Touching Peace

Yossi Beilin provides an inside account of the secret talks that broke all the official rules and led, 16 months later, to the famous handshake in September 1993 between Rabin and Arafat on the White House lawn. He describes the subsequent Stockholm dialogue, which came to a promising conclusion just five days before Rabin's assassination, and reveals details of the unofficial - and yet to be implemented - understanding reached with PLO Deputy Abu Mazen on the content of a final peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The concluding part of this book addresses the all-important, and for Israelis unfamiliar, question of how to live in peace: Israeli nationalism and foreign policy, Israel as part of the Jewish world, electoral reform, religion and the state, the Arabs of Israel, and other topics. A senior figure in Israel's Labour Party, an intellectual as well as a man of action, Yossi Beilin reveals in this book his own creative and passionate commitment to a settlement in the Middle East. This is the story of risks taken and opportunities grasped, in pursuit of the holy grail of Middle Eastern politics of the late 20th century: