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PaineWebber We invest in relationships. 32300 Northwestern Ilwy., Suite 150 Farmington I fills, MI 48334 Nkndh, SIN : AUDIO TA L KI N G RENTAL BO ■ OKS • Audio Books Sales & Rentals • • Cassette & CD • • • SALES ALL THE NEWEST AUTHORS INCLUDING JOHN GRISHAM, ROBERT WALLER AND STEPHEN KING! Listen to your favorite book on tape while driving, exercising, working! Mail West Bloomfield Plaza order Orchard Lake Road At Maple available 737-7171 HOURS: Mon-Sat 9-9 Sunday 12-6 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