Top secret The secret negotiations that followed ran in parallel with the official bilateral negotiations taking place in Washington in the wake of the Madrid peace conference. While the PLO was not represented officially at those talks, a Palestinian delegation headed by the physician Dr Haidar Abdel Shafi and featuring academics and legal advisers was present. The two sides proved intractable and, eventually, the Palestinian team, which had only been allowed to attend under the umbrella of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, walked out of the negotiations in protest at the expulsion of 400 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The expulsion reflected, in the eyes of the Palestinian delegates, the real intentions of the Israelis. Compounded by the continued building of illegal settlements, it became clear that little agreement would be reached across this particular negotiating table. A weakened PLO would, however, soon enter the fray once again. Arafat's PLO was paying the economic price for supporting Iraq's Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War as Gulf states withdrew their financial support. So, instead of pursuing its battle with a determined delegation in Washington, the Israelis chose to negotiate with a weakened partner. In the words of Ron Pundak, a member of the Israeli negotiating team in Oslo, the "PLO before Oslo was almost dead". The secret negotiations focused on a consecutive series of concessions made by the PLO leadership towards a deal that would not only solve their economic crisis but also open US and international venues to an organisation once boycotted as a terrorist group. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the secret negotiations is the fact that the Norwegian ministry of foreign affairs does not hold a single document pertaining to the talks, despite them being mediated by employees from the foreign minister's office. To date, these documents remain missing and unaccounted for, excluding a handful kept by Terje Rød-Larsen, one of the Norwegian team members who later became the UN resident coordinator for the Palestinian people. His wife, Mona Juul, was also a member of the mediating team and later became Norway's ambassador to Israel. Twenty years after the conclusion of the secret negotiations, Rød-Larsen refuses to return the documents he possesses to the Norwegian foreign ministry.
Israel The Price of Oslo Part 2 - YouTube |
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