Yossi Ginossar, Envoy to P.A., Dies
TEL AVIV — Yossi Ginossar, a former senior Shin Bet official and a key envoy to the leadership of the Palestinian Authority for three prime ministers, died January 12 of cancer at age 58.
Ginossar served Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak as a liaison to Palestinian leaders, becoming particularly close to Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat.
He was among the first Israelis dispatched by the government to open secret contacts with Arafat’s PLO in the mid-1980s. His Palestinian contacts would later lead to charges by critics that Ginossar, a businessman after leaving the Shin Bet, had benefited financially from his relationship with the PA.
Ginossar categorically denied the charges in a wide-ranging interview in the daily Yediot Aharonot last weekend.
Born in 1946 in Vilnius, Lithuania, Ginossar moved to Israel at the age of 11. He was transferred to the Shin Bet from an army desk job and rose through the service to become chief of its investigations bureau and its northern district, which included southern Lebanon.
He was forced to resign in 1985, along with agency director Avraham Shalom, after they and others were found by an inquiry commission to have orchestrated a cover-up of the killing of two captured terrorists.
After leaving the service, he went into business and served as a back-channel government envoy, first for the return of missing soldiers and later for contacts with the Palestinians. His business contacts in the Arab world, which continued during his service as a negotiator, led to charges of conflicts of interest against him and his business partner and fellow negotiator, the Middle East analyst Stephen P. Cohen. An inquiry by Israel’s attorney general found the charges groundless.
“Yossi Ginossar was a devoted contributor to Israeli national security over his whole life, both as a member of the security establishment and as an envoy to the Palestinian leadership,” Cohen said.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
