Arab-Israeli Peace Runs Aground

December 1, 2003

The lull in Arab-Israeli peacemaking in recent years gives today’s scholars the opportunity to reflect on what was right and what was wrong in previous efforts to resolve the conflict. After a frenetic flurry of attempted peacemaking in the late Clinton Administration, the hard slog of the al-Aqsa Intifada made final status talks recede into the distance, even as an episodic progression of peace efforts – the Sharm al-Sheikh Agreement, the Mitchell Committee Report, the Tenet Work Plan, and the Quartet’s ‘Road Map’ – sought to bring the parties into dialogue once again.

Long academic lead times, however, mean that authors publishing books now had conceived their projects during a much more hopeful period in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, when it appeared that final status talks might soon lead to the Promised Land of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli agreement. By the time these books arrived on the publishers’ desks, however, the depths to which cooperative efforts had fallen were apparent to all. The result is not so much to make these books irrelevant, but instead to cast them in a rather different light than that in which they had been conceived.