2. We fail more often than we succeed in the Holy Land: In 50 years of Arab-Israeli diplomacy, only three Americans -- two Republican secretaries of state and a Democratic president -- have managed to successfully broker agreements that had any lasting impact.
Following the 1973 war, Nixon's diplomatic wingman, Henry Kissinger, managed to negotiate three interim disengagement agreements between Israel, Egypt, and Syria. The final agreement, signed on June 1, 1974, still governs arrangements between Israel and Syria over the Golan Heights.
Carter brokered both a framework for an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty and one for a Middle East peace involving Israelis and Palestinians at Camp David in September 1978. The former resulted in the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, which was signed at the White House in March 1979. The latter, which envisioned full autonomy for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, failed -- partly because there were no Palestinians involved in the negotiation process.
Secretary of State James Baker, finally, put together a diplomatic framework that enabled Israelis, Syrians, Jordanians, Palestinians, and a delegation from the Arab Gulf states to attend a three-day conference in Madrid in October 1991. Madrid itself produced no breakthrough agreement, but it lent cover to the secret talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians in Oslo, laid the basis for a future Israeli-Jordanian agreement, and broke some important taboos regarding direct negotiations.
Lesson: Success in this enterprise is rare. It requires luck and a mediator that knows what he or she is doing. Those who think America can impose its wishes at will are living on some other planet.
3. The parties on the ground have to want a deal: With the exception of the Madrid process, all the Arab-Israeli breakthroughs were launched secretly by the parties themselves -- with no U.S. involvement.
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's trip to Jerusalem in 1977 would not have been possible without the secret confidence-building contacts between Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan and Egyptian Deputy Prime Minister Hassan Tuhami. Oslo's Declaration of Principles, signed in 1993, was negotiated secretly with the help of the Norwegians. And the Israelis and Jordanians, who had carried on quiet diplomacy for most of the last century, called on their old contacts to set up their peace treaty negotiations. In each case, the United States was purposely excluded in the initial phase.
Lesson: If the parties aren't invested in the negotiations, you can hang a "closed for the season" sign on the peace process.
4. But there also has to be a U.S. role: Direct negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians played a critical role in the Oslo process, the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, and the beginnings of the Egyptian-Israeli process. But in the Kissinger, Carter, and Baker diplomacy, the U.S. role as a third party broker proved more important.
This was particularly evident in the talks that culminated in the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. Carter purposely kept Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Sadat apart at Camp David and shuttled between the two sides, though Egyptian and Israeli negotiators played key roles.
Lesson: We might wish it were otherwise, but the locals can't get there by themselves.
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