Resumo de From Oslo To Jerusalem: The Palestinian Story Of The Secret Negotiations

In this book, Ahmed Querie also known as Abu Ala documents his experience on Oslo. He was the head of the Palestinian negotiations team in Oslo. He details the negotiations from its embryonic start in February, 1992 to the final declaration in Washington in September, 1993.The title promises the reader an insightful account of the making of the accord and the internal thinking of the Palestinian Leadership during the Oslo dialogue. Such an account by the Chief negotiator of Oslo would have been very vital in understanding the Oslo accord. But what the author manages to give is no such thing as he simply gives a descriptive account of the negotiations of Oslo with minute detail but fails to give the background Palestinian internal debates, compulsions and hopes that made them accept what they finally accepted after months of secret talks. What he achieves in the book is to give a reasonably fluent description of the talks in Oslo, the high points, the low points, the emotions involved and more prominently his personal experience during the negotiations. He ascribes the failure of the PLO?s policy of supporting Iraq in the Gulf war which isolated PLO, the economic fall out of the Intifada and the end of Cold war with the fall of trusted ally Soviet Union, as the reasons for PLO opting to conduct negotiations with Israel. All these, he says, had considerably weakened PLO and hence they had no other option but to negotiate with Israel. Hence, when Oslo came as an option as a direct back channel with Israel, PLO Leadership had little options apart from giving it a try even though initially the credibility of this back channel was unclear.In the later stages of negotiations Ahmed Querie identifies five issues which bogged down the talks namely the final implementation of the UNSC 242 and 338, question of Jerusalem, security issues concerning Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho, the rights of the displaced people of 1967 war to return and the question of mutual recognition. These almost led to the collapse of the talks and he says this was prevented by the intervention of Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres who made an indirect dramatic telephone negotiation with Yaseer Arafat and the Palestinian leadership and that only secured the agreement with each party making some concessions. The book is essentially a personal account of Ahmed Querie and he succeeds to an extent in that level. For he has clearly portrayed his frustrations, swing of emotions due to the yoke of making history or messing the chance, anguish and final ecstasy in achieving a historic breakthrough. But where the book miserably fails is giving insights into the Palestinian thinking behind the scene. He leaves out most of the details of the discussions held in Tunis in between the Oslo talks. These discussions, if mentioned, could have provided valuable insights and would have made the book more absorbing. In their absence all the technical nature of the negotiations dulls the reader beyond a point. Without them the book provides less insights and this big gap, made bigger by the fact that this is a conscious omission by the author as he knew them for sure, makes the book less gripping and ordinary. The fact that he rarely criticizes the official Palestinian line in the book makes it a politically correct one and thereby timid. Ahmed Querie could have revealed much more than he chose to but still in the political mainstream of Palestine, Ahmed Querie has played it safe by avoiding to mention the internal dynamics of the PLO in detail. The book passes off as uncontroversial, insightful at times and generates interest in those places where the course of generating history rouses its own interest.

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