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 returne

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 b

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, S

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

The Labor Party won the postponed elections in December 1973, but Golda Meir resigned in April 1974 and was succeeded by Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin had a smaller majority than Meir had had in her first term, and with the country still seething, he was in many ways presiding over a party whose hegemony was about to end.

THE RAID ON QIBYA also marked the beginning of the public—and controversial—career of Ariel Sharon, Israel’s daring and brilliant military commander. Sharon would prove difficult to label.