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The Peace Professor
Amateur diplomat Yair Hirschfeld's secret meetings with
Palestinians paved the way for the Israel-PLO accord.
JAMES D. BESSER WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
H
e is the unlikeliest of he-
roes — a rumpled schol-
ar with a disarmingly
distracted manner, a
practitioner of quiet dialogue in
a country where heroes tend to
be bigger-than-life military
leaders.
His heroism is of a different
stripe: More than anything else,
Yair Hirschfeld's odyssey in the
past 12 months offers proof pos-
itive that ordinary people can
have a role in creating peace
where the generals and politi-
cians have failed.
Mr. Hirschfeld, a 49-year-old
New Zealand-born lecturer in
Mideast history at the Univer-
sity of Haifa, created and
painstakingly nurtured the
"back channel" connection to the
Palestine Liberation Organiza-
tion — 10 months of secret dis-
cussions in Norway that
resulted in the Sept. 13 Israeli-
PLO accord for Palestinian self-
rule.
Three months after the
White House ceremony mark-
ing the signing of that agree-
ment, there are troubling
indications that its implemen-
tation may be foundering. But
Mr. Hirschfeld, the citizen-
diplomat, remains confi-
dent that the foundation
he helped build in Nor-
way is strong enough to
survive the continuing
violence and the po-
litical backlash that
threaten the ac-
cord.
To a sur-
prised world,
Mr. Hirsch-
feld was the
unknown am-
ateur who
stepped up to
the plate and
hit a home
run his first time at bat.
But in a recent Washington
interview, he stressed that his
participation in the secret talks
that began almost a year ago
was just the latest chapter in
an effort that goes back more
than a decade, to a time when
"dialogue" between Israelis and
Palestinians was a dirty word
— and in some cases, a crime.
"I was engaged in backchan-
nel activities and dialogue for
the past 12 years," he said. "I
wouldn't have stuck with it un-
less I believed that we were part
of a historical process — and
that process could lead to an
agreement."
The backchannel saga
opened several years ago when
Yossi Beilin, then a member of
the opposition in the Knesset,
began talking to Terje Rod
Larsen, the head of a Norwe-
gian organization that investi-
gated conditions in the occupied
territories.
After the triumph of Yitzhak
Rabin's Labor party in the
June, 1992 Parliamentary elec-
tions, Mr. Larsen offered to help
Mr. Beilin — now deputy for-
eign minister — open an indi-
rect line of communication
between the Rabin government
and the PLO leadership in Tu-
nis.
Mr. Beilin tapped his old
friend Yair Hirschfeld as the
crucial go-between, since no of-
ficial member of the govern-
ment would dare break the
taboo against direct contact
with the PLO.
"The fact that I am an acad-
emic was important to maintain
the full deniability of the dia-
logue," he said.
The talks began in earnest in
December 1992, with a secret
meeting in London between Mr.
Hirschfeld and Ahmed Sulei-
man Khoury, a senior PLO of-
ficial who also goes by the name
of Abu Alaa.
From the beginning, the
talks were structured more like
an abstract academic exercise
than a diplomatic negotiation
— an important ingredient in
their ultimate success, accord-
ing to Mr. Hirschfeld.
"The fact of my being an aca-
demic was important in order
to permit brainstorming," he
said. "What you do in such a sit-
uation is that you check many,
many possibilities of how to
bridge gaps.
It's important that you dis-
cuss matters in an easy atmos-
phere, where nothing is
recorded, nothing is on record,
and you can easily retreat from
positions."
That format also provided
cover for the Rabin government.
"We could always say that we
were just engaged in academic
exercises, not 'negotiations' " he
said. "But they were effective
enough to cover the entire
ground. That was important,
because you had to be able to
give people like Rabin and
Peres answers on ALL issues
involved in the negotiations."
In 15 sessions, Mr. Hirschfeld
and his PLO counterparts ham-
mered out the outlines
of the Israeli-PLO
deal, producing nu-
merous drafts and
introducing a num-
ber of concepts that
became part of the
final agreement
signed in Sep-
tember — in-
cluding the
notion of edg-
ing into Pales-
tinian self-rule
by agreeing
first on an
arrangement
for Gaza and
Jericho.
It wasn't until March that
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres
was officially informed of the se-
cret sessions. In April, Mr.
Peres went to Prime Minister
Rabin, and the process began to
gain momentum.
Mr. Hirschfeld vigorously dis-
puted the popular assumption
that the United States govern-
ment actively discouraged the
back-channel route because of
Washington's emphasis on the
Madrid formula, which cen-
tered on formal meetings of of-
ficial delegations in
Washington.
"The Americans knew from