings between Yossi Beilin, a top aide to the then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Yasir Arafat’s closest adviser, Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen. The two sides thought they had reached the basis for a final peace deal. But Rabin never had a chance to read it, much less sign off on it. Just before the draft pact reached his desk, he was shot by an Israeli assassin.
Today, under Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the ideas hatched by Beilin and Abu Mazen still form the basis for make-or-break negotiations with Arafat. Various summaries of the draft agreement have leaked out over the years, but the document itself–which NEWSWEEK has obtained–is stunning in its sweep and detail. (A full copy is available on NEWSWEEK .msnbc.com.) Many of the concessions on the table now–over land, refugees and security–were in fact broached back then. According to a U.S. ex-official, President Clinton considered the Beilin-Abu Mazen draft perhaps the “core idea” at Camp David. Beilin and Abu Mazen “anticipated where the center of gravity would be,” says the same official. “They were way out in front of the consensus in ‘95.”
The secret talks that produced the “Understanding,” as it came to be called, were the brainchild of Yossi Beilin. A boyish-looking former journalist, Beilin was the initiator of the original “Oslo channel” of covert negotiations that led to the 1993 breakthrough agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Oslo was only an interim accord, however, and left the toughest issues for a later date. Beilin wanted to begin negotiating those as soon as possible. But he knew that many of the disagreements between the two sides, especially conflicting claims over Jerusalem, were so sensitive that the talks had to be top secret. At the start, neither Rabin nor Foreign Minister Shimon Peres knew about his scheme.
To get the plan going, Beilin met with PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat in 1993 on the pretext of attending a multilateral meeting in Tunisia, where Arafat then had his headquarters. Beilin’s bodyguards were so nervous about allowing their boss to enter Arafat’s compound that they insisted on conducting their own security sweep. (Arafat consented.) Over hot tea with honey, the two men talked about Beilin’s proposal for a secret channel aimed at nothing less than ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Arafat agreed and said he would appoint Abu Mazen, his closest aide and heir apparent, as his point man.
Over the following 18 months the Israeli and Palestinian teams met secretly about 20 times in Jerusalem, Cyprus and a half-dozen European cities. The operation was financed by Sweden and came to be known as the Stockholm Channel. Beilin and Abu Mazen assembled a tiny team of negotiators to minimize the chances of leaks. Beilin called back Ron Pundak and Yair Hirschfeld, the two Mideast experts who had laid the foundation for the Oslo breakthrough. Abu Mazen tapped Hasan Asfour, the PLO official who had charmed the then Foreign Minister Shimon Peres during earlier talks. The negotiators, who dubbed themselves the “peace factory,” rotated between European capitals to avoid detection. Even so, Israeli intelligence at one point got wind of the meetings and reported back to Jerusalem, according to Israeli sources.
The team was so small it had to tap outside experts on the immensely complex final status issues. But Beilin and Abu Mazen were afraid of widening the circle of people who knew about the negotiations. So they decided to sponsor seminars in Europe and Israel. In one European capital, under the cover of an academic gathering, scholars were invited to debate the fate of Jerusalem. In another, a seminar was arranged on Palestinian refugees. And so on. Participants had no idea their expertise was being used for the drafting of a secret peace proposal.
In the end, both the Palestinians and the Israelis offered concessions. Abu Mazen agreed that the new state of Palestine, to be created on much of the land occupied by Israel in 1967, would be “demilitarized.” And he accepted the Israeli demand for maintaining three reinforced battalions and other Israeli forces on the West Bank of the Jordan River within agreed military compounds. The agreement also called for three Israeli early-warning stations and three air-defense units to be maintained on the West Bank until May 5, 2007, or until peace agreements and bilateral security arrangements between Israel and other Arab foes were achieved. According to Israeli and Palestinian sources, these same security provisions were all but agreed to this summer during the marathon talks at Camp David. (Under the framework discussed there, the air-defense stations would be maintained for 12 years, the same period envisioned by Beilin and Abu Mazen.)
In return, Beilin agreed to relinquish nearly all of the West Bank occupied in the 1967 war, including the strategic Jordan Valley. Among Israeli military specialists and politicians it had always been an article of faith that the Jordan Valley was key to Israel’s security interests. But the military advisers working with Beilin convinced him that such thinking was anachronistic. New methods of intelligence gathering and early-warning systems would be sufficient. By maintaining some military presence in the territory for 12 years and setting up joint patrols with Palestinian security forces, Israel could give up control over the land. A source familiar with still-secret maps agreed to by Beilin and Abu Mazen says they are very specific. According to the Understanding, Israel would give up 94 percent of the West Bank to the Palestinians–a figure higher than the 90 percent usually bandied about today in connection with the Camp David talks.
On another sticky issue, Beilin’s team went farther than Israel ever had by acknowledging the “moral and material suffering caused to the Palestinian people as a result of the war of 1947-1949.” The pact recognized the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the “State of Palestine,” breaking a longstanding taboo in Israel, where even left-leaning Israelis were concerned about a Palestinian population explosion on their border. Beilin also agreed to accept a symbolic number of refugees into Israel proper. But beyond that concession, the two sides recognized that “realities” since 1948 rendered impractical the implementation of the right of Palestinians to return to their homes in Israel.
Not surprisingly, one aspect that Beilin and Abu Mazen could not fully agree on was the status of Jerusalem’s Old City and the mount where two of Islam’s most sacred mosques are located atop the ruins of the Second Temple. Yet they did lay out a plan for giving the Temple Mount “extra-territorial” status for the Palestinians. This would give the area something like the status of an embassy–part of sovereign Israel, but functionally under the exclusive control of the Palestinians. Similar solutions for Jerusalem are being considered now, including a plan calling for Israel to transfer aspects of sovereignty over the Temple Mount to a third party such as the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. “We’re working now to see if there are possible mechanisms that would allow us to say we have sovereignty, while the Palestinians can say they got what they wanted,” says an Israeli diplomat.
It is not clear to what extent Rabin was informed about the Beilin-Abu Mazen talks. Rabin’s widow, Leah, complained just last week that her husband must be turning in his grave over the concessions on Jerusalem offered by Barak at Camp David. (Abu Mazen, for his part, distanced himself from the document when bits of it leaked to the press.) But it’s clear that Beilin, at least, believed Rabin wanted to move quickly toward a final agreement and was ready to accept a full-fledged Palestinian state in most of the occupied areas. The agreement could not be more explicit: “The Government of Israel shall extend its recognition to the Independent State of Palestine within agreed and secure borders with its capital al-Quds” and “simultaneously, the State of Palestine shall extend its recognition to the State of Israel within agreed and secure borders with its capital Yerushalayim.” The final document, completed in a cramped Tel Aviv apartment on Oct. 31, 1995, was supposed to have been delivered to both Rabin and Arafat. But Rabin died at a peace rally on Nov. 4, before he could act on it. The question now is whether Barak and Arafat have the mettle to finish off what was nearly completed five long years ago.
