By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
When an Israeli party leader, former cabinet minister and experienced diplomat comes to town to give an address, it is typically an occasion for linen napkins, crystal goblets and major donors. So the paper tablecloths and plastic forks in the basement of the Rainier Valley Cultural Center made an unusual backdrop for an intimate dinner for about 70 with Yossi Beilin, leader of the left-wing Meretz-Yachad Party, architect of the Oslo Peace process and co-signer of the 2003 Geneva Accord.
Before Beilin’s talk, moderator Jack Olive explained that this event was not officially sponsored by Find Common Ground, a local organization that tries to put together at least one event each year to bring prominent Israeli and Palestinian speakers together on the same stage. This year, he said, Palestinian parliamentarian and former PLO official Hanan Ashrawi was unable to travel to the West Coast, but the group decided not to pass on the chance to hear what Yossi Beilin had to say.
Beilin has seen many disappointments and missed opportunities to forge a peace agreement with the Palestinians in his more than 20 years of public service. It was he who opened the secret talks with the Palestinian Liberation Organization that ultimately led to the 1993 Oslo Accords. In 1995, he and current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas agreed on a set of guidelines for a permanent status peace agreement. He led the Israeli delegation to the multilateral peace process working groups from 1992-95 and was a negotiator at the last formal peace talks with the Palestinians in Taba in January 2001. Still, after all the false hopes and subsequent descents into violence, he remains an optimist.
“Being an optimist doesn’t mean I believe that if it’s business as usual that it will be much better,” he said in an after-dinner speech. “It’s the other way around. When you feel that if it’s just business as usual it might be worse and worse, then you believe that it’s changeable and you can do something to have an impact and change things for the better.”
He noted that there have been “many setbacks” in the seven years since the collapse of negotiations, “when many of us believed that we were on the verge of signing an agreement with the Palestinians and it really exploded in our face.” But, he said, assigning blame is a job for historians, while for “us politicians” the task is to find a way to make the future better than the past.
“There were so many factors that benefited from the fact that there was no peace, that when the moment of truth was close,” he said, “they preferred to run away from it.”
To illustrate the point, Beilin told an old joke about a young attorney who called his father, a well-known lawyer, after his first day in court. When the father asked how things had gone, he announced that he had resolved the case that his father had struggled with unsuccessfully for the last 30 years.
“You idiot,” the father responded. “Look at your car. Look at your university degree, look at your suit. Who bought it for you? This was our big case. I dragged it and dragged it and dragged it out in order to provide you with some money, and you’ve destroyed it all.”
That, he said, was how many people in Israel’s peace movement felt. “Not that there was a big conspiracy,” Beilin said. “Although no one can exclude a conspiracy theory, of course,” he said, adding that he did not think there was one.
“The good news is that last week I read that Olmert, our prime minister, told this joke to somebody.” Beilin said he took that to be an indication that the prime minister believed that inertial pressures had prevented his predecessors from concluding a peace agreement, and he could be the one to resolve it.
“If that is the case, maybe it’s a positive sign,” he said.
A member of Knesset for 11 years, Beilin served as a minister in the governments of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak, including as deputy foreign minister, deputy finance minister, minister of economy and planning, minister in the office of the prime minister, minister for religious affairs, and minister of justice. He said he split with the Labor party, where he spent the bulk of his political career, over the decision to join in a unity government headed by then-Likud leader Ariel Sharon.
As a member of the opposition, he said, he was against Sharon’s plan for a unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip, preferring a negotiated pullout. But, he said, he ultimately did not oppose the disengagement because he felt the end result of dismantling the settlements and removing the troops was better than remaining.
As for the future, Beilin pointed to the Arab League’s 2003 declaration that they would accept peace with Israel if there was a final status agreement with the Palestinian Authority, renewed this year, as one of the turning points in the long struggle in the Middle East. That, he said, would constitute ultimate success for the Zionist ideal: to have Israel recognized by its neighbors and accepted as a part of the region.
He pinned his hopes for the future on a positive outcome from the international conference called by the Bush administration to be held in November. He acknowledged that the present situation, with Hamas controlling Gaza and Fatah in charge of the government in the West Bank, was not good for striking an accord, but he suggested that even if Hamas did not endorse an agreement, it would represent a sea-change in the situation. On the other hand, he described a very dim outlook for the future if the conference did not produce significant results.
“A failed international conference would lead to violence at least as bad as the last seven years,” he predicted. “If it fails, the next meeting could be a very long time.”
Keys to making it a success, he said, would be to be inclusive: inviting Syria to participate, as well as Jordan and Egypt, and to have President Bush chair the conference to put the considerable weight of the U.S. behind it, rather than sending a relatively low-level diplomatic delegation.
As for Hamas, he said that if they were ready to accept a final status agreement worked out between the P.A. and Israel, the Israelis could offer the carrot of a safe-passage between the West Bank and Gaza as part of the normalization process. He also expressed his belief that if Hamas is toppled by the intolerable situation in Gaza, some of the alternatives could prove even worse.
“People may leave Hamas,” he said, “but they are not going to join the Zionist movement.”