It hasn't happened to me yet. Certainly not in "Israel today". On Saturday night, in the digital edition, I read the words of Amnon Lord ("The Museum of History of Incitement," 01.12.2019), which I valued as a credible publicist, even if our opinions are widely shared. He criticized, quite legitimately, the column I published this weekend about Netanyahu's remarks following the publication of the indictment, in which I wrote that the prime minister has crossed red lines.

Instead of confronting the argument, the Lord chose a plot that has neither hands nor feet, and none of it, because the one who crossed red lines is not the prime minister but me, accusing me of the incredible charge that I torpedoed the talks between Israel and the Palestinians in Washington in the early 1990s. The Madrid process, in order to force Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the time, to adopt the Oslo process. In his words: "Beilin shares with the Palestinians guidance on how to fail the Washington negotiation channel, to force Rabin to be committed to the Oslo process."

Of course, there is no connection between a prime minister, who is accused of bribery, and who rages against the gatekeepers as the last offenders, and an alleged political move to favor one channel of conversation over another, but I had to read these lines, completely disproved, twice to believe he wrote them A political commentator like him.

Here are the facts: I initiated the Oslo process in April 1992 to whitewash the disputes that arose in Washington talks between the Israeli delegation and the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. I believed that they could be overcome by direct talks with the PLO representatives, which would take place if Rabin's "Labor" won the June elections that year, and after the Knesset repealed the law that prohibited contacts between Israelis and the PLO.

A day after the repeal of the law on a third reading, talks in Norway between two representatives (Dr. Yair Hirschfeld and the late Dr. Ron Pondak), who did not officially represent Israel, began to check the feasibility of holding a secret channel to solve the problems, to bring the solutions to the delegations Officials in Washington for the signing of an interim agreement, without the world knowing, then or later, the existence of such a channel (and there have been such channels in the past, the existence of which is unknown to this day).

I only updated Shimon Peres, who was my deputy in the Foreign Ministry, after two rounds in Oslo, and only after we had a preliminary agreement with the Palestinian side. He sought permission from Rabin to continue on the informal channel. The prime minister agreed, not only because he feared he would not fulfill his election promise to reach an agreement with the Palestinians in three to six months, but because he wanted to use the channel with the PLO to ensure continued talks with the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation in Washington, which were terminated as a result of deportation. Hamas activists on the Lebanese border in December 1992. The Oslo channel resumed talks in Washington again and again, and the one who decided to turn this back channel into the main channel was Rabin, after deciding on mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO.

The conspiracy attributed to me, to torpedo political talks in one channel to promote another, is inconceivable, and I expect anyone who raised it to ask for forgiveness.