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The middle east peace process is a more remarkable thing than we frequently take it to be. Historians often marvel at the complex negotiations resulting in the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War. The Middle East peace process has not only lasted longer, cost more, and involved more meetings among more diplomats than the Westphalian negotiations—the Middle East peace process has lasted longer than the Thirty Years’ War.
Harry Truman was the first American president to try to make peace between Israel and the Arab world, and the formula he proposed—Israeli concessions on land, the return of some Palestinian refugees, and development funding for everyone—prefigured seventy years of similar proposals from his successors.
Peace negotiations gained momentum with the end of the Cold War, when American policymakers vigorously pursued the dream of a comprehensive Middle East settlement that had eluded them for decades. This renewed effort marked the entrance of the Palestinians into the negotiations at the time of the 1991 Madrid Conference in the George H. W. Bush administration. Under George W. Bush, the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza was recognized as a key goal of the negotiations. Yet despite the attention of several presidents and the indefatigable efforts of hordes of diplomats and policy thinkers, the most significant progress toward peace in the region was not the fruit of American labors.
During President Bill Clinton’s administration, a limited Israeli-Palestinian agreement made the goal of peace seem closer than ever. Secret negotiations between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel, conducted without American involvement just like Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, culminated in the signing of the first of the Oslo Accords at the White House in 1993. Israel recognized the PLO “as the representative of the Palestinian people” and Yasser Arafat, on behalf of the PLO, recognized “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security” and renounced “the use of terrorism and other acts of violence.”[1] A year later Jordan would sign a peace treaty of its own with Israel, following Egypt’s 1978 agreement to become the second of Israel’s neighbors to withdraw from the conflict. Following another Israeli-Palestinian agreement in Cairo, the Palestinian Authority (PA) was formally established in July of 1994. The process continued with the signing of Oslo II in 1995, which established areas of limited PA rule.
As was the case for Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton got a significant peace agreement, but the deeper and broader peace he desired eluded him. Progress slowed after Oslo II and the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a radical Israeli opponent of the peace process, but under heavy pressure from the Clinton administration the Israelis and Palestinians signed the 1998 Wye River Memorandum. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government fell from power shortly after the agreement, but after a delay for elections, the new Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, returned to the process, stepping up the pace of diplomacy as the clock began to run out for the Clinton administration. After consultations with Barak, Clinton proposed the “Clinton Parameters” to Arafat, but at this point both Clinton and Barak were about to exit from power. In the United States, Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, was at this early stage less interested in the peace process than he would become later, and Barak’s successor, opposition leader Ariel Sharon, was elected in part because many Israeli voters were uncomfortable with Barak’s perceived willingness to concede “too much” to the Palestinians. This feeling was particularly strong because the Second Intifada (a wave of violence engulfing both Israel and the Palestinian territories that would last through 2005 and lead to approximately three thousand deaths) was raging at the time. The Taba Summit, which was meant to conclude negotiations over the Clinton Parameters, began the day after George W. Bush’s inauguration and concluded six days later after the Barak government ended talks to prepare for the general election scheduled in February. Sharon’s government did not resume talks after his victory.
After initially hesitating to enter into the process, George W. Bush tried to democratize and reform Palestine to make peace more attainable. He introduced his initiative to resolve the conflict, the Roadmap for Peace, in 2002 by calling for a two-state solution. The Roadmap wasn’t published until April 2003, a month after Mahmoud Abbas was appointed prime minister. Despite President Bush’s personal intervention and the announcement of cease-fires from multiple Palestinian factions, violence flared, reform efforts failed, and the expansion of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories continued. By the end of 2003, it was clear that the terms of Phase I of the Roadmap had not been met. Three months after Arafat’s death in 2004, Abbas and Sharon managed to negotiate a formal end to the Second Intifada at the Sharm El Sheikh Summit on February 8, 2005. Both sides expressed their commitment to the Roadmap for Peace. Efforts to restart negotiations led to the Annapolis Conference in November of 2007. Although Israeli representative and then–prime minister Ehud Olmert stated that he and Abbas were close to a deal, no agreement was reached. The Roadmap for Peace was largely shelved following the Bush administration’s close.
Early in the Obama administration, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu expressed a conditional openness to the creation of a Palestinian state, but negotiators made little progress before the expiration of Netanyahu’s ten-month freeze on settlement construction and expansion in the Occupied Territories. Peace talks resumed in 2013 with Secretary of State John Kerry meeting with Abbas and Netanyahu individually dozens of times over the course of months. Direct negotiations fell apart shortly after the deadline to establish an outline for an agreement expired in April of 2014. The gaps between the sides narrowed in subsequent discussions, but no real agreement was reached. Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election put Obama-era negotiating approaches on ice.[2]
Like some of his predecessors, Donald Trump benefited from decisions made by other leaders to get a new round of peace agreements. He sought to advance Israeli-Arab peace agreements whether or not the Palestinians were engaged and to deepen U.S.-Israeli cooperation with little regard for Palestinian sentiment. In a highly symbolic move, Trump shifted the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018, and recognized the Golan Heights as part of Israel in 2019. In 2020’s Abraham Accords, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain became the first Arab countries since Jordan to normalize relations with Israel. Sudan and Morocco would follow suit, marking the biggest shift in the political dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conflict in decades. Peace between Israelis and Palestinians, however, seemed farther away than ever.
In all the years of American independence, no foreign territorial dispute anywhere in the world has occupied this much American official attention for this amount of time nor been covered so avidly in the American press. Yet this heroic American perseverance has not been crowned with the desired success. President after president developed a strategy to capture the Holy Grail of American diplomacy, but the goal of Israeli-Palestinian peace eluded them all.
That peace agreement may have looked to successive presidents like the Holy Grail, the ultimate trophy whose acquisition would secure their place in history, but it was also something Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin—an object whose intrinsic importance was dwarfed by events that it set in motion. There are many other international problems of equal or greater consequence for American interests than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but none of them received this kind of attention. The Indian-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir, a dispute that regularly brings two nuclear powers into conflict and which has acquired increasing significance as Pakistan aligns more with China and India draws nearer to the United States, is part of an ongoing dispute that has produced more refugees than the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and cost up to one hundred times as many lives. Yet this conflict has never engaged as much American attention as the smaller and arguably less consequential struggle in the Middle East. During the peak years of the peace process, which roughly coincided with the administration of President Bill Clinton, the United States appears to have devoted more attention to Israeli-Palestinian affairs than to the failure of Russian democracy, the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan, the nuclear programs of Iraq, Syria, Iran, and North Korea, or the rise of China.
Between 1990 and 2001, American presidents and secretaries of state visited Israel and the Palestinian territories a combined total of seventy-five times. There were many more undisclosed meetings between high-ranking American officials and their Israeli and Palestinian counterparts, as well as an incalculable number of meetings between lower-level diplomatic officers from all parties involved in negotiations. No foreign country has ever received this level of sustained American attention and in fact no great power in world history has ever dedicated this much attention to a territorial dispute between two very small peoples thousands of miles from its frontiers.
The Americans were not the only outsiders transfixed by the conflict. At the United Nations, not only the secretary-general but the General Assembly, the Security Council, UNESCO, and the United Nations Human Rights Council sought to influence the course of negotiations. The Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation regularly weighed in, as did the European Union. The Quartet composed of the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and Russia occasionally made an appearance.
Beyond these official bodies, a host of civil society and advocacy organizations around the world sought to influence the peace process. From the Council on Foreign Relations to the World Economic Forum at Davos, the world’s most prestigious talking shops held program after program on virtually every aspect of the peace process. Academic and public-facing journals ran an endless procession of articles from current and former diplomats, politicians, journalists, and scholars about what was or wasn’t happening, who was or wasn’t responsible, and how the negotiations should or shouldn’t end. University professors on campuses around the world taught courses on the peace process. Students demonstrated and held sit-ins; activists organized social movements; terrorists detonated bombs; pundits pontificated; editors opined; cable news guests debated; and political candidates grandstanded for votes.
Discussion of the peace process was often both polarized and moralistic. For some, the question of American policy toward this struggle was simple. Whose case, Israeli or Palestinian, is most deserving? Once that is ascertained, many assume, America’s course must be clear: to support the case of the party judged to be in the right so that justice can be done. America’s peace process diplomacy is then judged by whether it serves the cause a particular observer has determined to be the just one.
Others seek to assign blame for the failure of the peace process to the intransigence of one side or the other. Were the Israelis or the Palestinians truly sincere about peace? Should Israel have made more concessions? Should Arafat have signed on the dotted line?
As the process ground along but hopes of peace diminished, many began to ask where the effort went wrong. Was it the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin? Did Clinton move too slowly at some points, too quickly at others? Should George W. Bush have reached out to Yasser Arafat on taking office? Was Bush wrong to promote the elections that gave Gaza to Hamas? Did Obama take too hard a line on settlements in the first months of his administration? Should he have taken a harder line in the closing years of his second term?
Others debate the style of American engagement. Should the United States act as a neutral broker, or should it favor one side—and if so, on what grounds should that choice be made?
And as always when questions involving Jewish interests and the Jewish state come up, the Vulcanists shamble onstage, blinking owlishly, muttering about “the Benjamins” and looking for signs that “the Jews” have once again worked their dark magic on American foreign policy to further some sinister plot.
The place to start in seeking to understand the Great MacGuffin is to ask why so many American presidents in the post–Cold War era found pursuing Middle East peace such a compelling pursuit, and why so many foreign powers participated in the quest. That will make it easier to see why the process has, so far, failed to bring peace, and to grasp the importance of this failure for subsequent events in the Middle East and beyond.
Peace at Home, Peace Abroad
Some rushed to embrace it, some struggled to resist, but ultimately all the post–Cold War American presidents from George H. W. Bush to Joe Biden found themselves engaged in the quest for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. What drew them in was hardly the power of the Jewish lobby; both Israelis and American Jews were at times deeply skeptical about the value of extended negotiations that would legitimize and finance their Palestinian opponents while giving them a place at the featured table of world politics. More than one president launched into the process more in the hope of constraining Israel than of empowering it.
What drew them in was what made Middle East diplomacy so important to Harry Truman. Involvement in the Middle East, however frustrating at times, was unavoidable considering both the domestic and international demands on American presidents. Given that, working to find some kind of compromise that could satisfy both Arabs and Israelis was not just the path of least resistance; it was a way for presidents, as Truman had done, to mobilize support for unrelated policy goals at home and abroad.
And there was, of course, always the prospect of a success that would offer global acclaim, prestigious awards, and a secure niche for one’s statue in the Temple of Fame.
The end of the Cold War found presidents looking for ways to get Americans to engage with foreign policy and support the military and civil costs of a global strategy. This was not easy to do. The project of building the liberal global order that captured elite imaginations in the post–Cold War period enjoyed only limited support in the public at large, and most Clinton-era order-building initiatives ranging from military actions in the Balkans to admitting China into the WTO faced significant opposition. The problem was particularly acute in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein’s 1990 attack on Kuwait highlighted the danger to key countries there, but the Gulf states—widely perceived among the public at large as price-gouging monopolists, religious extremists, and antisemitic America-haters—were not the kind of allies most Americans really wanted to help.
Engaging in the quest for Middle East peace helped build a constituency for a global foreign policy. American public opinion liked peace and it liked Israel. Negotiating with Israel’s neighbors to help make Israel safe, while reducing the chances of war in a region still vitally important to the nation’s oil supply, struck many American voters as an excellent use of a president’s time and reassured them that his foreign policy comported with their personal values and goals. An initiative to make Israel secure was much more popular than an agenda of selling arms to Arab despots in the Middle East while embarking globally on a series of nation- and culture-building missions that many Americans didn’t think would work and that others didn’t think were important.
The peace process also served as a way for presidents to adjust their policies to the political needs of the moment. Presidential trips to the Middle East almost always led to favorable press coverage, underlining the difference between a president and the lesser mortals who competed against him politically. Presidents could also use the process to engage supporters. A small shift toward reducing pressure on Israel would bring applause from some quarters; an equally small shift to ratchet the pressure up would win applause from others.
Beyond the short-term problems of alliance management lay much more difficult, long-term questions about the future of the region. What if anything could the United States do to ensure that when, as most American policymakers believed was inevitable, the authoritarian regimes of the region finally crumbled their successors would be favorably disposed toward the United States? Here the lesson of Iran was unforgettable. The United States had enjoyed a long and mutually beneficial relationship with the Shah of Iran, only to see this regional powerhouse turn bitterly anti-American when the Shah finally fell. One needed to manage the alliances of today without foreclosing the possibility of good relations with successor regimes in the future.
Promoting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process seemed to work in both time scales. In the short term, the peace process was as superb a tool for alliance management abroad as it was useful for political management at home. When American policy seemed to favor Israel, or when Israelis behaved in ways Arab public opinion found unbearably provocative, the peace process offered a diplomatic safety valve. Arab rulers were often torn between a clear-eyed view that cooperation with the United States was essential for regime, and even national, security and an equally strong understanding that public opinion in the Arab world could only be pushed so far and that both the United States and Israel were and remained deeply unpopular with the Arab public at large.
The peace process provided a handy framework for both Arab leaders and American presidents to manage this tension. Arab rulers could respond to public indignation by pressing the Americans to take a stronger stand in the ongoing peace negotiations. If nothing else, this took some of the political heat off American regional allies—good in and of itself from Washington’s point of view. And if more action seemed necessary, the United States could and sometimes did consciously shape its approach to the peace process in ways that demonstrated a responsiveness to Arab concerns. George H. W. Bush initiated the post–Cold War peace process to fulfill promises he made to Mikhail Gorbachev as he assembled the coalition against Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War.[3] His son would return, somewhat reluctantly, to the peace process as a way to help manage the political fallout from the Iraq War. President Obama would engage with the peace process as a way of demonstrating his, and America’s, interest in promoting reconciliation between the United States and the Islamic and Arab worlds.
Meanwhile, the existence of the peace process and America’s dominant role within it served both to highlight and to strengthen America’s uniquely powerful role in the Middle East. It was clear that the United States and only the United States had at least some ability to persuade Israel to modify its policies toward the Palestinians or to offer more generous peace plans. That meant that other countries seeking to influence Israel needed to come to the United States. The drama around the peace process, the succession of high-profile negotiations and summits that marked its course, and the rapt attention with which European and Arab media followed every twist and turn in the saga continuously drove home the reality that the United States was in a league of its own and that virtually every country in the world sought to be its ally.
For American policymakers, the peace process was not just a tool for handling the inevitable tensions as the United States worked to keep its restive regional partners onside. It also offered a path to the kind of democratic and social progress that Americans believed was the best way to make the Middle East both stable and pro-American in the longer term.
The heady atmosphere of the early 1990s as tyrannies fell and democracy surged around the world deepened the sense among American policymakers that the only way to safeguard American interests in the Middle East was to promote pacification, modernization, and democratization across the Middle East. This was not a new idea; the American diplomats, aid officials, NGO workers, consultants, and financiers who promoted a transformational agenda in the post–Cold War Middle East were following one of the most consistent impulses in the history of American foreign policy.
American policymakers and civil society leaders in the early 1990s were as certain as their predecessors had been for two centuries that liberal principles and liberal order would be good for the Middle East. With all of the confidence of their missionary forebears, Americans turned to the region intending to foster a liberal order on the models of the United States and Europe. Economic freedom, globalization, and reforms to dismantle the costly systems of state subsidies and corruption would bring prosperity. Freedom of speech and political rights would detoxify public life and produce regimes that governed in the interest of the people. Full and equal rights for women and minorities, whether sexual, ethnic, or religious, would solidify democracy and create a culture of tolerant diversity. These internal reforms within states would change the relations between states. A long-lasting peace would gradually descend on the region as borders opened and trade grew. Those who resisted the change would soon be economically and therefore militarily outstripped by those who embraced it. As this became obvious, leaders of all nations would hurry to get on the bandwagon leading the Middle East into the post-historical future.
All this might take some time, and there would be those who did not see reason on this issue right away. This is where American power and American influence would come in. We would keep the peace until the peace could keep itself. Bad actors like Saddam Hussein and the ayatollahs of Iran would be prevented from disturbing their neighbors while the process of development produced the green shoots of liberal order.
There was another issue. The fight against nuclear weapons proliferation had been an important American priority since the 1940s. Thanks in part to the willingness of Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan and his colleagues to sell their knowledge to aspiring nuclear powers and in part to North Korea’s proliferation activities, the growing danger of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East kept American strategists awake at night.[4]
If the Middle East was going to become part of the liberal world order Americans hoped to build, the Israelis and the Palestinians would have to make peace. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute had for too long kept the region in turmoil. It was the excuse that dictators used to justify their arms buildups and their imposition of military rule. Popular fury over Israeli occupation of Palestinian land was a weapon used to keep moderate democrats from power, and to bolster religious extremists. Producing peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis was a key step on the road to a stable and modernizing Middle East—and a long step toward heading off a regional arms race.
Ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had other advantages for America’s post–Cold War strategy. Demonstrating the ability of new world order diplomacy backed by American military might to blunt identity conflicts would reduce the chances for war worldwide. What would demonstrate this more clearly than overcoming the Arab-Israeli divide? If a dispute this intractable, this explosive, could be solved, then there was hope for every frozen or intermittent conflict, including Taiwan vs. China and India vs. Pakistan. Peace in the Middle East would help cement the peace of the world.
The Problem of Peace
In the heady “post-historical” years after the Cold War, Americans debated how we could create Middle East peace. In the grimmer 2020s the more common question is why did the peace process fail? There are battalions of writers who make very eloquent and convincing cases that the peace-loving Palestinians were cynically thwarted by brutal Israelis and weak-kneed Americans at every turn. Many others assemble massive piles of documentation and long chains of logic to demonstrate that Israel has repeatedly made extremely generous offers, only to be spurned by Palestinians too radical or too cowardly to accept. There are more debates on the American side about who made the great mistake so that the Holy Grail was so frequently glimpsed but never quite caught. The partisans and allies of various presidents write defending the strategies used; advisors and critics argue that more firmness with Israel here or a tougher stand against Palestinians there would have done the trick. Should President X have launched his peace process effort in his first months in office? Had President Z listened to the advice of Aide Q instead of Aide P would everything have worked out? Aide Q has written a book saying that this is certainly true; Aide P has written a book saying that thanks to that infernal busybody Aide Q, President Z was never able to implement Aide P’s brilliant policy advice.
This is an interesting debate in its way, but the premise is unconvincing. British and American leaders have been trying to get the Jews and Arabs of the Holy Land to agree on a solution for a century now, and the list of rejected solutions is a long one. One-state solutions, two-state solutions, international trusteeships, a regional federation under Jordanian leadership: many ingenious ideas, and even more ingenious variations, have been proposed one after another—and nothing has worked. If one peace negotiation fails, perhaps we blame the negotiator. If two or three fail, we might stick with that theory, though perhaps with less confidence. But if dozens of negotiations stretching back over a century have all failed to get an agreement, perhaps there is something structural at work.
Two factors seem to be involved. The first is that the type of peace the Americans tried to create was particularly difficult to foster. If the aim of the Middle East peace negotiations were simply to stop the killing, the road to an agreement would be fairly straightforward. That kind of peace is already here. Most of the time, Israelis and Palestinians are not actually shooting at one another, and even Hamas has talked about negotiating a “hudna,” a long-term cease-fire that would suspend the conflict for some specified time without settling the underlying issues. This is what “peace” has meant in much of history for much of the time. But it is not what the western world has meant by peace since the end of World War II. This is not the end of history. This is not liberal order.
With the end of the Cold War fueling their optimism, Americans weren’t just trying to arrange cease-fires. In the order Americans and others wanted to build after 1990, peace was something deeper, richer, and more binding than it had been in Westphalian Europe. Peace after the Cold War was meant to be thick: a deep interstate relationship that involved economic integration and a liberal security order.
The second other principal reason the peace process failed is that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is genuinely hard to resolve. It is the most charismatic conflict in the world, one that engages the attention and excites the emotions of people all over the planet. It is not just another conflict between squabbling tribes over a few stony acres. It’s a conflict that engages some of the most volatile and emotional issues of our times and each dimension of the conflict increases the difficulty of resolving it.
At the most obvious level, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is simply one more dreary, intractable ethno-nationalist conflict like the ones that wrecked the old Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, and that have frustrated and perplexed diplomats for the last two hundred years.
There have been dozens of these conflicts since the Spanish rose against occupying French troops during the Napoleonic Wars, and they don’t often end well. They are, for one thing, zero sum. Kosovo cannot be both part of Serbia and an independent republic. Nagorno-Karabakh must either be part of Armenia or part of Azerbaijan. Crimea is either part of Ukraine or part of Russia.
Worse, these conflicts almost always engage whole peoples. Each side passionately and sometimes fanatically believes in the justice of its own cause. Territorial compromise feels immoral to many people on both sides of the conflict, and the two sides do not agree on a common set of principles and facts that could allow the dispute to be settled on the basis of a common standard of justice or law.
Because compromise is so difficult, horrors like ethnic cleansing and genocide have played a greater role than one would like in the resolution of these disputes. There is no longer a German minority problem in the Czech Sudetenland because the Czechs drove the Germans out after World War II. The problem of the Greek and Turkish minorities in Turkey and Greece has been largely “solved” in much the same way. The Israelis and Palestinians who fantasize about driving their opponents out of the territory they want are following a well-worn road.
The other common approach to these disputes involves the imposition of an unshakable order by a determined power that neither ethnic group feels able to contest. While the Soviet Union stood, the Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Ossetians, Abkhazians, and others lived peacefully side by side in the Soviet Caucasus. While Josip Broz Tito ruled Yugoslavia, the rival national groups in that country accepted the status quo and got on with their lives.
To the degree that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a classic ethnonational conflict, it is difficult to solve. But this conflict is even less tractable. From a Palestinian point of view, this is not just a typical ethnic quarrel. The Jews are not just aggressive neighbors; they are, many Palestinians feel, illegitimate immigrants. While Jews have continuously lived in Palestine since biblical times, the migration that led to Israeli independence was a product of modern times—and it was imposed on the native population by an imperial power.
The combination of imperial rule and large-scale nineteenth- and twentieth-century labor migration changed the demographic makeup of a number of countries around the world. The British encouraged wholesale migration of Chinese into what is now Malaysia and Singapore. British India sent workers and merchants to destinations ranging from British-ruled East Africa to British colonies in the Caribbean and South Pacific. In many cases the tensions between the native populations of those countries and the migrants of the imperial period remain flashpoints to this day.
These immigrants are rejected not just because they are foreign. They are rejected because their presence is both a consequence and a reminder of the humiliation of imperial rule. The demand to expel the “illegitimate” foreigners often plays a major role in the struggle against imperial rule. Tensions between native and immigrant groups frequently persist for generations and in many countries post-independence regimes have either discriminated against the descendants of migrants or expelled them. The expulsions of long-settled Greeks from Nasserite Egypt, of Indians from newly independent East African nations, the genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing directed against the Rohingya of Burma (many of whose ancestors migrated from British India in the days of the Raj): these all came about in reaction to episodes of imperially licensed or encouraged migration. For Palestinians who do not accept the legitimacy of Britain’s seizure of Palestine in World War I, the Balfour Declaration and the subsequent immigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews represents a historical crime.
This sentiment has legs. Some of the strongest support for the Palestinian cause is found in countries like South Africa, Malaysia, and Algeria where struggles against the consequences of imperial migration have been central to political life.
This brings us to a third level of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute: the degree to which it reflects the politics of decolonization and national liberation. The Palestinians were fighting, as they saw it, for exactly the same thing Indian, Egyptian, Algerian, Nigerian, and Indonesian liberation movements were fighting for. They wanted to rule themselves in their own land in their own way. They still do.
The perception of the Palestinian struggle as a conventional national liberation movement grounded in anti-imperialism and a rejection of western hegemony is widespread today, not only among Palestinians. That is how the Palestinian cause is still seen in much of the world: as one of a handful of national liberation movements not yet crowned with success. That ensures the Palestinians of deep sympathy and solidarity far beyond the confines of the Arab world.
Additionally, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is widely seen as part of an ongoing struggle between Christianity and Islam. While the image of the Crusades is often invoked in this context, wars of religion have played a greater role in the more recent history of the lands that once belonged to the Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires. Imperial Russia was as hostile an environment for Muslims as it was for Jews; roughly two million Muslims fled tsarist repression in Russia and the Caucasus for the Ottoman Empire in the decades before World War I—about the same as the number of Jews who fled Russia in those years. From the Greek Revolt of 1821 to the allied occupation of Constantinople in 1918, Ottoman defeats were interpreted by both Ottoman and western sources as defeats for “Islam” at the hands of an ascendant “Christendom.” Catholic missionaries followed French arms into Algeria and Lebanon; Muslims and Jews fled or were expelled from their homes as the Orthodox Christian peoples of the Balkans threw off the Ottoman yoke.
From the Caucasus through the Balkans and across the Middle East, conflict between Christianity and Islam is not some relic of the Middle Ages. The last two centuries, from an Islamic point of view, saw a series of Christian conquests and serial invasions of the Ottoman and Persian empires. That the British sponsored the Zionists in their early days and that the Americans embraced them as they became powerful underlines the association of the Zionists with the Christian West. The injustice that Palestinians experience, deprived of their land and of the dignity of national independence, exemplifies and symbolizes the injustices that many Muslims in the Arab Middle East and beyond see encoded into the existing world order.
Caught up in this charismatic conflict, the Palestinians have become a kind of representative nationality, one whose experience resonates around the world. At one level, their situation evokes the plight of indigenous peoples worldwide who have lost their homes to a tide of foreign, usually western, colonization and conquest. At another, the Palestinians represent all those treated unfairly or left behind in the contemporary world. Their plight is emblematic of those who feel born into the “loser” nations—kept out of the wealthy precincts of the “advanced countries” by walls, fences, and identity papers.
The talismanic role of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle in the global political imagination made the conflict difficult and perhaps impossible to resolve by conventional means, but it also made solving that conflict look irresistibly attractive to a generation of American leaders eager both to establish and to legitimize the post-historical liberal order they hoped would secure the peace after the Cold War. Just as Solomon established his wisdom by adroitly adjudicating tangled disputes, America would establish its world order by resolving this most difficult and intractable of disputes. We would pull the sword out of the stone; we would capture the Holy Grail.
The American-led peace process after the Cold War was the centerpiece of the American effort to replace the historical rivalries and preoccupations of the Middle East with the kind of liberal order Americans had promoted in Western Europe after World War II and hoped to extend globally following the Cold War. Americans wanted a Middle East composed of liberal democracies enjoying a thick peace, and the establishment of a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians would, many Americans felt, both symbolize and ensure the establishment of liberal order in a critical part of the world.
This ambitious design did not fail because a particular Israeli leader or Palestinian leader failed to endorse a particular proposal or take a particular step at a particular time. Fundamentally, the plan failed because the United States did not have the power, the wisdom, or the will to impose it. At the end of the day, neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians shared the American faith in liberal order, and the accumulating failures of American policy in the region eroded any faith the two peoples might have had in American wisdom and reliability. In Arthurian legend, the Holy Grail could only be achieved by a knight who combined a pure heart with perfect faith and superhuman strength. Uncle Sam, sadly, was not quite the man for the job.
The Glittering Grail
In late 2000, President Bill Clinton led the peace process to what remains its high-water point when he put forward what became known as the Clinton Parameters for a final settlement to the conflict. Under those parameters, the Palestinians would receive all of Gaza, 97 percent of the West Bank, with territorial compensation elsewhere for the 3 percent (mostly densely populated Jewish settlements near Jerusalem) of West Bank territory that Israel would keep. East Jerusalem would be the capital of the Palestinian state, the Palestinian diaspora would have a “right of return” to the Palestinian state (though not to Israel), there would be an elevated train or highway connecting Gaza and the West Bank over Israeli territory, and the new state would receive $30 billion in aid. Arafat refused to sign on.[5]
“I am a failure,” Clinton told Arafat. “And you have made me one.”[6]
The peace process has not entirely failed. It provided a framework for limited Palestinian self-governance; it managed and limited the conflict for many years; and it helped to secure American power in a crucial region of the world in the aftermath of the Cold War. It helped the Palestinians move into the diplomatic mainstream, immensely assisted their fundraising, and kept their cause in the public eye. For Israelis, the peace process bought them some time to consolidate the settlement blocs near the Green Line (the line of demarcation between Arab and Israeli control at the end of the 1948–49 war) that they most wanted to integrate into Israel proper, reduced violence on both sides of the Green Line, and defused some international criticism against their treatment of the Palestinians.
But if the American effort to mediate an Israeli-Palestinian peace did not utterly fail, it fell far short of success. The Palestinians did not get the land, and the Israelis did not get their peace, and in many ways the two parties seemed further apart in 2022 than in 1990.
Too often in the course of this long series of negotiations, the Americans seemed more interested in selling peace than either the Israelis or the Palestinians were in buying it. Rather than helping the two sides reach an accommodation that both wanted but that neither could reach without help, American diplomacy often involved attempting to bribe, intimidate, or cajole both sides into accepting positions that neither side on the ground really liked, but that the Americans believed could pave the road to peace.
As American diplomats sought to keep the peace process moving forward, they made some unpleasant discoveries. The first was that steering the peace process was like riding a bicycle; if you weren’t making progress the bicycle would wobble and ultimately crash. But that wasn’t all. The closer negotiators came to the final-stage negotiations, the more difficult progress became—the road turned narrower, rockier, steeper, and more pitted with potholes the nearer one came to the goal.
The second was that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians really believed in the liberal order the Americans were trying to promote. At best, they thought it was a naive American dream with little relevance in the real world; at worst, they saw it as a dangerous delusion. Israelis and Palestinians have complicated political cultures, and there are many different points of view among both groups of people, but for sometimes similar and sometimes different reasons, both cultures have a lot of skepticism about the idea of liberal order. Added to that skepticism were serious and well-grounded concerns about whether the Americans are wise enough and committed enough to the long, arduous, and quite possibly bloody task of creating and defending that order in the years and decades to come. The more both Israelis and Palestinians saw of American policies in the Middle East, the graver those doubts grew.
Israel and Liberal Order
The single most important thing about Israel that most Americans do not understand is that the Jewish state was founded on a reasonable and historically justified skepticism about the ability of liberal order to protect Jews. American liberals in particular long believed that Israel was the firstborn offspring of the United Nations, and that a nation that owed its existence to the international community and liberal values should live by the values which gave it life. That is a beautiful story, but if Stalin had not made a mockery of the arms embargos first imposed by the U.S. and then by the U.N., there would likely be no State of Israel today.
The profoundly ambivalent relationship between liberalism and Zionism goes back to Herzl’s time. In nineteenth-century Europe, liberal, assimilationist Jews argued that the triumph of enlightened values would allow Jews to live in dignity and security. The Zionist movement insisted this faith in the power of liberal order was a fatal mistake. Liberalism cannot save the Jews, Herzl taught, international institutions cannot save the Jews, democracy cannot save the Jews, good intentions cannot save the Jews. Only the sovereign power of a Jewish state offers the Jews hope for survival. For many Israeli Jews today, Herzl’s view makes more sense than ever.
Liberalism remains, many Israelis believe, too weak and too wedded to magical thinking for a nation like Israel to trust. And weak as liberalism is inside countries, the utter uselessness of liberal principles in international life is much worse. How has the “rules-based international order” worked out for victims of the Syrian civil war? How safe are the Rohingya? The Uighurs? The Tibetans?
Many Israelis believe that if the Jewish state had relied on the “international community” for its survival, it would have perished long ago. The United Nations voted for the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state but didn’t lift a finger to enforce it. Only Stalin’s willingness to defy the arms embargo brought victory to the Jews. The United Nations charter declares that member states must respect the territorial integrity of other states. This has never been enforced on Israel’s behalf—not when Britain and the United States schemed to force Israel to give up the Negev in the early 1950s,[7] not when Arab neighbors gave aid to terrorists seeking to attack Jewish targets in Israel and beyond, not when Arab countries and, later, Iran regularly announced their intention to destroy Israel and drive its citizens into the sea.[8] The United States promised Israel in 1957 that it would protect Israel’s ability to use the Straits of Tiran if Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt.[9] To enforce that commitment, U.N. troops were dispatched to the Straits. In 1967, Nasser ordered those troops to leave. They obeyed. When Israelis asked Washington to honor its promises and prevent Nasser from blocking Israeli sea traffic, the United States was too preoccupied with the Vietnam War to respond. The U.N. was equally passive.[10]
For a nation of refugees, many still in shock from the Holocaust and many others from the shock of expulsion or exile from the Arab-majority nations of the Middle East, the lesson could not be clearer. Israel could only count on itself.
The international community’s failures in the 1967 crisis were not Israel’s only experience with the weakness of liberal order. UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) troops have been solemnly tasked by the Security Council to establish a zone on the Lebanese side of the border where the only armed forces would be UNIFIL itself and the regular Lebanese army.[11] UNIFIL continues to patrol, yet somehow this area has become one of the most heavily armed terrorist zones on the planet, bristling with tens of thousands of missiles that somehow slipped past the no doubt eagle-eyed and incorruptible UNIFIL guardians of the peace.[12] The “international community” remains placid and calm unless a prospect of Israeli military action against the peaceful Hezbollah missile sites that dot the graceful hills disturbs the tranquil and liberal order that UNIFIL so respectably provides.
Think, Israelis say, of the Muslims of Bosnia, who trusted in the protection of U.N. peacekeepers in Srebenica. They were massacred by the Serbs and while many world leaders wept beautiful tears on television, the Bosnian victims stayed dead.[13] All this, many Israelis feel, proves that Herzl was right: if the Jewish people entrust their survival to liberal institutions and liberal ideas, they will die.
American Jews and Israeli Jews are often deeply divided over the value of liberal order. American Jews are, by and large, people for whom Herzl was wrong. The liberal principles of American society opened the path for Jewish integration of a depth and scale that Europe had never seen. Since the nineteenth century, many American Jews have felt that the United States, founded on Enlightenment principles and religious freedom, had much more to offer its Jewish citizens than any Jewish state in Palestine ever could. This history has helped make American Jews one of the most deeply and seriously liberal communities in the United States.
While Israelis are not monolithic on this or any other subject, large numbers reject the optimism of their American cousins. Many Israelis who grew up in the former Soviet Union, particularly those who left after 1990, brought the deep-seated Russian cynicism about the West’s liberal values with them. They no more believe in the inevitable triumph of liberal principles than does Vladimir Putin. Russian history teaches lessons similar to Herzl’s: we live in a hard world, and power is the language in which countries speak to each other.
The difference in political orientation between American and Israeli Jews is not just confined to the peace process or to Palestinian issues. During the refusenik era, when Israeli and American Jews were united in their support for Soviet Jews seeking to emigrate to Israel, a yawning gap opened between the two communities. Not all the Jews who wanted to get out of the Soviet Union, it soon became evident, wanted to go to Israel. Many wanted to come to the United States. Many other Soviet Jews didn’t want to go anywhere at all; they just wanted to practice their religion freely in the USSR.
The American Jewish community by and large instinctively supported all of the choices of all of these Jews. American Jews wanted aid to go to refuseniks awaiting exit permits whatever country they wanted to reach. And they responded to pleas by Soviet Jews for religious freedom by working with Americans of all faiths and no faith to pressure the Soviet Union to provide freedom of religion for all of its citizens, not just the Jews.
The Israeli government had a narrower focus. It was only interested in the Jews who wanted to come to Israel. Jews wanting to emigrate to America or other countries were on their own. As for pressuring the Soviet Union to allow religious freedom for people of all faiths, or even only for Jews, this was not a diplomatic burden the Israeli government, which had enough problems with a Soviet government actively supporting Palestinian terrorism, wanted to bear.[14] American Jews in a position of relative security fixed on universal principles; Israeli Jews relentlessly focusing on what Israel in their view needed to survive: the tension between these two approaches to Jewish ethics and priorities continues to this day.
In any case, the plurality of Israeli Jews today who trace their ancestry to the Middle East and the old Ottoman Empire rather than to Western Europe[15] are also deeply skeptical about the prospects for liberal order in the Middle East. Rooted in the Arab world and speaking and reading Arabic, these Israelis often believe that they understand the Arabs better than American intellectuals. A more democratic Middle East, many of them believe, will be more radical and more antisemitic than a Middle East of cautious kings and embattled dictators. Why, they sometimes ask, do so many westerners believe that a surge of populism in the West might lead to fascist identity politics and white nationalism, while Middle East populism would inevitably lead to social democracy and brotherly love?
These different political outlooks lead to very different assessments about what the peace process can accomplish. Americans, including many American Jews, tend to think that an end to the conflict is possible, and argue that Israelis should be more willing to “take risks for peace.” Many Israelis approach the question of Palestinian statehood with a long laundry list of things that could go wrong. Americans counter by pointing out the risks and costs of a continuing conflict.
Herzl’s attitude toward liberalism was complex. He did not believe that European liberalism could save the Jews, but he appreciated the beauty of liberal values and wanted the Jewish state, once its existential concerns had been addressed, to be politically liberal.[16] For much of the history of Jewish Palestine and Israel, the dominant Zionist parties were democratic socialist parties economically well to the left not only of most American liberals but of most European social democrats as well. These parties were economically socialist but politically liberal, combining support for a substantial government role in a tightly regulated economy with a strong emphasis on political and intellectual freedom.
Democratic and liberal values shaped Israel’s political development, and many Israelis continue to believe that preserving and extending this liberal heritage is a noble and necessary project. Equal treatment for Israel’s minority Arab population and as generous an approach to the Palestinians as consistent with Israeli security strike liberal Zionists as consistent with Israel’s founding values and their understanding of Jewish ethics.
These Israelis would like to meet the Americans and for that matter the Palestinians halfway, partly out of conviction, partly because they see the U.S. as Israel’s best friend and want to promote American power and prestige, and partly because they know that a more forthcoming stance on peace issues helps Israeli diplomacy in much of Europe and strengthens relations with the largely liberal American Jewish community. Liberal Zionists of this kind, generally the descendants of Jews with European roots, once dominated Israeli politics and are still powerful in some important Israeli institutions. Since the 1970s, however, their political fortunes have been ebbing, and the weakness of liberal Zionist political parties has been one reason that the American-sponsored peace process has lost momentum over the years.
On the right, many Israelis share the convictions of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist Zionism that inspired Menachem Begin and the Likud movement. The Revisionists believed that territorial expansion to the Jordan River offered Israel better security than any foreign-brokered peace agreement. The “pragmatic” wing of the Likud movement, including Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history, was more willing to meet the Americans partway than other branches of the movement, but to Netanyahu’s right there were many Israelis who made no secret of their desire for territorial expansion and their opposition to Palestinian statehood. Religious Zionists who believe in a divine mandate for Jews to reoccupy all the lands promised to Abraham in the Bible are joined by secular Zionists arguing that the original mission of the Zionist movement was to reclaim the historical homeland of the Jews. This homeland was centered in what is now the West Bank rather than on the coastal plains where most Israelis live today. Hebron and Jericho, these Zionists argue, were more important to the project of a Jewish return than Tel Aviv.
These arguments horrify most American Jews and American liberals, as well as many liberal Zionists. It is not just that continued construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank offends Arab and European opinion and can involve serious injustice to Palestinians with preexisting claims. The greater fear is that Israeli annexation of the West Bank combined with continuing Arab population growth will lead to a situation in which Israel must either cease to be Jewish or stop being democratic. The question here is not whether Israel can entrust its security to the false promises of a weak and flawed liberal international order; it is whether Herzl’s dream of a liberal Zionist state can be realized.
There are counterclaims that pro-annexation Israelis make about the future demography of a united West Bank/Israel, but the real problem for the peace process is the widespread sense that the status quo works reasonably well for Israel, that a Palestinian state—which might end up being controlled by Hamas rather than Fatah—cannot be trusted to keep its agreements, and that the kind of deep regional peace and liberal order Americans want to build is unrealistic. Over time, Israeli enthusiasm for the peace process has waned, reflecting broader social and political trends in Israeli society, growing disarray in the Arab world, and diminishing confidence both in the wisdom of American foreign policy and the depth of Washington’s commitment to the future of the region.
Palestinians and Liberal Order
The Palestinian relationship to the American drive for a compromise peace and a liberal order is as complex as the Israeli one. Like many Israelis, large numbers of Palestinians find both the geography and the liberal ideology of the kind of peace Americans want far less attractive than most Americans do.
Americans and many others who don’t follow the peace process closely sometimes think that the chief beneficiaries of any peace agreement will be the Palestinians and assume that the Palestinian objective in peace talks is to get an agreement as quickly as possible. They would have a state of their own; the Israeli occupation would come to an end, and the Palestinian people would be able to put the unhappy past behind them and get on with the business of building a prosperous future.
While it is certainly true that the Palestinians can expect some substantial benefits from an agreement on the two-state solution, making peace with Israel is anything but a cost-free exercise for the Palestinian leadership. Given the disparity in power between the two sides, even with the help of outside mediators the Palestinians cannot negotiate on an equal basis with the Israelis, and so long as that power disparity continues the terms of any realistic agreement must inevitably fall far short of what most Palestinians believe justice demands.
To secure a small, poor share of a land most Palestinians believe is rightfully theirs, the Palestinians would have to cede all claims to the great majority of British Palestine, including virtually all of the best agricultural land, ports, and transportation networks. Of the two states, the Palestinian one would be by far the weaker and the poorer, with disarmament provisions in the treaty that would make it a second-class nation permanently. An “independent” Palestine would be hobbled with a long list of restrictions and prohibitions that no Palestinian government could legally terminate. The new state, semi-sovereign in important respects, may well have to accept the long-term presence of foreign troops on its soil in the interest of Israel’s security. It could probably not exercise full control over its airspace. This is not national independence wrested victoriously from a defeated oppressor; it is an acceptance of a truncated independence on enemy terms.
To many Palestinians, this looks more like surrender than victory. It looks like the acceptance of a kind of rump Palestine, a shrunken state economically and militarily dependent on Israel. That does not mean that there are not a significant number of Palestinians who would welcome or at least accept a two-state solution on these terms. Palestinian society is not monolithic; it includes a wide range of political and religious views. Many Palestinians, especially on the West Bank, would accept and some would welcome a two-state solution based roughly on the 1949 lines. Others, especially in Gaza and among the displaced refugee communities in countries like Syria and Lebanon, would hold out for more. Many, on the West Bank and beyond, might accept the two-state solution for now, but like many Irish nationalists after the partition of 1921 would continue to hope, to work, and even to fight for more.
Beyond this, like Zionism, the Palestinian national movement is built to some degree on a rejection of the ideal of western order to which Americans seek to convert the Middle East. In the Palestinian case, the rejection is literal: the 1947 United Nations resolution partitioning British Palestine was seen by Americans like Eleanor Roosevelt as a cornerstone of their efforts to build a liberal order. The Palestinians and other Arabs who rejected this resolution did so on the basis of an important principle. The British had no legitimate rights in Palestine, they said. Britain conquered the country from the Ottomans, but the Balfour Declaration had no moral standing whatever. How can you give away someone else’s home? The Balfour Declaration was illegitimate, the League of Nations was an imperialist club with no moral right to assign mandates, and the United Nations had no more right to partition Palestine than to, for example, demand the partition of Britain.
The rejection of the partition, in this view, is not the petulant stance of a selfish and childish people. It is the mature and thoughtful repudiation of western imperialism. Liberalism, seen as reproducing the power relationships—and legitimizing the decisions—of the imperial powers cannot be the basis for a legitimate and just global order. This is not a view restricted to Arabs and Palestinians but is a common view in postcolonial countries where the phrase “liberal world order” has a more sinister meaning than American diplomats would like it to have.
It was resistance to liberalism and not just to Zionism that made the Palestinians a people. Following the defeats of 1948–49, it was the spirit of resistance and rejection that shaped a Palestinian national movement in the refugee camps. The world wanted to forget them. Arab leaders sought to control and use them. But the Palestinians refused. They resisted, they persisted, they fought with every weapon they could find, including terror when nothing better came to hand, and they ultimately succeeded in forcing the world to acknowledge their existence and, however partially, the justice of their cause.
The experience of dispossession and occupation along with generations of living in refugee camps shaped the political consciousness of the Palestinians. It was not an easy school and the people that came out of it are strong. The explosive anger and hatred seething in parts of the Palestinian community, the feelings that drive teenagers to attack Israeli citizens with knives, come out of a long and painful history. Even for the many Palestinians who neither commit violence nor condone the murder of Israeli civilians, the idea that resistance is the foundation of Palestinian identity is evidently and obviously true.
To accept the kind of shrunken, dependent Palestinian semi-state on offer today and to give up the struggle would not just mean the renunciation of resistance as a tool for the future. It confesses the futility of Palestinian resistance in the past. If the two-state solution is the best choice the Palestinians have today, it means that the Palestinian national movement has been wrong on virtually every major decision since the 1930s. If the Palestinians had accepted the 1937 Peel Commission plan, they would hold much more territory and better territory than they can get today. The 1946 Morrison-Grady proposal was not as good as the Peel Commission Report, but it was better than either of the two partition plans discussed at the United Nations in 1947. And those plans offered more land and better land to the Palestinians than the Arabs held when the 1949 armistice ended the war.
Is the Nakba, the disaster that overwhelmed the Arab Palestinians when hundreds of thousands fled or were expelled from their homes during Israel’s war for independence, the result of the political blindness and incompetence of the Palestinian leadership in the 1940s? Should the stateless Palestinians and refugees scattered across the diaspora blame the bad decisions of Palestinian leaders for the upheaval that scattered them to the four winds? Has the net result of a century of Palestinian resistance been a century of misery for the Palestinian people culminating in an ignominious surrender on worse terms than they could have gotten thirty, fifty, or one hundred years ago?
The leaders of the Palestinian Authority, who derive their legitimacy from the decades of heroic struggle and suffering, cannot repudiate the legacy of Palestinian resistance without chopping down the tree in which they perch. To build a rump Palestinian state while rejecting the founding myths and ideology of the Palestinian people is a difficult task, but this is what the American-led peace process requires Palestinian leaders to attempt. It is not perhaps as surprising as some think that Yasser Arafat only entered the process under duress and ultimately declined to take up the task.
For Palestinians who would live in this new country, there is another problem with the two-state solution. The Palestinian state will be small and poor; how will it be governed?
Here, many Palestinians thought they detected a certain western hypocrisy. Both Israelis and Americans find themselves talking about the need for a “Palestinian partner for peace.” What exactly did they mean when they said that?
Yasser Arafat was not a moral monster like Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. He was not even a thug like Saddam Hussein. He was a sincere Palestinian nationalist, but his nationalism was shaped by the harsh realities of the post–World War II liberation struggles. He knew the price of power in the world of feuding Palestinian militias in exile; niceties like press freedom and democratic elections never stood high among his priorities. If the PLO had to embrace terror to achieve its objectives, so be it. He could launch wars and murder rivals. Westerners might deplore these characteristics, but if he had signed a peace agreement with Israel they would have overlooked these problems just as they overlook the secret police and lack of civil liberties in many other Arab countries. The presidents of Egypt and the kings of Jordan enjoyed stable relationships with the United States and Israel in part because however deplorable the methods, their security services kept the peace. Arafat’s Palestine could expect a similar indulgence.
A new Palestinian state would probably not have an easy birth. There are powerful armed factions like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad who will not accept any agreement with Israel and who will regard any Palestinian government that signs such a treaty as illegal. They will feel no scruples whatever about continuing the armed struggle with Israel and, as has been demonstrated many times in the past, they also stand ready to launch an armed struggle against any Palestinian government that signs such a treaty.
More, there are powerful governments that would support these factions with money and arms. In past times, Iraq and Syria would have certainly armed radical Palestinian rejectionists. Today, Iran certainly, and quite possibly Turkey, would do the same. Given that there are hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in countries like Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon for whom the establishment of a rump Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza would offer very little, and given that the widespread poverty and misery in Gaza would linger for many years under even the best-case scenarios for independence, foreigners seeking to stir the pot by recruiting disaffected Palestinians into radical and rejectionist organizations would have no shortage of potential recruits. As happened in Ireland, the independence of Palestine would likely begin with a vicious civil war.
The Israelis, Americans, and Europeans who thought that Arafat could be the “partner for peace” that Israel needed did not mean that they thought he was an idealistic dreamer whose love of peace and nonviolence would enable Palestinian society to transcend its difficult past. They meant that they thought he had the combination of political charisma and brutal ruthlessness needed to crush his Palestinian opponents by any means necessary.
The establishment of a truncated state with limited powers under a corrupt and brutal dictatorship fighting a dirty guerrilla war might have been the best choice the Palestinians had in the 1990s, but for many Palestinian intellectuals and observers, it was not a particularly attractive culmination to a hundred years of struggle.
Another factor that tended to undercut the enthusiasm of ordinary Palestinians for the two-state solution as envisioned by the Oslo Accords was a not unnatural nor unreasonable fear that the new Palestinian state would be as kleptocratic and developmentally ineffective as so many Arab states have been. Under the circumstances of the 1990s, this was a reasonable prediction. The Palestinian Authority was already demonstrating the mix of state failure and kleptocratic initiative so familiar from other countries in the region and beyond. The West, it is clear to any Palestinian or indeed to any Arab, was willing to ignore or even collude with the corruption of Arab governments seen as useful on security grounds; an Arafat government struggling to keep Palestine quiet to uphold the regional peace would be seen as important in just that way.
As for the lavish offers of foreign aid from Europe, the Gulf Arabs, and even the United States for a future Palestinian state, many Palestinians viewed them with cynicism. First, the Palestinian experience is that donors are much quicker to make pledges than to pay them. Second, the United States has been sending billions in aid to Egypt since the 1970s. Has poverty been eliminated in Egypt?
This does not mean that Palestinian public opinion preferred Israeli occupation to Palestinian self-government, or that Palestinians did not resent continued Israeli settlement building on the West Bank and what they saw as a reluctance to give Palestinians more control over more territory. Nor does it mean that all Palestinians were pessimistic about what life would be like under home rule. Indeed, leaders like Salam Fayyad worked seriously and effectively to improve Palestinian governance and lay the foundations for a future state. Even so, Palestinians were less invested in the kind of peace Washington wanted than many sympathetic Americans believed, and the prospects for peace were dimmer than successive American presidents and secretaries of state quite understood.
A peace treaty with Israel did not mean to Palestinians what the peace treaty with Britain meant to Americans in 1783. It was the ratification of a historic defeat and while, from a pragmatic point of view, it might have been (was, in my opinion) by far the best option Palestinians had in the 1990s, it was anything but the peace of their dreams. When war instead of peace came out of the Middle East on 9/11, the prospects for liberal order and a calm, democratic post-historical world began to dim, and for many people around the world, a much darker future began to look probable.
Middle East peacemaking was practically more difficult and morally more complicated than it looked and not even the talented and knowledgeable American diplomats who dedicated decades of their lives to the quest could ever quite capture the luminous Grail that hovered perpetually just beyond reach.
The Unsettling
Rivaled only by the question of the future of Jerusalem, the question of the steadily expanding numbers of Jewish settlements established in the territories conquered from Jordan and Syria in 1967 was the most vexed and perplexing issue for diplomats seeking an end to the dispute.
By 2019, the number of Jewish Israeli citizens living in East Jerusalem and the West Bank had reached 670,000. About 560,000 of these lived in a set of densely populated developments, primarily in the neighborhood of Jerusalem, or otherwise close to the Green Line marking the position of forces at the time of the 1949 armistice.[17] Smaller groups of settlers lived on the Golan Heights or at strategic points in the Jordan River valley where their presence was seen as helping to stabilize boundaries with neighboring states. The remainder were scattered across the West Bank, sometimes on isolated hilltops, sometimes on previously empty land, sometimes in the midst of Palestinian cities such as Hebron. Some settlers were drawn by lower home prices and subsidized financing. Some were attracted for religious or national reasons.
Different settlements had different statuses under Israeli law. Israel had annexed the parts of Jerusalem formerly under Jordanian control in 1967, and the Golan Heights (de facto) in 1981. While most countries considered all Israeli settlements beyond the Green Line illegal, Israeli law saw no difference between new housing developments in East Jerusalem and new suburbs of Tel Aviv. Many Jewish settlements in the West Bank were legally recognized by Israeli authorities. Some were in a gray zone where enterprising settlers built homes without government permission. Others have been declared illegal under Israeli law, and a few have even been demolished.
From the standpoint of diplomats trying to shepherd the peace process, settlements are a continuing source of trouble. The largest settlements, close to Jerusalem and the Green Line, are paradoxically the least problematic. Since the 1990s negotiators have assumed that Israel would keep all or most of these settlements in any final peace agreement, compensating the Palestinians with cessions of an equivalent amount of land elsewhere along the frontier.
It is the settlements deeper inside the future Palestinian state, and the possible expansion of settlement activity into additional areas near Jerusalem, that create the most significant problems for peace negotiators.
The expansion of settlements alarms and embitters Palestinian opinion, raising increasing questions over time about the viability of any Palestinian state. Those questions become particularly acute in the neighborhood of Jerusalem, where certain proposed Jewish housing developments would block Palestinian access to what most Palestinians expect will be part of their future capital. The presence of settlers exacerbates the tensions, the injustices, and the inconveniences of the occupation and generates a steady stream of violent incidents that erodes any trust between the two national communities and keeps tensions high. The reality that disputes between the two communities are settled by Israeli courts and sometimes by Israeli military authorities creates, at the least, a perception of systemic injustice that angers Palestinians and attracts global sympathy to their cause. What under other circumstances would be routine questions of land ownership, water rights, building permits, and infrastructure investment can trigger intercommunal violence and flare up into international incidents overnight.
Support for settlements, while not universal, is strong enough in Israeli politics that putting real and lasting limits on settlement expansion tests the authority and undermines the power of even the strongest Israeli leaders. Israeli support for settlements falls into three groups. There are the pragmatists who support the settlements in or near the Green Line aimed at improving the defensibility of Israel’s frontiers, and who see settlements more generally as a bargaining chip that may push Palestinians toward an agreement out of the fear that the longer they wait, the worse their final frontiers will be. Another group sees settlements as an extension of the original work of the Zionist movement. For them, the West Bank, not the coastal plain, is the Hebrew heartland. This is where the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah stood, and if the aim of the Jewish national movement is to erect an independent Jewish commonwealth on the original homeland of the Jewish people, that movement has not accomplished its mission until the heartland is once again part of the Jewish state. The third group of religiously motivated settlers believes that in establishing Jewish settlements in the ancient heartland they are fulfilling a divine mandate and in some cases they do not recognize the authority of any government, including the Israeli government, to tell Jews where they may or may not live in the divinely Promised Land.
As the number and density of Israeli settlements have grown over the years, the issue has become simultaneously harder to solve and more consequential for the health of the peace process. From the Palestinian side, the inability of their negotiators to stop a process that humiliates and enrages public opinion while, increasingly, making the establishment of a geographically contiguous and economically viable Palestinian state less likely contributes to growing public skepticism about the Palestinian leadership and about the possibility of a peaceful compromise with Israel.
From the Israeli side, fighting settlements has never been an easy political task, and few politicians want to order troops to force unwilling settlers from their homes in order to please the Palestinians or even the Americans. The larger the settlements grow, the greater this reluctance becomes. As more voters either live on the West Bank or have friends and relatives who do, the higher rise the political costs of curtailing new settlements and withdrawing from old ones.
For both sides, settlements make a compromise peace seem less likely and less attractive. Palestinians do not believe Israelis will give up enough settlements and territory to fulfill even their minimum demands for statehood. Some Israelis see less and less advantage in giving up flourishing towns and alienating large numbers of voters in exchange for what they fear will be empty promises of peace and coexistence from the Palestinian side.
American diplomats would find themselves repeatedly caught between Palestinian demands for partial or total settlement freezes as a condition for entering serious peace talks and Israeli politicians unwilling to take on powerful domestic forces. Over time, as both sides dug in on their settlement positions and American prestige and authority gradually declined, it became progressively more difficult and ultimately impossible for American diplomacy to manage this contentious issue.
Participation Trophies
Decades of focused American advocacy failed to end the conflict, but the diplomatic efforts were not entirely in vain. As an exercise in diplomatic staging and conflict management the peace process was an American triumph. Even without a final agreement, the peace process reduced American risks in the region at very low cost; dramatized and furthered American primacy in world politics; facilitated the task of alliance management as the Americans continued to support the triple entente of Washington, Israel, and the conservative Arab states; ended Palestinian engagement in international and regional (as opposed to anti-Israel) terrorism; maximized American and presidential flexibility; and turned what could have been a source of weakness and vulnerability at home and abroad for American presidents into a formidable source of political advantage.
While American power was essential to make the peace process the center of Middle East diplomacy for such an extended period, the peace process worked so well for the United States in large part because so many other states in the region and beyond benefited from it. For Israel, a process under American sponsorship helped it manage its relations with Europe without risk of being pressured into unacceptable concessions. Both Israelis and leaders of conservative Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Kuwait appreciated the way that the Oslo Accords and the peace process drew the leading armed factions into a political process and increased the leverage of conservative Arabs and western funders over the movement as a whole.
Managing the Palestinian movement was a longtime headache for the Arab states. The movement’s popularity with Arab public opinion meant that Arab leaders could not act openly against it, but the Palestinian leadership had never been an easy partner, fighting wars against both the Jordanian and Lebanese governments when headquartered in those countries and aligning itself with radical forces in the Arab world that challenged the status quo.[18] The PLO’s support for Saddam Hussein after his 1990 conquest of Kuwait marked a low point in relations between the Gulf States and the Palestinian movement. Angry and alarmed at what they saw as an unprincipled and undeserved betrayal, the Gulf states expelled more than 300,000 Palestinian expatriates—roughly half the number of Palestinians forced out of Israel in the 1948–49 war. “What Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories,” said Arafat—who had only himself to blame for the disaster.[19] It was not in the interest of these governments to destroy the Palestinian movement or to be seen as its enemies. But neither was it in their interest to support a truly independent Palestinian movement.
Europeans also had a Palestinian problem. For twenty years some Palestinian organizations and individuals had been a major force in terror attacks worldwide, operating in networks that enjoyed funding and state sponsorship from countries like East Germany and Syria, ultimately backed by the Soviet Union. As Palestinians pursued Israeli targets through Europe, horrific violence—like the Black September attacks on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics—exploded across a continent struggling with indigenous terror movements of its own.
The peace process soon became a golden cage for the Palestinian movement. With financial aid from Europe, rich Arab countries, and the United States pouring in, Arafat and his successors could build patronage networks and reward loyal supporters with government jobs. That made the Palestinian Authority a formidable political force in the Occupied Territories, and ensured significant wealth for the movement’s elite, but dependence on foreign paymasters also limited Palestinian freedom of action. The Palestinian Authority could not walk away from the peace process without alienating key backers, and it could not walk back its recognition of Israel without inflicting massive economic hardship on its most loyal supporters. At the same time, as the movement’s once fiery activists settled into a comfortable middle age on their civil service salaries from the Palestinian Authority with children to educate and bills to pay, the movement’s moral authority began to erode among Palestinians and the Arab world at large.
From very early on, the peace process became a flourishing cottage industry for both Israelis and Palestinians. Both sides could and did trade their willingness to participate in the process or to make concessions for aid. The Palestinians, with fewer resources and fewer cards to play, in particular benefited from the largesse. Shortly after the famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, an international consortium of donors pledged $2.4 billion in aid to the Palestinians, $500 million of which would come from the United States.[20] As one American official later described it, “international assistance” should “build a peace constituency among the Palestinians.”[21]
The PA was and at the time of writing remains dependent on foreign aid to cover its core expenses. According to World Bank figures, between 1994 and 2018, the PA received $38 billion in aid, and this accounted on average for 30 percent of the PA’s expenses in each year. Additionally, so-called clearance revenue, tax revenues and other payments collected by Israeli authorities and handed over to the Palestinians, accounted for more than half of the PA budget during much of this time.[22]
For Americans in particular, this was an excellent bargain. The payments kept the PA, however reluctantly at times, committed to a peace process that was one of the most helpful instruments of American foreign policy, and for their own diplomatic and political purposes, the Europeans and the Gulf Arabs were helping to pay the bills to support a diplomatic structure that bolstered American power and advanced key American goals.
Meanwhile, Arab and European leaders could always win political points at home by criticizing America’s allegedly one-sided support for Israel in the negotiations. American presidents could take these criticisms in stride as they changed nothing and, if anything, helped American presidents at home by boosting their “pro-Israel” credentials.
For Palestinians, the peace process was a mixed blessing. As the weakest party in the negotiations, Palestinians consistently had less control over the agenda and direction of the peace process, received the least benefits, and paid the highest price for participating. This was partly reflected in the structure: the price of admission for the Palestinians was something they had always rejected—recognizing Israel as a legitimate state without the establishment or recognition of a state of their own. Palestinian participation in such an unsatisfactory but unavoidable process was so difficult for Palestinians that the movement split, with Hamas rejecting the peace process entirely and setting up a rival government in Gaza.
But ultimately Arafat’s wing of the Palestinian movement—flat broke after the fall of the Soviet Union and its break with the Gulf Arabs over the Gulf War—had little choice. The ability to set up an administration in waiting in the Occupied Territories and to put thousands of faithful supporters on a secure payroll was too attractive to pass up. Beyond that, the transition from pariah status into the world of respectable diplomacy was hard to resist. Ambivalent, divided, and suspicious, the Palestinians came to the table.
The Israelis were also conflicted. The Zionist and religious hardliners most committed to the idea of expanding the Israeli state across the West Bank to the Jordan River saw the peace process as dangerous from the start. For other Israelis, by giving formal standing to the Palestinians and creating an arena for face-to-face negotiations, the process could potentially expose Israel to orchestrated pressure from the United States and other powers to accept a territorial solution short of Israeli wishes.
Yet at the same time, the peace process forced Yasser Arafat to recognize the existence of the Jewish state and facilitated a steady deepening of relationships between Israel and conservative Arab states. It also provided a forum for holding Palestinians at least somewhat accountable for terror attacks against civilians. Israel could toughen or loosen its stance in the talks based on Palestinian behavior, and open Palestinian violations of commitments made in the peace negotiations could be used to pressure foreign governments to reduce or suspend aid to the PA.
Additionally, a substantial result of the onset of negotiations was to give the PA responsibility for security in Palestinian population centers, a responsibility that inevitably led to joint antiterror efforts, reduced the pressure on Israelis to carry out these efforts alone, and created many points of contact for the Israeli government deep into the Palestinian movement. Finally, Israel (like the Palestinians) could and did use the reality that the outside powers valued the peace process more than the insiders to leverage “compensation for compliance” deals. The peace process was worth a lot of money to various governments around the world; like the Palestinians, Israel could and did charge accordingly.