Track-Two Diplomacy toward an Israeli-Palestinian Solution, 1978–2014 by Yair Hirschfeld (review)

Yair Hirschfeld is an Israeli academic whose life’s work has been devoted to promoting behind-the-scenes negotiations towards a peaceful two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is cofounder and director general of a Tel Aviv-based nongovernmental organization called the Economic Cooperation Foundation (ECF), and the bulk of this book is essentially an institutional history of the Foundation’s various projects between 1990 and 2009. As such, it is a valuable monograph, which the author has reconstructed from interviews with many participants, and from his unique collection of policy papers and minutes of meetings. Each chapter is framed within a rigorous structure, breaking down the stages of various ECF ventures, both successful and failed, and concluding with a balance sheet of “lessons learned.” A recurring theme in Hirschfeld’s coverage of all the various episodes is the need for would-be peacemakers to navigate the constraints of both the Israeli and Palestinian domestic political arenas.

Chapter 3 provides new background to several lesser-known success stories of the late 1980s: the April 1987 Peres-Husayn agreement between then–Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres and King Husayn of Jordan (the “London Document”), and formulas associated with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir and Egyptian president Husni Mubarak in 1989 that would become stepping stones to the Madrid Conference in 1991. But Hirschfeld’s name (along with that of the late Ron Pundak) is most frequently associated with the secret negotiations that made possible the dramatic Israeli-PLO mutual recognition and the Oslo Accords signed by Palestine Liberation Organization chair Yasir ‘Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in September 1993. As an academic with friendly access to Yossi Beilin of the Israeli Labor Party and prominent West Bank Palestinians Hanan ‘Ashrawi and Faysal Husayni, Hirschfeld was well-placed to serve as a go-between. But, as frequently happens with Track II activity, he and Pundak had taken on “a thankless task. … [L] ike the initiators of a successful start-up company, Hirschfeld and Pund[a]k were reluctantly willing to accept that their success would lead to a ‘take-over’ of the Oslo talks by Track-I negotiators”¹ — precisely what happened in May 1993 when Uri Savir and Joel Singer were dispatched by Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin to take charge of the ongoing secret meetings with PLO representatives. Sadly, perhaps, Hirschfeld and Pundak were left off the guest list for the signing ceremony on the White House lawn that September. But the two were soon invited to resume working behind the scenes, and between the summer of 1994 and October 1995 a new series of track two negotiations with British-based Hussein Agha and Ahmad Khalidi produced an important draft paper that would become known as the “Beilin–Abu Mazin Understandings.” Retrospectively, this appears to be the highpoint of Hirschfeld’s achievements in the shadowy corridors of the peace process.

In a chapter entitled “The March of Folly” — written from the sidelines and not without a touch of “I told you so” — Hirschfeld recounts the collapse of the Oslo process, the disastrous Camp David summit of July 2000, and the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada (uprising). He bemoans the unwisdom of Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak’s and US president Bill Clinton’s push for an “everything-or-nothing” showdown with ‘Arafat on final-status issues, illustrated by the Israeli prime minister’s refusal to open an envelope containing a fallback position paper prepared by the ECF for the eventuality of failure at Camp David. As the Israeli peace camp tried to salvage what it could from this diplomatic disaster and the deadly violence of the intifada, Hirschfeld dissociated himself from the “paradigm [for a final-status agreement] that had already failed under Barak and Clinton” (p. 284) and remained aloof from the efforts made by others to narrow gaps in...