Making Peace and Writing About It

Bustan: The Middle East Book Review  () – www.brill.nl/mebr

Making Peace and Writing about It

Itamar Rabinovich Tel-Aviv University and New York University [email protected]

Dennis Ross. The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, . ISBN-: , ISBN-: -. Aaron David Miller. The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli peace. New York: Bantam Books, . ISBN-: , ISBN-: -. Edward Djerejian. Danger and Opportunity: An American Ambassador’s Journey ThroughtheMiddleEast. New York: Simon and Schuster, . ISBN-: , ISBN-: -. Martin Indyk. Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplo- macy in the Middle East. NewYork: Simon and Schuster, . ISBN-: .

Abstract The Arab-Israeli peace process, a U.S. led diplomatic effort, has been unfolding over nearly four decades. Various American policies, ranging from a step by step approach to securing a comprehensive settlement, reached their peak in the s, with the Clinton administration’s sustained efforts to settle the Arab-Israeli dispute. Although these efforts yielded several successful outcomes, including mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestinian national movement and greater Arab-Israeli normalization, they were marred by the continuous Israeli-Palestinian strife and other negative developments. Much of these efforts were promoted by professional experts, working for various branches of the U.S. government. This article surveys several books written by some of these officials, which provide diverse accounts of the unfolding events. The testimonies in these books range from comprehensive surveys to attempts at exploring the reasons for America’s failed venture, and offer new insights into the peace process.

Keywords Arab-Israeli peace process; American foreign policy; James Baker; Dennis Ross; Aaron Miller; Daniel Kurtzer; Edward Djerejian; Martin Indyk

The Arab Israeli peace process, the diplomatic effort led by the United States to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, has unfolded in fits and starts for almost four decades now, from the fall of  to the present. Eight American presidents and their administrations invested varying de- grees of effort in promoting this daunting project. Henry Kissinger, who did not believe that a comprehensive solution was feasible, laid the foundations through his step-by-step diplomacy. Jimmy Carter did try to effect a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace settlement and ended up by pushing Menahem Begin and Anwar Sadat into negotiating a separate Egyptian Israeli peace— with his tardy but significant help. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W.Bush were not partic- ularly active or effective in the promotion of Arab Israeli peace. Barack Obama made a resolution of the Arab Israeli conflict, its Palestinian component in particular, a high priority of his administration and foreign policy, but it is too early to tell how successful he will be. In this saga of diplomatic efforts, good intentions, lingering obstacles, suc- cess and failure, the s stand out, mostly because of the Clinton administration’s sustained effort to settle the Arab-Israeli dispute through the Madrid process. It was initiated by the first Bush administration in the aftermath of the Gulf War and pushed forward by the Clinton administration. The decade-long effort resulted in the formulation of a framework and a set of rules (the Madrid process), mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestinian national movement (the Oslo and Washington accords), a second peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state (Jordan), a significant degree of Arab-Israeli normalization and a good deal of Israeli-Syrian give and take through which the shape of an Israeli-Syrian settlement was adumbrated, albeit not completed. These achieve- ments were marred by continuous Israeli-Palestinian strife, by terrorism, and a Syrian-Israeli war by proxy in Lebanon. In , the major tracks of the peace process, the Israeli-Syrian and the Israeli-Palestinian, collapsed. The diplomatic debacle was followed in short order by the outbreak of a Palestinian-Israeli war of attrition, commonly known as the second intifada. It is common practice to look at the foreign policy of the United States through the prism of its principal actors and decision-makers: presidents, secretaries of state, and national security advisors. It would be wrong, however,