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Page 48Would you please explain to me how we
pose an existential threat to you, and
not the other way around?”
Savir said he “reflected briefly and
told him: ‘You are a threat, because you
want to live in my home. In my house’.”
Characteristically, Savir’s 1998 ac-
count of the negotiations, The Process:
1,100 Days that Changed the Middle East,
strove to be detailed, thoughtful, empa-
thetic and fair. “As in so many conflicts,
each side considered itself the victim,”
he wrote. Savir depicted Arafat as a vol-
canic but shrewd figure.
In what seemed like a pivotal event,
Arafat and the Israeli prime minister,
Yitzhak Rabin, shook hands in front of
President Clinton on the White House
lawn in September 1993, to mark the
signing of a “declaration of principles”
for peace. Savir also stood on the lawn,
anticipating a permanent end to the
conflict within the five-year transition-
al period.
Negotiations continued and an ac-
cord known as Oslo II was signed in Ta-
ba, Egypt, in 1995. The outcome was un-
popular with Israeli rightwingers, who
saw the PLO as a terrorist group, while
hardline Palestinians viewed it as a form
of surrender. Savir was assigned a body-
guard after a threat from Jewish settlers.
Hamas had begun a suicide bombing
campaign in 1994 and Rabin was assas-
sinated at a peace rally in 1995 by anShimon Peres beckoned Uri Savir into
his official residence in Jerusalem one
Saturday afternoon in May 1993.
Savir was only 40 but a rising diplo-
matic star and one of the Israeli foreign
minister’s most trusted advisers. Peres
(obituary, September 28, 2016) had re-
cently named him director-general of
the ministry, in preference to more ex-
perienced candidates.
“A glass of wine?” Peres offered as
Savir sat on a plush sofa. Continuing his
relaxed tone, Peres inquired: “How
about a weekend in Oslo?” He sounded,
Savir recalled, as if “he were offering
cheese and crackers”.
Savir’s pulse quickened. “Excuse
me?” he mumbled, taken aback, as he
digested the meaning of the offer: Peres
wanted him to represent Israel in peace
talks with the Palestine Liberation
Organisation (PLO). Savir became
Israel’s chief negotiator for what would
be known as the Oslo peace accords,
which laid out a process towards an
eventual two-state solution, with the
PLO agreeing to formally recognise
Israel’s right to exist in return for the
right to limited self-governance in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip.
On the flight to Europe, Savir said:
“My mind was racing with thoughts
about bloodshed, the occupation, the
thirst for peace, the upcoming meet-
ing.” During a stopover at Copenhagen
airport he momentarily feared the
Israeli delegation were assassination
targets when they realised a group of
Iranians were also on their plane to
Oslo. “The threat of fundamentalist
terrorism sponsored by Iran was justifi-
ably on our minds and would become
the main counterweight to the entire
peace process,” he said. It turned out
“they were simply peaceful travellers
on their way to Norway”.
In Oslo the negotiating team left the
airport through a rear exit and were
escorted by secret service agents to a
safe house in the mountains. After awk-
ward small talk, the sides sat opposite
each other on a narrow wooden table.
Ahmed Qurei, also known as Abu Ala, a
future prime minister of the Palestinian
National Authority, was wryly intro-
duced to Savir as “your Enemy No 1”.
They went on to become friends.
Savir began with prepared notes he
had written that struck a conciliatory
tone: “Our interest is in peace, in secur-
ity, and, together with you, in leading
the way to regional peace.”
Qurei insisted on the involvement of
the PLO chairman, Yasser Arafat:
“There’s no chance of advancing to-
ward peace without the PLO and its
leaders. No one else can speak for the
Palestinian people with authority and
legitimacy.”
Qurei added: “You have the finest air
force in the world, a huge number of
tanks, the most effective intelligence
network in the world, one of the largest
and most renowned armies. You call us
terrorists. We call ourselves freedom
fighters and have only a few Kalashni-
kovs, some grenades, Jeeps and stones.
He described himself
as the last optimist
in the Middle East
Uri Savir, right, with Shimon Peres in 1985 and, top, in 1993 as Peres signed
the Oslo accords in front of Yitzhak Rabin, President Clinton and Yasser Arafatwas a Zionist who helped to found the
Israeli foreign service.
Savir graduated from the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem with a BA in
international relations. He worked as a
press attaché in the Israeli embassy in
Ottawa and rose to become consul-
general in New York. He was one of
several youthful assistants to Peres dur-
ing his first term as prime minister in
1984-86. The group, Savir said, “were
jokingly known as the Blazers, five
young, highly motivated aides with a
penchant for dark blue sport jackets”.
He also negotiated with Jordan and
Syria. After leaving his foreign ministry
post in 1996 he became the first chief
executive of The Peres Centre for Peace
and Innovation. He was later named
honorary president. As a member of
the moderate, short-lived Centre Party
he was elected to the Knesset in 1999.
After that two-year stint he estab-
lished the Rome-based Glocal Forum,
an organisation promoting inter-
national cooperation between cities.
Later, inspired by the Arab Spring,
Savir formed YaLa Young Leaders, an
online youth movement to build con-
nections across the Middle East and
north Africa. “It’s much more impor-
tant for Arabs and Israelis to study
together than for me to sit 500 hours
with Yasser Arafat. This is what I be-
lieve today. I didn’t understand it 20
years ago,” he told a reporter in 2015.
The drama in Norway was turned into
a Broadway play, Oslo, by JT Rogers, for
which the American actor Michael Ar-
onov won a Tony award in 2017 for his
portrayal of Savir, who provided advice.
Still, the athletic, bearded and kinetic
onstage character bore little resem-
blance to the bespectacled original.
Savir is survived by his wife, Aliza, a
psychotherapist who worked as a diplo-
mat at the Israeli foreign ministry and
as an executive at the Peres Centre, and
their daughter, Maya, an author.
Despite his distress at the failure of
the Oslo accords to produce an endur-
ing reconciliation, Savir described him-
self as the Middle East’s “last optimist”.
He published another book, written
while he was recovering from a brain
aneurysm, Peace First: a New Model to
End War (2008). He called it a practical
blueprint for a “new architecture of
peace” in which he wrote of how “the
Middle East faces the same critical bat-
tle as the rest of the world: the battle for
peace in an environment full of obsta-
cles, suspicion and hostility”.Uri Savir, Israeli diplomat, was born on
January 7, 1953. He died of heart
problems on May 14, 2022, aged 69Obituaries
Uri Savir
Visionary Israeli diplomat who advised Shimon Peres and was the chief negotiator of the Oslo peace accords
HERMAN CHANANIA/GPOVa n g e l i s
Mark Ezra writes: In
2010 I produced a
two-hour docu-
mentary on Vangel-
is (obituary, May 21),
which was directed
by Tony Palmer.
Vangelis, whose
work I admired
greatly, was amenable during the filming
but, on viewing the final cut of the film,
demanded that several characters ap-
pearing in it, who had contributed to his
career, be removed. Tony refused and I
supported him wholeheartedly. Shortly
afterwards I received letters from all the
big recording companies refusing per-
mission for the use of any of Vangelis’s
tracks. I pointed out that these rights
had already been granted and that I had
correspondence from them all to prove
it. Not so, I was informed. Vangelis had
re-recorded all the tracks we needed and
re-registered them, and so my grants of
licence were worthless.
I flew to Athens with my wife, Jenny,
to meet him in a big house by the sea. I
was met by his lawyer, also named Van-
gelis, along with two other lawyers. My
wife, a composer, seeing two grand
pianos in the vast room, sat at one and
began to pick out a tune that was form-
ing in her head. Moments later she was
joined at the other piano by the great
composer himself, who meticulously
repeated her theme and then devel-
oped a variation. The two of them sat
there, duetting the piece, for the next
20 minutes. I cannot claim to have
made as much progress on the film as I
would have wished, but Jenny enjoyed
one of the best afternoons of her life.Lives remembered
Professor Sir
Laurence Martin
Mark Chambers
writes: I met Lau-
rence Martin (obit-
uary, May 18) and
his wife, Betty, in the
late 1970s when they
moved to Newcastle
and their son Bill
joined our school.
They welcomed me like family, forgiving
Bill and me for a series of youthful mis-
adventures. Our scrapes were often lit-
eral, and Laurie’s weary resignation as
we sneaked home with yet another dam-
aged family car became all too familiar.
Later, when I was due to be back in New-
castle for two years of law studies, Laurie
suggested that I could rent the top floor
of the vice-chancellor’s lodge from the
university. It was a marvellous place to
live, reinforced by kindnesses from my
landlords below. Many evenings I would
return to find a plate of freshly baked
cookies for me on the stairs.
Laurie thought it would help having
me in the house because his frequent
travelling meant Betty was often on her
own. My moment to shine duly arrived
when the burglar alarm went off late at
night when Laurie was away. Unfortu-
nately, I managed to sleep soundly
through all the noise and commotion,
including the arrival of the police. On his
return, I experienced one again the gen-
tle admonishment of a heavy sigh and
an eye-roll in exasperation from Laurie.To add a personal view to an obituary,
@email it to [email protected]Zi itwhohelpedtofoundtheg
b
d
pIsraeli extremist opposed to the
accords. Savir was standing near Rabin
and saw the shooting. Peres briefly took
over as prime minister until Binyamin
Netanyahu, who was hostile to Oslo,
narrowly defeated him in the 1996 gen-
eral election. The peace process stalled,
to Savir’s dismay.
“Oslo did not fail or succeed. There
was a breakthrough, an opportunity,
but it was wasted, since Israel came to
their implementation with a primeminister and party who objected to the
process,” Savir reflected. “Rabin and
Arafat got along fairly well. I and Abu
Ala got along very well, but what was
there between the peoples? Nothing.
They weren’t partners to the accords.
“There was a technology boom;
northern Tel Aviv flourished and
Israel’s peripheral areas declined. In
Gaza, Palestinian leaders returning
from Tunisia returned to their upscale
apartment towers but refugee camps
remained mired in garbage.”
Uriel Savir was born in Jerusalem in
1953 to Henni and Leo Savir, both re-
fugees from Nazi Germany. His fatherIn 1995 he was standing
near Yitzhak Rabin
when he was shot dead