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from the massacre was that the mix of Jewish settlers, some of whom felt they
were on a messianic mission to resettle all of Biblical Israel, and restive
Palestinians who wanted sovereignty and control over their own lives was
potentially toxic, for both sides. Ideally, the process which had begun with Oslo
might start to disentangle it, though I remained far from confident that anything
resembling full peace would come any time soon.

*
*
*

Rabin, and even more acutely Shimon Peres, believed it was important to
press ahead with the opening phase of the handover of Israeli authority mapped
out by Oslo. In May 1994, a draft of the so-called “Gaza and Jericho First”
agreement was completed. Once it was ratified, the five-year interim period
would begin, with further withdrawals and parallel negotiations on the
“permanent status” of the territories. In this first step, Israel would transfer civil
authority in Gaza Strip and the Jordan Valley town of Jericho to the
Palestinians, and local security would be in the hands of a newly created
Palestinian police force.

My primary concern, and my responsibility, was the security provisions in
the agreement, since the Israeli army retained its role in charge of overall
security. When I went to see Rabin a few days before the cabinet meeting to
approve the Gaza-Jericho agreement, I told him I was worried that it left room
for potentially serious misunderstandings, friction and even clashes on the
ground. There was no clear definition of how our soldiers would operate
alongside the new local police in the event of a terror attack, violence by Hamas
or Islamic Jihad, or, for that matter, a car crash involving an Israeli and a
Palestinian. He agreed this needed to be addressed, although it was clear he
intended to do so with Arafat, via the Americans, not by reopening and delaying
the formal agreement.

But I had a deeper concern about the entire Oslo Agreement, which I also
now raised with Rabin. I did not doubt the importance of reaching a political
agreement, and ideally a peace treaty, with the Palestinians. But I’d now read
the Oslo Declaration in greater detail, and discussed it with lawyer friends of
mine. I’d also re-read the 1978 Camp David framework on which the self-rule
provisions were based. The endpoint was pretty clear, just as it had been at
Camp David: Palestinian authority over the West Bank and Gaza, defined as a

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