This volume examines the gap between agreements and actual peace. It offers different explanations for the successes and failures of the three processes - in South Africa, Northern Ireland and Israel-Palestine - and provides historical and comparative perspectives on the failure of the Middle East peace process.
For seventy years Israel has existed as a state, and for forty years it has honored a peace treaty with Egypt that is widely viewed as a triumph of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East. Yet the Palestinians - the would-be beneficiaries of a vision for a comprehensive regional settlement that led to the Camp David Accords in 1978 - remain stateless to this day. How and why Palestinian statelessness persists are the central questions of Seth Anziska's groundbreaking book, which explores the complex legacy of the agreement brokered by President Jimmy Carter. Based on newly declassified international sources, Preventing Palestine charts the emergence of the Middle East peace process, including the establishment of a separate track to deal with the issue of Palestine. At the very start of this process, Anziska argues, Egyptian-Israeli peace came at the expense of the sovereignty of the Palestinians, whose aspirations for a homeland alongside Israel faced crippling challenges. With the introduction of the idea of restrictive autonomy, Israeli settlement expansion, and Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the chances for Palestinian statehood narrowed even further. The first Intifada in 1987 and the end of the Cold War brought new opportunities for a Palestinian state, but many players, refusing to see Palestinians as a nation or a people, continued to steer international diplomacy away from their cause.
As Middle-East Bureau Chief of the French Public television network and a resident of Jerusalem since 1968, Charles Enderlin has had unequaled access to leaders and negotiators on all sides. Here he takes the reader step-by-step along the path that began with the hope of agreement but led only to the ultimate collapse of the peace process. The dramatic account moves between the occupied territories and the negotiation tables as it follows the emotional shifts in the conflict from the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin to the years when Benjamin Netenyahu was in power. In a definitive account of the meetings at Camp David in July 2000, Enderlin details what was said between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators brought together by Bill Clinton in the presence of Yasir Arafat, President of the Palestinian Authority, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
Winner of the 2014 Lionel Trilling Book Award An examination of the failure of the United States as a broker in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, through three key historical moments For more than seven decades the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people has raged on with no end in sight, and for much of that time, the United States has been involved as a mediator in the conflict. In this book, acclaimed historian Rashid Khalidi zeroes in on the United States’s role as the purported impartial broker in this failed peace process. Khalidi closely analyzes three historical moments that illuminate how the United States’ involvement has, in fact, thwarted progress toward peace between Israel and Palestine. The first moment he investigates is the “Reagan Plan” of 1982, when Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin refused to accept the Reagan administration’s proposal to reframe the Camp David Accords more impartially. The second moment covers the period after the Madrid Peace Conference, from 1991 to 1993, during which negotiations between Israel and Palestine were brokered by the United States until the signing of the secretly negotiated Oslo accords. Finally, Khalidi takes on President Barack Obama’s retreat from plans to insist on halting the settlements in the West Bank. Through in-depth research into and keen analysis of these three moments, as well as his own firsthand experience as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation at the 1991 pre–Oslo negotiations in Washington, DC, Khalidi reveals how the United States and Israel have actively colluded to prevent a Palestinian state and resolve the situation in Israel’s favor. Brokers of Deceit bares the truth about why peace in the Middle East has been impossible to achieve: for decades, US policymakers have masqueraded as unbiased agents working to bring the two sides together, when, in fact, they have been the agents of continuing injustice, effectively preventing the difficult but essential steps needed to achieve peace in the region.
A critical examination of the history of US-Palestinian relations The United States has invested billions of dollars and countless diplomatic hours in the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace and a two-state solution. Yet American attempts to broker an end to the conflict have repeatedly come up short. At the center of these failures lay two critical factors: Israeli power and Palestinian politics. While both Israelis and Palestinians undoubtedly share much of the blame, one also cannot escape the role of the United States, as the sole mediator in the process, in these repeated failures. American peacemaking efforts ultimately ran aground as a result of Washington’s unwillingness to confront Israel’s ever-deepening occupation or to come to grips with the realities of internal Palestinian politics. In particular, the book looks at the interplay between the U.S.-led peace process and internal Palestinian politics—namely, how a badly flawed peace process helped to weaken Palestinian leaders and institutions and how an increasingly dysfunctional Palestinian leadership, in turn, hindered prospects for a diplomatic resolution. Thus, while the peace process was not necessarily doomed to fail, Washington’s management of the process, with its built-in blind spot to Israeli power and Palestinian politics, made failure far more likely than a negotiated breakthrough. Shaped by the pressures of American domestic politics and the special relationship with Israel, Washington’s distinctive “blind spot” to Israeli power and Palestinian politics has deep historical roots, dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate. The size of the blind spot has varied over the years and from one administration to another, but it is always present.
Exclusive interview with Ariel Sharon! A probing look at the war on terrorism. Conflict in the Middle East has simmered and boiled for decades. Now, war and terrorism are global in scope. The Last War contains supremely relevant information for all concerned: Why do Islamic radicals hate the West? What is the radical Moslem’s world view? Who are Osama bin Laden’s allies? Who are the “Little Satan” and the “Great Satan”? Are we being told the whole truth about our enemies? Tragically, a decade of intense diplomacy and negotiation has given way to widespread violence: some analysts, aware of the real potential for catastrophic war in the region, openly wonder if this will all lead to a “last war” of sorts. After seven years of "confidence-building" measures that are the framework of the Oslo Accords - an ambitious attempt to bring Israelis and Palestinians to a final peace agreement - the whole affair is unraveling. Violence in the West Bank has accelerated dramatically since Yitzak Rabin and Yasser Afarat signed the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn in 1993. In this indepth study of the peace process, the reader will learn little-reported facts about the peace process and the people involved, and will be able to see clearly that the latest confrontations are a prelude to a devastating conclusion.
This edited volume explores Canada’s foreign policy relationship with the Palestinians and broader Middle East Peace Process (MEPP). Canada was intensively involved from 1992 to 2000 in peacebuilding as a mediator in the multilateral part of the MEPP, as chair of the Refugee Working Group, and sponsor of Track II negotiations. This all changed after a significant mid-2000s discursive and policy shift when Canada withdrew from the politics of Israel-Palestine peacebuilding and took a strong partisan stance in favour of Israel. Through 10 chapters by current and former government insiders and academics with extensive field experience, this unique edited volume offers insight into decades of evolution in Canadian policy toward the Palestinians, MEPP and the Middle East. It arrives at an important time when the international community is reconsidering how it views Israel’s entrenched occupation of the Palestinians, after three failed decades of United States-led efforts to find peace through a negotiated two-state model. Today, peace may never have appeared further away after the Trump Administration adopted policies directly contradictory to the MEPP. This proved a test to Canada’s own official policy toward Israel and Palestine, its longest running and most important region of engagement in the Middle East. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, guest edited by Jeremy Wildeman and Emma Swan.
The Palestine-Israel conflict is one of the longest running and seemingly intractable confrontations in the modern world. This book delves deep into the "peace process" to find out why so little progress has been made on the key issues. Zalman Amit and Daphna Levit find overwhelming evidence of Israeli rejectionism as the main cause for the failure of peace. They demonstrate that the Israeli leadership has always been against a fairly negotiated peace and have deliberately stalled negotiations for the last 80 years. The motivations behind this rejectionist position have changed, as have the circumstances of the conflict, but the conclusion has remained consistent -- peace has not been in the interest of the state of Israel. A fascinating read, and particularly timely as the Obama administration tries once more for a peace settlement, this book draws on a wealth of sources -- including Hebrew documents and transcripts -- to show that it is the Palestinians who lack a viable "partner for peace."