One message of Peace Process is that the United States has had, and will continue to have, a crucial role in helping Israel and her Arab neighbors reach peace. If American presidents play their role with skill, they can make a lasting contribution. But just as likely, they may misread the realities of the Middle East and add to the impasse by their own errors.
This book argues that domestic Israeli politics have been a key factor in determining Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking in the period from 1988 to the present.
The book is a fresh interpretation of Israeli foreign policy vis-à-vis the peace process, one that deems domestic political factors as the key to explain the shift within Israel from war to peace. The main assumption is that peacemaking that entails territorial compromise is an issue that can only be completely comprehended by understanding the interaction of domestic factors such as inter-party politics, ideology, personality and the politics of coalition. Although the bulk of the book focuses on how internal inputs informed the peace process, the book takes into account the external factors and how they impacted on the internal constellation of political forces in Israel.
For more than fifteen years, entrepreneur Dan Abraham, founder and former chairman of Slim-Fast Foods, chose to utilize his considerable resources to facilitate Mideast peace. Together with Utah Congressman Wayne Owens, Abraham made more than sixty trips to the Middle East between 1988 and 2002, meeting with Arab leaders Hosni Mubarak, Hafez Assad, Crown Prince (now King) Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah of Jordan, Abu Mazen, and Yasser Arafat, and Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon. Using his business experience with difficult negotiations, Abraham took an active behind-the-scenes role, setting up critical one-on-one meetings between key figures. He urged these leaders to articulate not what they wanted, but what they needed, to make peace, fostering significant advances in the peace process. Since Owens’ untimely death in 2002, Abraham has continued to arrange peacemaking meetings on his own. Drawing from meeting transcripts, diary entries, and extensive handwritten notes, Abraham writes in the first person about these extraordinary, often private meetings, giving us rare “you are there” insight into historically significant events. In his pragmatic and hopeful book, he writes, “I am a great optimist, particularly about a region of the world that usually brings out people’s most pessimistic inclinations— Israel and its neighbors.”
This book argues that domestic Israeli politics have been a key factor in determining Israeli-Palestinian peacmaking in the period from 1988 to the present.
Eight years after the second Palestinian uprising, the Oslo accords signed in 1993 seem to have failed. This book explores one of the major aspects of the bilateral peace process – the composition and behaviour of the Palestinian negotiating team, which deeply impacted the outcome of the negotiations between 1991 and 1997.
The Oslo secret negotiations from 1992 to 1993 were some of the most astonishing and also successful negotiations in the Middle East, leading to the mutual recognition between the PLO and Israel. Through an in-depth examination of the Oslo negotiations, this book argues that at the core of the negotiations was a fascinating dilemma of recognition. Overcoming this dilemma was at the centre of the secret negotiations. A thorough analysis documents how decision makers tried to communicate without being able to engage in face-to-face negotiations, and highlights the significance of the role of third parties in the conflict resolution process, stressing in particular the importance of the European Union’s power in bringing the sides together. This is a comprehensive account of the Oslo negotiations, focusing particularly on the timely issue of non-recognition – which is of great importance today given the recent emergence of the rise of Hamas as the dominant Palestinian political force.
This book examines the international politics of the Red Sea region from the Cold War to the present. It argues that the Red Sea region demonstrates well the characteristics of a sub-regional system, with increasing economic and social interdependence, greater regional integration, with the stronger regional powers – Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia – seeking to establish their influence over the sub-region, and with all states forming regional alliances to protect their interests and to fend off possible encroachment of others.
The position of the Persian Gulf as the main highway between East and West has long given this region special significance both within the Middle East and in global affairs more generally. This book examines the history of international relations in the Gulf since the 1820s as great powers such as Britain and the US, and regional powers such as Iran and Iraq, vied for supremacy over this geopolitically vital region. It focuses on the struggle for control over the islands of the Gulf, in particular the three islands of Abu Musa, Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb – an issue that remains highly contentious today. It describes how for 170 years Britain eroded Iranian influence in the Gulf, both directly by asserting colonial rule over Iranian islands and port districts, and also through claiming Iranian islands for their protégés on the Arab littoral. It shows how, after Britain's withdrawal, these islands became a pawn in the animosity and conflict that pitted, at one time, Arab radicals and nationalists against monarchical Iran, and, later, the conservative-moderate Arab camp against Islamic Iran. It goes on to explore the impact of the rise of American power in the Gulf since the start of the 1990s, its policy of containment of Iran and Iraq, and how this has provided encouragement to the ambitions of the Persian Gulf Arab littoral states, especially the UAE, towards the islands of the Gulf.
Although Christians form a significant proportion of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel, very little research has, until now, been undertaken to examine their complicated position within Israel. This book demonstrates the limits of analyses which characterise state-minority relations in Israel in terms of a so-called Jewish-Muslim conflict, and of studies which portray Palestinian Christians as part of a wider exclusively religious-based transnational Christian community. This book locates its analysis of Palestinian Christians within a broader understanding of Israel as a Jewish ethnocratic state. It describes the main characteristics of the Palestinian Christian community in Israel and examines a number of problematic assumptions which have been made about them and their relationship to the state. Finally, it examines a number of intra-communal conflicts which have taken place in recent years between Christians and Muslims, and between Christians and Druze, and probes the role which the state and various state attitudes have played in influencing or determining those conflicts and, as a result, the general status of Palestinian Christians in Israel today.
