ABSTRACT
The "official" Israeli-Palestinian negotiations opened November 3, 1991, in Madrid, four days after the grand opening in that city of the broad-based, United States-sponsored Arab-Israeli peace conference. The Israeli-Palestinian talks were held under a slightly clumsy "split-bilateral" formula, according to which they were deemed a subset of a trilateral Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian "track." Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian track, one of the effects that was most evident to many Palestinians at the time was that Israeli and American attention seemed to have shifted once again away from the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and back to the Israeli-Syrian track. The frontier between Israel's self-established "security zone" inside south Lebanon and the area to its north had long been unsettled. In July, the situation there deteriorated further with increased Hezbollah attacks on Israeli troops and Israeli retaliatory attacks against Hezbollah positions, until Hezbollah militiamen started firing rockets over the "security zone," into Israel itself.
