News Brief

(IsraelNN.com) The Annapolis conference on the Middle East comes 16 years after Israel agreed to meet with Yasser Arafat at Madrid, where both Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) agreed to the principle of "land for peace." Talks continued the following year in Moscow and concentrated on issues of weapons control, water, economic cooperation and the Arab demand for allowing millions of foreign Arabs to immigrate to Israel.

In 1993, Rabin and Arafat shoot hands at the White House and signed the first Oslo Accords, and a year later the Palestinian Authority (PA) was formed in a ceremony in Egypt.

Reuters News Agency noted that the process stalled in 1996, when former Prime Minister Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu advocated "security for peace" instead of "land for peace." However, the news agency did not mention that Netanyahu reacted to terrorist attacks carried out against Israel with the same weapons that Rabin had given the PA for its security forces.