Arabs and Israelis by Abdel Monem Said Aly

Author:Abdel Monem Said Aly
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137290854
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK

Figure 7.6. Leaders attending the Madrid Peace Conference.

© Pascal le Segretain/Sygma/CORBIS

The convening of the Madrid Conference was preceded by intense American diplomacy, orchestrated by Secretary of State James Baker, focused on ensuring the participation of Syria and Israel. It was also associated with considerable tension in American–Israeli relations, as the Bush administration clashed with the Likud-led government led by Itzhak Shamir. The clash centered on Washington’s attempt to persuade Israel to halt the construction of and within settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. For the first time since the mid-1970s, the United States exerted overt pressure on Israel, threatening to deny it the $10 billion in United States government loan guarantees that Israel sought in order to fund the absorption of Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union.

The Road to Oslo

In January 1993, Arafat authorized a number of senior PLO officials and PLO-affiliated non-officials to engage a number of Israeli non-officials in a Track-II attempt to negotiate a set of principles on which a process to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict would be based. Two Palestinian leaders were among the architects of the Oslo Accords that resulted from these talks: Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and Ahmed Qurie (Abu Ala’). Abbas’s Israeli counterpart was Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin and Qurie’s Israeli interlocutors were two independent scholars: Yair Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak. Following the understanding reached on the first draft of the proposed Declaration of Principles (DOP), the Israeli unofficial participants were joined and later largely replaced by senior government officials: Uri Savir, Director General of the Foreign Ministry and Joel Singer, a former military advocate, who was now recruited from private practice to become the Legal Advisor to the Foreign Ministry.14

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.