The Mideast Peace Process: An Autopsy

Launched in 1993 after an agreement at Oslo, the Middle East "peace process" was solemnized in the famous handshake between Yitzak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn. In return for renouncing violence and terrorism, and accepting Israel, the Palestinians were to be given a state. In return for giving up land, the Israelis would get peace. But after seven fitful years, the process collapsed in bloodshed in the autumn of 2000. Today, Israelis and Palestinians are more bitterly divided than ever before. This book tells what went wrong and why. For decades, the Israeli negotiating posture was summed up in the phrase, "land for peace." Its greatest achievement was the 1977 overture by President Anwar Sadat of Egypt that led to a historic peace deal and the return to Egypt of the conquered Sinai peninsula. But with Oslo, this hardheaded and successful diplomacy was replaced by wishful thinking. In feverish, sometimes surreal, negotiations presided over by the Clinton administration and punctuated by the assassination of Yitzak Rabin, the doomed administration of Benjamin Netanyahu, the desperate give-away program of Ehud Barak, and finally the unleashing of a new intifada by Yasser Arafat, Israel became strategically ever more vulnerable as the Palestinians gained more and more ground. Comprised of essays from the pages of Commentary by David Bar-Illan, Douglas Feith, Daniel Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, and other leading observers, this book is a fever chart as well as an autopsy. Writing at ground level as the peace process careened from one crisis to the next, the authors show us step by step how the Israelis were forced increasingly on the defensive and how the Palestinians became convinced that they stood on the brink not of peace but of victory. In her introduction, former U.N. Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick shows how Oslo has taken the Middle East back to a future of guerrilla war and terrorism--if not outright war--the very future it promised to prevent. This book is a brilliant and definitive analysis of diplomacy gone wrong.

 

Preface - Neal Kozodoy

Israel's New Polyannas - David Bar-Illan

The Story Behind the Handshake - Yigal Carmon

Land for No Peace - Douglas J. Feith

Where Is the Peace Process Going? - Dore Gold

The Rabin Assassination: A Reckoning - Hillel Halkin

In Arafat's Kingdom - Nadav Haetzni

When the Palestinian Army Invades - Yuval Steinitz

Israel's Moment of Truth - Daniel Pipes

Intifada II: Death of an Illusion? - Norman Podhoretz

The Journalists and the Palestinians - Fiamma Nirenstein

On the "Right of Return" - Efraim Karsh

Afterword - Mark Helprin Contributors