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OUP CORRECTED PROOF - FINAL, 10/9/2014, SPi xxx The Crooked Course have been scarce. This Part chronicles the rare moments when both Israeli and Palestinian negotiators put pen to paper in an effort to resolve a conflict that has seemed intractable. Part I begins with the Oslo peace talks, which in 1993 produced the Declaration of Principles (DoP) and the mutual recognition of the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. These two agreements formed the basis for all subsequent talks between the parties. In 1992, as the director of the Norwegian research institute Fafo, I initiated, together with then member of Knesset Yossi Beilin, secret talks between him and local Palestinian leader Faisal Husseini, at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem. These talks, which were facilitated by Fafo and the Foreign Ministry of Norway, reached a dead end later that year. The Norwegians realized that without involving the exiled and outlawed Palestinian leadership in Tunis, nothing could be accomplished. At the time, both Israeli and American citizens were forbidden to engage with any member of the PLO. In December 1992, I flew to Tunis to meet for the first time with PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat. In that meeting in his villa, in the darkness of the early morning hours, he authorized the head of Fatah’s financial wing, Ahmed Qorei (alias Abu Ala), to travel to Oslo for secret talks facilitated by Fafo in cooperation with the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. The first meeting took place at Borregaard Manor outside Oslo, in January 1993. From January to May 1993, secret talks were conducted as a pre-negotiation phase, in parallel to the Madrid process taking place in Washington. The goals of pre- negotiations in Oslo were twofold: to build trust between the Palestinian and Israeli representatives; and to explore possible parameters of an agreement. In order to reach the first goal, the exercise was restricted to a small group, willing to engage in secret intense interaction over a lengthy period. Unlike the massive delegations in Washing- ton, the delegations in Oslo were never larger than three to five people on each side, with continued interaction often from dawn to dusk. In Oslo, the Palestinians were represented from day one by a delegation of the PLO, handpicked by its chairman, Yasir Arafat. The rationale behind this unprecedented step was that the Norwegians had discovered that the PLO was already controlling every detail, albeit invisibly, of the bilateral and multilateral talks in Washington. Furthermore we believed that if the PLO and Yasir Arafat were not directly involved in the talks, they still had the ability and the will to block any agreement. Allowing others to reach an agreement would be tantamount to political suicide by the PLO. Therefore, it was necessary to have them at the table. Without them, no agreement could be reached. The pre-negotiation phase ended on 1 May 1993. The talks had reached a point where both parties believed that the other was negotiating in good faith and that an agreement had to take the shape of a declaration of principles. On that date, the head of the Palestinian negotiation team, Ahmed Qorei, invited me for a walk in the hills above Oslo. He made it clear—in the most explicit of words—that the PLO would not continue into a final round of talks unless the Israelis “upgraded” their delegation to high-level officials. Up to this point, the Israelis were represented by two academics (Ron Pundak and Yair Hirschfeld) who did not hold any formal position in the HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023162