The Geneva Accord, a time for dialogue...

With the Geneva Initiative, officially launched at the Espace de Sécheron in front of more than 700 personalities on 1 December 2003, Geneva has confirmed its role: to be the place where peace negotiations are possible, to offer an alternative for dialogue when diplomacy fails.

Such is the Geneva Accord, the brainchild of Professor Alexis Keller. Encouraged by the private dimension offered by Alexis Keller, the discussions between representatives of Israeli and Palestinian civil society have made it possible to draw up essential proposals on the problems blocking a two-state solution: the status of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees and border demarcation.

For our special report on the Geneva Initiative, we met Alexis Keller and Micheline Calmy-Rey, who determined the support of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs for the efforts of the two main negotiators, former Israeli minister Yossi Beilin and former Palestinian minister Yasser Abd Rabbo. Our two interviewees go back over the background to this Agreement, which, despite the difficulties at the time, made it possible to create a new forum for dialogue.

The RTS archives that we have compiled in our dossier cover this short period, between late 2003 and early 2004, when the rules of diplomacy were overturned by a public desire to break the deadlock in the Middle East and continue along the path opened up by the Oslo and Camp David Accords and the Taba summit. It is a unique initiative, but one that is in line with the humanitarian diplomacy that Switzerland has been pursuing for more than a century and a half.

Bill Clinton had this to say to Alexis Keller, whom he was receiving in private: ‘A negotiator must know that the Israelis desperately need to be loved and that the Palestinians desperately need to feel that you are attentive to their suffering’. That was in 2003.