Review: The Path to Geneva: The Quest for a Permanent Agreement, 1996-2004

By Yossi Beilin. RDV Books/Akashic Books, 380 pages, $22.95.

It's a very rare thing that a book about the Arab-Israeli conflict is more than just a library addition these days. But perhaps this will not be the case with Yossi Beilin's The Path to Geneva: The Quest for a Permanent Agreement, 1996-2004. The leader of the new Israeli left-of-center party Yahad, the former justice minister in the short-lived government of Ehud Barak, and a chief architect of the 1993 Oslo Accord and 2003's Geneva Agreement, Beilin has produced a remarkable account of the last decade of peace negotiations with the Palestinians. If one were wondering what exactly happened and what precisely went wrong, this is as close of an account to what transpired as you're likely to find.

While the collapse of the peace process has largely been blamed on former prime minister Barak's poor handling of the final-status negotiations with Yasir Arafat, Beilin lays the bulk of the responsibility on former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Citing Netanyahu's stated opposition to the Oslo Accord in his "scholarly" publications – 1993's A Place among the Nations and 1997's Fighting Terror are examples – and detailing all of Netanyahu's demonstrably uncooperative actions while prime minister between 1996 and 1999, Beilin makes a very strong case for why the Netanyahu years were the beginning of the end for Oslo.

This doesn't absolve Netanyahu's successor, Barak, of his own very real failings; Beilin is equally unsparing in his analysis of his former boss. However, Beilin's focus on Netanyahu, to the exclusion of every other right-winger in Israeli politics – current prime minister Ariel Sharon included – is a necessary and intelligently argued corrective to the historical record. In Netanyahu's 1996 authorization of the Yom Kippur opening of the Western Wall Tunnel from the Temple Mount to the Arab Quarter, for example, Beilin sees a rehearsal for the al-Aksa intifada that followed Sharon's deadly stroll across the Temple Mount in September 2000.

The Path to Geneva's only weakness is Beilin's tendency toward self-aggrandizement. While he has every right to point out his own achievements as a peacemaker, sometimes the references come across as though they were aimed at cultivating American Jewish support for his new political party. By no means is this an indictable offense, particularly at a time when liberal Israeli organizations require more financial and ideological support from abroad than ever. It's more like a smudge in an otherwise moving and highly informative piece of historical writing. (Joel Schalit)