On Feb. 22, Ahmed Qurei, popularly known by his nom de guerre, Abu Ala, passed at the age of 85 in the West Bank, closing a very important chapter in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In 1993, Abu Ala led a small team from the Palestine Liberation Organization that conducted secret discussions in Norway with a small Israeli team (of which I was a member), led by Uri Savir, the director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. The resultant groundbreaking Oslo Accords included Israel-PLO mutual recognition and a blueprint for peace, starting with Palestinian autonomy and ultimately aiming at a two-state solution. Savir died last May.
I believe that, if Abu Ala had not led the PLO team, the Oslo Agreement would never have come about. Short, balding, and smiley, he wasn’t the natural fit to lead the negotiations regarding the future of Palestine. Abu Ala was not associated with the official negotiations that went on at the time in Washington between an Israeli delegation and a Palestinian team unaffiliated with the PLO due to an earlier Israeli refusal to talk with the group (which Israel considered a terrorist organization). Nor was he familiar with the details of the Palestinian positions in the official Washington talks (which were extreme and uncompromising).
Abu Ala was, instead, responsible for the PLO’s economic activities before fate intervened and made him a diplomat.
The secret Oslo talks were intended to overcome the ideological hurdles encountered in Washington. There, Abu Ala’s weakness in political matters became his great strength: Since he was neither familiar with nor committed to the nuances of the Palestinian positions in the Washington negotiations, it was easy for him to deviate from those rigid, official Palestinian positions and reach an agreement with his Israeli counterparts on alternative, more pragmatic formulations.
Additionally, Abu Ala was a moderate person and fully committed to a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Perhaps because he was an economist, he also had a realistic approach to resolving the conflict. For example, once, when the question arose as to whether the Palestinian Authority could issue a Palestinian currency, he scoffed in my ears at the ideological Palestinian position (held also by Yasser Arafat) that advocated issuing an independent Palestinian currency and preferred, for practical reasons, to continue using the Israeli currency. Abu Ala, however, was not a Zionist. He was a proud and patriotic Palestinian who strove to advance Palestinian interests, but he simply concluded that by conducting negotiations with Israel, the Palestinians could achieve more than by fighting against it.
He was also the greatest negotiator I have met. I watched him with admiration in Oslo maximizing Palestinian gains, notwithstanding the bad hand they had been dealt. I also enjoyed observing this colorful person moving quickly from loud yelling (usually at the Norwegian mediators who served as lightning rods for his tantrums) to jokes, imitations (mostly of his Palestinian colleagues), and nonstop laughter with us Israelis, sometimes until well after midnight. I believed he sometimes lied to Arafat in his reports on the developments in the negotiations, and, of course, he occasionally also lied to us Israelis, as he once admitted to me. But it was done, in my opinion, out of his determination to reach an agreement as quickly as possible, which obliged him to maneuver constantly between the pressures coming from various directions at once. In his pragmatic attitude to resolving fundamental political issues, his determination to reach peace, and his focus on the big picture instead of the details, Abu Ala often reminded me of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s approach to peace with Israel when he decided to visit the country in 1977.
After the Oslo Accords were concluded, Abu Ala became the speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council and, subsequently, the Palestinian prime minister under President Arafat. He also participated in (but did not lead) Palestinian delegations in subsequent, failed attempts to reach a final peace agreement with Israel. Perhaps if he had led those efforts, the result could have been different.
Joel Singer is a former legal adviser of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the main drafter of the Oslo Accords.
