This could be called a „trade agreement.“ There are no plans to be legally binding. These are communications that are part of the negotiations. The „legally binding“ treaty is expected to arrive later. As an illustration, after the signing of the DOP, I worked in detail with Major General Uzi Dayan (then IDF Chief Of Planning and an important IDF representative in negotiations with the PLO) on the DOP implementation agreements, in particular the Gaza-Jericho and Oslo II agreements. General Uzi Dayan is also a nephew of Moshe Dayan. Workers and employers must respect a contract until the end of a contract (. For example, by the employer or worker dismissed or dismissed by an employee) or until the conditions are changed (usually by mutual agreement between the employee and the employer). Fifteen years later, when Israeli Prime Minister Jitzchak Rabin sent me to Oslo to correct the draft declaration of principle (DOP) that had been secretly developed there by PLO representatives and two Israeli academics, I was faced with the same dilemma. The DOP project was full of problems, including the fact that the document did not reflect the agreements that the two academics had notified me with the Palestinians. I liked what the PLO representatives would have agreed, but I found the agreed DOP project totally deficient.
I did not know why there was such a gap between the text and what the academics told me that the PLO agreed. Was the gap due to misunderstandings between the two sides in Oslo, so that what the Israelis thought they had agreed was not really agreed by the Palestinians? Or did the Palestinians play „Bait and Switch“ on the Israelis by promising the sky in oral interviews and then by maneuvering their Israeli colleagues to accept a completely different text? But my favorite goldwynism is his proverb that „an oral contract is not worth the paper on which it is written.“ The importance of this observation is not limited to commercial contracts between a Hollywood producer and Silver Screen stars. In my experience, this maxim also applies to international agreements. In order to reach agreement on what has been agreed and to conclude a contract, the parties must agree: to achieve this goal, I have developed a two-step plan. First, I drew up a list of questions I wanted to ask with the Palestinian representatives in Oslo, which covered the gap between the DOP project and the alleged oral commitments of the PLO delegation. If the Palestinian responses to my questions did not significantly confirm what the two Israeli academics told me, that they heard about the PLO, it would be the end of the discussions on the „Back Channel“ in Oslo. If, conversely, the PLO`s responses were substantially in line with what I was told, I would fix the DOP by putting their answers in the text of the agreement.
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