Yossi Beilin: Israelis behind Oslo never thought about future, final agreement

Dr. Aaron Lerner
IMRA
27 August '10

"I simply am not prepared to live in a world in which things cannot be resolved"
Yossi Beilin - Interview by Ari Shavit "Yossi removes his glasses" Haaretz Magazine, March 7, 1997

This is my favorite Beilin quote. But for some reason, the English translation of the original interview doesn't seem to be available anywhere on internet - including the Haaretz archive.

With Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu about to fly to Washington it is worthwhile to look back for a moment and consider the astounding revelations from this long forgotten interview (only available in Hebrew in the archives of Haaretz):

The following are translations of some choice excerpts:

Shavit: When you entered the Oslo process, Rabin Peres and you, was it clear to you that this was going to a Palestinian state?

Beilin: No. It is very interesting to note that the talks of the soul regarding "where will this process lead" took place only between the sides, not within them.within the Labor party and within the government and within the negotiating team I don't recall any real and serious discussion of the final solution.

Shavit: I don't understand. In 1992 you were elected to the government. In 1993 you created the Oslo process. At no stage did you ask yourselves where this all was leading to?

Beilin: No.

Shavit: You never spoke with Rabin about the significance of Oslo in the long run?

Beilin: Never.

Shavit: And with Peres?

Beilin: I also never spoke with Peres about it.

Shavit: That's to say that we are going to an historic process that is second to none in its drama and at no stage you don't say "wait a moment, let's think about this", let's check where we are basically going?

Beilin: By Rabin, avoidance of the final arrangement was a kind of policy. He pushed it off. After he died I sat with Leah Rabin and I said to her - if someone could have known what final arrangement Rabin had in mind it's only you. She told me - "Look, I can't tell you. He was very pragmatic, hated to deal with what will be in many more years. He thought about what will be now, very soon. To the best of my knowledge he did not have a very clear picture of what the final arrangement would be"

Rabin thought that things would develop, saw something instrumental like that, some autonomy that might become a state and might not. He did not have a clear picture.
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Shavit: The question that must be raised is if the decisions of Oslo were made at all in a rational process?

Beilin: In general there aren't rational processes. Rationality, at the end, is almost always rationalizing. When you look at these kinds of processes you find that almost always the things happen out of internal feelings of the participants that they are doing the right thing. Out of their emotions and intuition and personal experience.
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Shavit: have you considered at times, that maybe, because of 1948, the complications of the dispute make it unsolvable?

Beilin: Yes. It occurs to me. But I immediately utterly rejects it. I see myself as an absolute rationalist and I want to live a rational world. I very much want to live in a world in which there is a solution to our existential problems that is possible. I have no proof that this is indeed the situation. This is like being an optimist. Is an optimist convinced that the pessimist is always wrong? No. He simply convinces himself that things will be good. That it will be OK. And then he also does everything in order to insure that he is right. That's the way I am.

I simply am not prepared to live in a world in which things cannot be resolved.

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