The Ingredients of Palestinian-Israeli Peacemaking

Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 43, No.3, Spring 2020 The Ingredients of PalestinianIsraeli Peacemaking Daniel C. Kurtzer* On October 30, 1991, the United States and the Soviet Union, acting jointly as co-sponsors, convened the Madrid Peace Conference. Israel, Jordan, the Palestinians, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and significant other countries met to launch negotiations on the basis of terms of reference negotiated by U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III. The event marked the shattering of a number of taboos that had plagued earlier efforts to bring Israelis and Arabs together. The terms of reference of the conference stipulated that direct, bilateral negotiations would follow and that multilateral talks on economic issues, water, the environment, refugees, and arms control and regional security would proceed in parallel. The vexing issue of Palestinian representation was solved by creating a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. The Madrid Conference offered no answers to the substantive issues that divided the parties, but it paved the way for all peace process efforts since then. As a seminal event, Madrid has been the subject of serious studies, as have the negotiating rounds that followed.1 Quite a few lessons have been drawn out from the successes and failures of what has become known as the “Madrid process” and the “Oslo process” that followed the Israeli5 *Daniel C. Kurtzer is the S. Daniel Abraham Professor of Middle East policy studies at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Following a 29-year career in the U.S. Foreign Service, he retired in 2005 with the rank of Career-Minister. From 2001 to 2005, he served as the United States Ambassador to Israel and, from 1997 to 2001, as the United States Ambassador to Egypt. Throughout his career, Kurtzer was instrumental in formulating and executing U.S. policy toward the Middle East peace process. He is the co-author of Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East; co-author of The Peace Puzzle: America’s Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace, 1989-2011; and editor of Pathways to Peace: America and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Kurtzer’s Ph.D. is from Columbia University. 1 See, for example, Daniel Kurtzer, Scott Lasensky, William Quandt, Steven Spiegel, and Shibley Telhami, The Peace Puzzle: America’s Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace, 1989-2011 (Cornell University Press and United States Institute of Peace Press, 2013), as well as a number of first-person accounts by Palestinian, Israeli, and American participants in the process. 6 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) agreement on mutual recognition and the Declaration of Principles in 1993. The list of lessons learned is unsurprisingly long. For example, in The Peace Puzzle, the authors cite eleven fundamental lessons drawn from the American negotiating experience.2 Similar lists of lessons can be and have been drawn from the experience of the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators themselves. Not surprisingly, most such lessons actually go unlearned, as leaders have been unwilling to build on what their predecessors have accomplished and have seemed intent on forging their own paths, even when those paths have been marked with warning signs about what works and does not work. While it seems self-evident that those starting out in peace negotiations, especially novices and those unschooled in diplomacy, would study the record so as to try to avoid the pitfalls of previous efforts, this has not been the case. In the United States, the tendency of an incoming administration to view as toxic anything done by its predecessor has almost guaranteed that the new administration will approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution process with a blank sheet of paper, discounting all that preceded it as failed policy unworthy of study. This manifestation of the tongue-in-cheek but accurate definition of insanity—doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results—may one day yield progress, or even a breakthrough. The wise diplomat would be welladvised to study the files before embarking on a diplomatic effort to resolve this, or any other, protracted conflict. This article lays out five critical requirements for peacemaking, especially in the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. Context and Timing A student of...