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

Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, the former mayor of Jerusalem, declared his intention to hand over the majority of Palestinian territories in the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority. Unlike some of his predecessors, Olmert was asserting that a Palestinian state could be established before many of the thorniest issues in the negotiations would

Peres subsequently served in a number of significant roles beyond his being a member of the Knesset, including minister of foreign affairs, minister of defense, minister of finance, and prime minister from 1984 to 1986. Now, committed to Rabin’s vision of peace, he pushed on with Oslo. In November and December 1995, Israel redeployed out of all the

September 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered to create a Palestinian state in Gaza, almost all of the West Bank, and half of Jerusalem.

WITH THE GAZA EVACUATION complete, getting Israel disentangled from Palestinians on the West Bank was next on Sharon’s docket. To smooth his political path, he left the Likud and in November 2005 formed his own party, Kadima Yisrael (“Forward, Israel!”), recruiting centrists from both Labor and Likud. But four months after the Gaza disengagement,

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