The peace was negotiated in secret — disguised as an academic seminar | WHO KILLED THE PEACE? Part 4

History Onion · Part 4 · 2:59

In January 1993, two Israeli professors flew to Norway for what their government could honestly call an academic seminar. In a country house outside Oslo, they sat down with officials of the Palestine Liberation Organization — and began negotiating the peace their peoples had failed to make for forty-five years. Talking was the crime: Israel had a law against contact with the PLO, and a peace activist had gone to prison just for meeting Arafat. A public peace conference had been running in Washington since 1991 and was going nowhere, because Israel had barred the PLO from it — the Palestinians at that table were local West Bank and Gaza figures who had to telephone Arafat in Tunis before they could agree to anything. So Norway built the workaround: a research institute lent its name, the government quietly paid, and fourteen secret rounds later the deal was initialed in an Oslo villa. The Washington negotiators had no idea. Then, on September 13, 1993, on the White House lawn, Yasser Arafat put out his hand — and Yitzhak Rabin, the old soldier who had fought him his whole life, hesitated in front of the world before he shook it. Part 4. Follow for Part 5 — The Spoilers.