LONDON: I went to the Israeli-Palestinian conference in Jordan in a sceptical frame of mind. I estimated that, as so often in the past, we might succeed in drafting a joint declaration of principles about the need to make peace, to halt terror, to end the occupation and oppression, to mutually recognize each other’s rights, and to live as neighbours in two states for two peoples. We have done all that many times before, at all kinds of conferences and gatherings and with agreements and public statements and what have you. At many points in the past 10 years we have been in striking distance of peace, only to slide again into the abyss of violence and despair.

The same old points of dispute would, I feared, trip us up again: “the right of return” or a solution to the refugee problem? “Return to the 1967 borders” or a logical map that also takes the present into account, and not just history? Open and explicit recognition of the national rights of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples to live each in its own country, or just some equivocating platitude about “peaceful coexistence”? Explicit Palestinian assent to finally and absolutely renounce any additional future claims, or “black holes” that would permit an eventual renewal of conflict and violence?

In previous agreements, including the Oslo agreement, the two sides were very careful not to get caught in the “radioactive core” of the conflict. Refugees, Jerusalem, end of the conflict, permanent borders — all these minefields were marked off by white ribbons and their resolution put off to a better future. The Camp David conference collapsed, after all, the minute it trod on those mines.

On the first evening, the members of the two groups meet for an opening talk. It is a few days after the murder of families and children at the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, a few hours after the killing of several innocent Palestinians in Rafiah, children also among them. A strange ambience pervades the room. Here and there someone tries to crack a joke, perhaps in order to mask the mixture of emotion, resentment, suspicion, and goodwill. Colonel Shaul Arieli, former commander of the Israel Defence Forces in the Gaza Strip, sits facing Samir Rantisi, a cousin of Hamas leader Abd al-Aziz Rantisi. The son of the late Faisal Husseini, Abd al-Qader al-Husseini sits facing Brigadier General Shlomo Brom, a former deputy commander of the Israeli army’s strategic planning division. Next to David Kimche, formerly senior Mossad official and director-general of Israel’s foreign ministry, sits Fares Kadura, a leader of the Tanzim, a Palestinian militant guerrilla group.

Through the window, beyond the Dead Sea, we can see the small cluster of lights that marks Kibbutz Kalia, which the Geneva document would transfer to Palestinian control. We also see the large dome of lights marking Ma’aleh Adumim, the Jerusalem suburb along the road to Jericho that, according to the same document, would become an inalienable part of the State of Israel.

We talk and debate (in fluent Hebrew) until after midnight with Hisham Abd al-Raziq, who spent 21 years — half his life — in Israeli prisons. Now he serves as the country’s minister for prisoners’ affairs. He is almost certainly the world’s only cabinet minister for prisoners’ affairs. But our own minister- prisoner, Natan Scharansky, is apparently the only person in the entire world who bears the title “minister for diaspora affairs”.

Some day, Palestine will most likely have a minister for diaspora affairs instead of a minister for prisoners’ affairs. There is a certain intimacy at such meetings: the Israelis and Palestinians are enemies, but not strangers. The Swiss observer at the conference was certainly astonished to see the frequent switches that took place here, in the rooms and in the corridors, between anger and back-slapping and between jabs as sharp as slivers of glass and simultaneous outbursts of laughter.

When the day comes to sit down with the Syrians, faces will be rigid and stern on both sides of the negotiating table. So the Palestinians are, they say, with the Saudis. But here, in the hotel on the Dead Sea shore we are more like a long-married couple in their divorce attorney’s waiting room. They and we can joke together, shout, mock, accuse, interrupt, place a hand on a shoulder or waist, throw invective at each other, and once or twice even shed a tear.

Because we and they have experienced 36 years of intimacy. Yes, a violent, bitter, warped intimacy, but intimacy, because only they and we, not the Jordanians and not the Egyptians and certainly not the Swiss, know exactly what a roadblock looks like and what a car-bomb sounds like and exactly what the extremists on both sides will say about us. Because since the Six Day War, we are as close to the Palestinians as a jailer is to the prisoner handcuffed to him.

This conference was not meant to inaugurate a honeymoon between the two nations. Quite the opposite — it was aimed at, finally, attenuating this warped intimacy. At drafting a fair divorce agreement. A painful, complicated divorce, but also one that unlocks the handcuffs. They will live in their home and we will live in ours. The Land of Israel will no longer be a prison, or a double bed. It will be a two-family house. The handcuffed link between the jailer and his prisoner will become a connection between neighbours who share a stairwell.

Nabil Qasis, a former president of Bir-Zeit University and the Palestinian Authority’s minister of planning, is a polite, introverted, melancholy man. He is also a tough negotiator. He is perhaps the only member of the Palestinian group who has no inclination to jest or trade mild jabs with the Israelis.

During a discussion in the meeting room, Nabil Qasis raises his voice and demands that the word “return” appear in the document. In exchange, he and his associates will consent to the word being accompanied by reservations. Avraham Burg, a religious Labour member of the Knesset and its former speaker, also raises his voice. He, too, is angry: let Nabil Qasis give up part of his national identity just as I, Avraham Burg, hereby relinquish no less than a part of my religious faith, inasmuch as I am prepared to agree, with a broken heart, to Palestinian sovereignty on the Temple Mount.

For my part, I say that as far as I’m concerned, “return” is a code name for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of two Palestinian states on its ruins. If there’s return, there’s no agreement. Furthermore, I will be a party only to a document that contains explicit recognition of the Jewish people’s national right to their own country.

This was one of any number of difficult moments of crisis during the conference. In the end, neither the term “right of return” nor the word “return” appear anywhere in the document. It speaks of a comprehensive solution of the entire Palestinian refugee problem, outside the borders of the State of Israel.

There is no point at all to the hysteria that the document’s opponents are now encouraging. Its authors know very well that Sharon and his cabinet are the legal government of Israel. They also knew that their initiative, which is the fruit of an intense series of meetings between the parties, conducted in strict secrecy during a period of two years, is no more than an exercise. The goal of the exercise is solely to present the Israeli and Palestinian publics with a window through which they can view a different landscape — no more car bombs and suicide bombers and occupation and oppression and expropriation, no more endless war and hatred. Instead, here is a detailed, cautious solution that does not circumvent any one of the fundamental questions.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.