Sublime

One of the most highly decorated soldiers in Israel’s history, Barak had campaigned on a platform built on three fundamental promises. He pledged to get Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon, from which Israel had never figured out how to extract itself. He committed himself to making peace with Syria. And finally, despite increasing doubts about

Having lost his support in the Knesset, Barak called for elections to be held in February 2001. Israeli Arabs boycotted the elections as a reaction to the events of October 2000, which further weakened the Left. Barak lost, and Ariel Sharon, heading the right-wing Likud party, was elected to replace him. Once again, Palestinian violence had

As the violence continued, President Clinton attempted one last-ditch effort to resuscitate the peace process. In late December 2000, Clinton presented his proposal, “The Clinton Parameters,” which proposed that the new Palestinian state would include 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank (though the parameters did not mention Gaza, Clinton clarified

Just as it had been a right-wing, Likud administration that had made peace with Egypt, it was a Likud administration that agreed to the first indirect talks with the Palestinians. In October 1991, with Yitzhak Shamir still prime minister, Israeli officials sat with Syrian, Lebanese, and Jordanian delegations in Spain, in what would become known as

Netanyahu did follow through on Israel’s commitment (as stipulated in the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreement, also known as Oslo II) to redeploy from Hebron, then the last West Bank city under Israeli control. Under American pressure, Netanyahu also later signed the 1998 Wye River Memorandum, designed to resume implementation of the stalled

Embittered, Sharon agreed to step down as defense minister, but he remained in the government as a “minister without portfolio,” not responsible for any particular ministry. Humiliated and widely detested, it would have been difficult to imagine then that just two decades later, that same pugnacious Ariel Sharon would become prime minister and