The document summarizes the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict, which began in the late 19th century with increased Jewish immigration to Palestine. There are competing claims over the land between Jews/Israelis and Palestinians/Arabs. The conflict consists of wars between Israel and neighboring Arab states from 1948-1973 over Israeli sovereignty and territorial integrity. A second aspect is the intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians over issues like borders, settlements, Jerusalem status, and Palestinian refugees. Resolving these core issues is challenging given the deep historical, religious and political narratives on both sides over claims to the land.

1. Arab–Israeli Conflict
ASAF SINIVER
University of Birmingham, UK
One of the most protracted and intractable
disputes of our time, defined along the com-
peting political, religious, territorial, and
national claims of two communities over one
land, the modern roots of the Arab–Israeli
conflict date back to the nineteenth century,
following the first waves of Jewish immigra-
tion to the land of Palestine, an area which
at the time was part of the Ottoman Empire.
There are broadly two competing narratives
concerning the historical and religious con-
nections to the land: a Jewish–Zionist–Israeli
narrative, and a Palestinian–Arab narrative.
Questions over “who was there first,” who
is the victim and who is the aggressor, and
ultimately whose land it is, have been con-
tested ever since by historians, political elites,
diasporas, casual observers of the conflict,
and of course the communities themselves.
The Arab–Israeli conflict consists of a
series of enduring rivalries. Firstly, there
has been an ongoing conflict between Israel
and its Arab neighbors Egypt, Jordan, Syria,
and Lebanon (and the Arab world more
broadly) over Israel’s sovereignty and terri-
torial integrity following its independence
in May 1948. It manifested itself in a series
of conventional wars: the First Arab–Israeli
War of 1948–49; the 1956 Suez Crisis; the
1967 Six-Day War; the 1967–70 War of
Attrition; the Yom Kippur War/October
War of 1973; and the 1982 Israel–Lebanon
War. Secondly, and the more intractable
aspect of the conflict, has been that between
Israelis and Palestinians. This relationship
had been shaped largely by the plight of
The Encyclopedia of Diplomacy. Edited by Gordon Martel.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118885154.dipl0337
Palestinian-Arabs during the 1948 and 1967
wars, and Israel’s military occupation of Arab
land following the 1967 war. It has since
been punctuated by two popular Palestinian
uprisings (Intifadas) in 1987 and 2000 and a
peace process which began in 1993; however
to date the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has
remained immune to resolution.
Whereas the conflict between Israel and
the Arabs centers mostly around territorial
claims, the adjacent dispute between Israelis
and Palestinians is composed of several core
issues which make it far more intractable
as its resolution is contingent on agreement
on all of the core issues, namely the status
of Jerusalem, the resolution of the refugees
issue, the status of Israeli settlements and bor-
ders, and security. There are other important
issues such as control of water sources in the
West Bank; however, they are not perceived
as “deal breakers” as much as the other issues.
Jerusalem is arguably the most emotive
of these core issues, being sacred to Jews,
Muslims, and Christians. The negotiated
outcome of the dispute over Jerusalem,
especially aspects concerning freedom of
worship and access to the holy sites in the
Old City of Jerusalem, therefore concerns
billions of people beyond the immediate
communities who live on the land. Known as
Temple Mount to Jews and Haram al-Sharif
to Muslims, this tiny compound (0.0578125
sq. mi.) at the heart of the Old City com-
prises 100 different historical and religious
monuments dating back thousands of years.
It is where the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Wail-
ing Wall (a remnant of the exterior wall of
the Second Temple) lie in close proximity
to each other, and where inter-communal
clashes took place over access rights as early
as 1920. Both Israelis and Palestinians claim

2. 2 ARAB–ISRAELI CONFLICT
Jerusalem as their historical and eternal cap-
ital. Jerusalem is the holiest city to Judaism
and the home of the two Jewish Temples – the
first Jewish kingdom with Jerusalem as its
capital appeared in 1000 BCE, some 1700 years
before the rise of Islam and Muslim rule over
the city. Jerusalem is also the third holiest
city to Islam (after Mecca and Medina), and
the location of the Prophet Muhammad’s
miraculous journey and ascension to heaven.
In the eyes of the international community
(including the United States and the Euro-
pean Union) Jerusalem is an international
city and its political status is to be determined
in negotiations between Israelis and Pales-
tinians. Jerusalem was designated as a corpus
separatum by the United Nations General
Assembly in Resolution 181 of November 29,
1947, which also recommended the estab-
lishment of a Jewish state and an Arab state
in the historic land of Palestine. Therefore
even though Israel declared Jerusalem as
its capital in December 1949, it has not
subsequently been recognized as such by
the international community, and foreign
embassies are located in Tel Aviv instead. In
1990 the United Nations General Assembly
declared East Jerusalem an illegally occu-
pied Palestinian territory (West Jerusalem
has been an Israeli territory since the First
Arab–Israeli War).
Compared to the historical significance
of Jerusalem, the refugees issue is far more
recent and dates back to the First Arab–Israeli
War of 1948–49. It centers on a key ques-
tion concerning which side is responsible
for the plight of approximately 750,000
Palestinian-Arabs during the war, and conse-
quently who bears the ultimate responsibility
for their reparation. Israel claims that as the
war came about as a result of the combined
Arab attack on the new Jewish state, it cannot
be held responsible for the inevitable creation
of the refugee problem. The Arabs, however,
maintain that during the war Israeli forces
actively expelled people from their homes and
razed hundreds of Palestinian villages to the
ground. UN General Assembly Resolution
194 of December 1948 called for the return of
refugees to their homes and their compensa-
tion; however, the meaning of the resolution
has been debated by the parties ever since.
In subsequent negotiations Israel refused to
allow the automatic compensation and return
of Palestinian refugees to their homes (now in
Israel), whereas the Palestinians have insisted
that Israel accept responsibility for the prob-
lem and acknowledge the refugees’ right of
return. The creation of a further 250,000
Palestinian refugees following the 1967
Six-Day War has further cemented the issue as
a core aspect of the conflict, and has helped to
galvanize Palestinian national consciousness.
The third core issue of the Israeli–Pales-
tinian conflict concerns the status of Israeli
settlements in the West Bank (in 2005 Israel
withdrew from the Gaza Strip and uprooted
its 8000 settlers from there). The first Israeli
settlements appeared shortly after the 1967
war, despite the advice of the government’s
legal counsel who cautioned that this activity
contravened Article 49 of the Geneva Con-
vention, which prohibited the Occupying
Power from transferring its civilian popula-
tion to the territory it occupies. The official
policy of the Israeli government however
maintains that these territories are “disputed”
rather than “occupied,” as there has never
been a Palestinian state on this land – the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip were captured
from Jordan and Egypt, respectively. In the
eyes of the international community Israeli
settlements are illegal (“illegitimate” in the
eyes of the United States), and the continuing
expansion of settlement activity by successive
Israeli governments is seen as a deliberate
policy to disrupt the territorial continuity
of a Palestinian state. There are approxi-
mately 500,000 settlers in the West Bank
(including some 250,000 in East Jerusalem),

3. ARAB–ISRAELI CONFLICT 3
Map 1 Arab–Israeli Conflict. Source: Martel, G. (Ed.) (2012) Encyclopedia of War. Oxford: Wiley Black-
well. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.
living amongst a Palestinian population of
2.2 million. The fate of the Israeli settlements
is closely interlinked with the delineation of
borders in a future peace agreement, as the
size of the Israeli withdrawal from the West
Bank and extent of settlement dismantlement
will determine the size and borders of the
Palestinian state.
Finally, the core issue of security undercuts
the other core issues as their future resolution
is dependent of the conclusion of satisfac-
tory security arrangements. It also mostly
emanates from one side, Israel, whereas
the other core issues are contested by both
sides. Israel’s key demand on security is that
a future Palestinian state will be demilita-
rized – without a standing army and with only
a limited security force for internal policing.
However such demands and others are viewed
by the Palestinians as a threat to the auton-
omy and sovereignty of the Palestinian state
which will only maintain the asymmetrical
power relations between the sides.
Mapping the diplomatic history of the
conflict is therefore fraught with challenges
and controversies. Jewish–Israeli narratives
point to biblical texts and the first Jewish
kingdom with Jerusalem as its capital dating
back to 1000 BCE, whereas Palestinian–Arab
narratives refer to the overwhelming majority
of Muslim–Arab population in the area of
Palestine for almost a millennium. However,
it was not until the late nineteenth cen-
tury that Palestine became a contested land
between Arabs and Jews, and the Arab–Israeli
conflict did not emerge until Israel’s creation

4. 4 ARAB–ISRAELI CONFLICT
in May 1948 and the First Arab–Israeli War
which immediately followed.
The modern roots of the conflict are com-
monly traced back to the late nineteenth
century. In the face of increasing persecution
and state-sponsored anti-Semitic attacks
across tsarist Russia and Eastern Europe in
the 1880s, Zionism emerged as the ideologi-
cal solution by calling for a homeland for the
Jews in their ancestral home Eretz Israel or
“Land of Israel.” Between 1881 and 1948 the
percentage of Jewish population in Palestine
had risen from 5 percent of the total (mostly
Muslim) population to 33 percent. A series
of violent clashes between the Jewish and
Arab communities in 1920, 1921, 1929, and
1936–39 prompted Britain, which received a
mandate over Palestine from the League of
Nations at the end of First World War, to find
solutions to the incompatible demands of
the Jewish and Arab communities; however,
its efforts did little more than exacerbate the
nascent conflict and alienate the Arab and
Jewish communities. Indeed the British had
played an important role in sowing the seeds
of the conflict by promising the same land to
the two peoples: first to Arab leader Hussein
Bin Ali in 1916 in exchange for his help to
defeat the Ottomans, while in 1917 the Bal-
four Declaration, issued by the foreign secre-
tary, expressed the commitment of the British
government to the establishment in Palestine
of a national home for the Jewish people. By
1937 the British had come to the realization
that the only solution was a surgical separa-
tion of the two communities, when the Royal
Peel Commission recommended the partition
of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.
Following the end of the Second World
War there was increased pressure on Britain,
not least from US president Harry Truman,
to allow Jewish survivors of the Holocaust
to enter Palestine. However the mandatory
authorities refused to allow unrestricted
Jewish immigration for fear of alienating
the Arab population. By 1947, with Jewish
and Arab violence reaching unprecedented
levels, Britain decided to refer the question of
the future of Palestine to the nascent United
Nations. On November 29, 1947, the UN
General Assembly passed Resolution 181
which called for the partition of mandatory
Palestine into a Jewish state and Arab state,
with Jerusalem designated as an international
city. The Jewish community in Palestine (the
Yishuv) accepted the resolution but the Arabs
rejected it as an unjust solution to the prob-
lem. Following the termination of the British
mandate on May 14, 1948 the state of Israel
was established, leading to its invasion by the
armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and
Iraq the following day. In 1949 UN mediator
Ralph Bunche helped to conclude four bilat-
eral armistice agreements between Israel and
Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Known
as the Green Line, the armistice borders
between Israel and its Arab borders remained
unchanged for nearly two decades: Egypt was
in control of the Gaza Strip, Jordan in control
of the West Bank of the River Jordan includ-
ing East Jerusalem (including the Old City
and its Holy Sites), while Israel’s territorial
gains meant that it increased in size from the
55 percent allocated to it in the UN partition
resolution to 78 percent of mandate Palestine
at the end of the First Arab–Israeli War,
including West Jerusalem. Known as the War
of Independence by Israelis, it is remembered
as the Nakba, or catastrophe, for the Pales-
tinians for their loss of land and the expulsion
and departure of approximately 750,000
Palestinians from their homes during the
war. Since then the plight of the Palestinian
refugees and their right of return has been
one of the core issues of the Arab–Israeli con-
flict and more recent negotiations between
Israelis and Palestinians. The origins of the
First Arab–Israeli War, and especially the
roots of the refugee problem, have since been
fiercely debated by scholars. In the 1980s the

5. ARAB–ISRAELI CONFLICT 5
Israel State Archive released to the public
previously classified governmental records
pertaining to this period, which gave rise to
scholarly debates between “Old” and “New”
historians about which party bore the ulti-
mate responsibility for the origins of the war
and the birth of refugee problem.
The Second Arab–Israeli War – the Suez
War of 1956 – came following years of
cross-border infiltrations of guerrilla groups
(Fedayeen) into Israel, and Egyptian president
Gamal Abdel Nasser’s decision to nationalize
the Suez Canal and to close the Straits of Tiran
at its southern tip to Israeli and Israel-bound
shipping. At the same time, Israel’s approach
to asserting its borders, primarily via mili-
tary retributions against Arab villages (most
famously the October 1953 Qibya raid which
resulted in dozens of civilian deaths) fur-
ther contributed to the escalation of hostile
relations between Israel and its neighbors.
In October 1956 Israel colluded with France
and Britain, who wished to maintain their
strategic interests in the region, to attack
Egypt and force it to reopen the Suez Canal.
However, despite the successful military cam-
paign the plan backfired and the three allies
were forced to withdraw their forces amidst
the condemnation of the United Nations
and unprecedented cooperation between the
United States and Soviet Union to bring the
crisis to an end. The Suez War was followed
by a decade of relative calm; however, in
June 1967, the conflict entered a new phase
which changed the maps and politics of the
Arab–Israeli conflict and the international
community’s attention to it. The June 1967
War, or Six-Day War, came as a result of a
series of miscalculations by the Arabs, Israelis,
and the Soviets. With the Egyptian and Syrian
armies massed on its borders (though not
assuming offensive postures), Israel launched
pre-emptive strikes and within six days it
captured the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula
from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria,
and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from
Jordan, which joined the war in the first day
despite warnings from Israel to stay out of the
fighting. The Six-Day War had dramatically
changed the political and military balance
of power in the Middle East. The Arabs and
their Soviet backers were humiliated, with
Nasser’s pan-Arabism suffering a deadly
blow. Arab attitudes towards Israel became
even more intransigent and belligerent – in
September 1967 the Arab League summit in
Khartoum passed the famous “Three No’s
Resolution” – No to negotiations with Israel,
No to recognition of Israel, No to peace with
Israel. The war also saw the resurrection of
Palestinian national consciousness following
the plight of 250,000 refugees from Gaza and
the West Bank, while the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) gradually became a key
non-state actor in the conflict by inflicting
heavy casualties on Israeli civilians by means
of terror. Israel’s territory more than quadru-
pled as a result of the war, which now placed
it in the position of an occupying military
power of more than one million Palestinians
in the West Bank and Gaza. A few weeks
after the war Israel’s national unity govern-
ment ordered the construction of the first
civilian settlements in the recently occupied
territories, despite the condemnation of the
international community and in violation of
the Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Conven-
tion which prohibits the transfer of civilian
populations by the occupying power into the
occupied territory. Israel’s decision to annex
East Jerusalem and unify the city as Israel’s
eternal capital was another important legacy
of the Six-Day War. To date the international
community does not recognize Jerusalem as
Israel’s capital, instead viewing the status of
the city as a matter to be negotiated between
Israel and the Palestinians. On November
22, 1967, the UN Security Council passed
what is perhaps its most famous resolution
on the Arab–Israeli conflict: Resolution 242

6. 6 ARAB–ISRAELI CONFLICT
put forward the formula of “land for peace,”
by calling on Israel to withdraw from ter-
ritories occupied in the recent war, while
recognizing the right of every state to live
in peace and security. Resolution 242 was
deliberately vague on the point of Israel’s
withdrawal “from territories” (as opposed to
“the territories”), and the question of how
much land should Israel withdraw from in
exchange for how much peace would be
offered by the Arab states has been at the
forefront of subsequent negotiations ever
since. The Six-Day War changed not only the
Arab–Israeli military balance of power, but
it also turned the Middle East conflict into
one of the hot-spots of the Cold War, with
the United States supporting Israel and the
Soviet Union backing the Arab states, most
prominently Egypt and Syria. The tension
between the superpowers over the conflict
reached unprecedented levels in the last days
of the Yom Kippur/October War of 1973. The
war began with a combined surprise attack
by Egypt and Syria on Israeli positions in the
Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights respec-
tively, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the
Jewish calendar. During the three-week war
both superpowers supported their respective
allies with arms; by the war’s end the high
stakes had brought the superpowers as close
as they had been to a direct confrontation
since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, with
American forces around the world placed on
the highest level of alert short of nuclear war.
Unsurprisingly, the protracted nature of the
conflict had made it a fertile arena for interna-
tional diplomacy and third-party mediation
in particular. During the first two decades
of the conflict the majority of mediation
efforts were carried out by United Nations
envoys. However, following the 1967 Six-Day
War, the conflict became a key hot-spot for
superpower confrontation by proxy, with
the United States standing firmly behind
Israel and the Soviet Union supporting Arab
regimes such as Egypt and Syria.
Following the 1973 Yom Kippur War/
October War the United States became,
for the first time in the history of the con-
flict, the principal intermediary under the
leadership US secretary of state Henry
Kissinger. Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy and
“step-by-step” approach to the resolution
of the conflict helped to end the Arab oil
embargo, diminish the influence of the
Soviet Union in the region, and made the
United States the undisputed and indispens-
able mediator, manager, and guarantor of
what has since been known as the Mid-
dle East peace process. Between 1974 and
1975 Kissinger mediated two disengagement
agreements between Israel and Egypt in the
Sinai Peninsula, and another between Israel
and Syria in the Golan Heights – the first
diplomatic success since the 1949 armistice
agreements. In 1977 President Sadat of Egypt
made a historic visit to the Israeli Knesset
in Jerusalem, which not only split the Arab
world, but also led to American president
Jimmy Carter’s successful mediation of the
Camp David Accords between Sadat and
Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin in
September 1978. These historic agreements
were the basis for the Israel–Egypt peace
treaty which was signed in March 1979,
the first Arab–Israeli peace in the history
of the conflict. For their efforts both Begin
and Sadat were awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize. However despite the historic magni-
tude of the peace treaty, it was not followed
by further diplomatic progress in the next
decade: Israel’s disastrous intervention in
Lebanon in 1982, the outbreak of the first
Palestinian Intifada (uprising) five years
later, and American preoccupation with the
East–West relations and the end of the Cold
War were some of the reasons for the freezing
of Arab–Israeli diplomacy during much of
the 1980s.

7. ARAB–ISRAELI CONFLICT 7
Israeli–Palestinian relations were not the
subject of diplomacy until the early 1990s.
The end of the 1991 First Gulf War pre-
sented the administration of George H. W.
Bush with a renewed mandate to restart
the peace process and to introduce a new
vision for the Arab–Israeli conflict. The first
step in this direction was the Madrid Peace
Conference (October 1991) which set the
wheels in motion for subsequent negotia-
tions between Israeli, Arab, and Palestinian
teams in Washington. In September 1993,
following months of secret talks sponsored
by the Norwegian government, Israeli prime
minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader
Yasser Arafat signed the Declaration of
Principles (“Oslo I” agreement). In this his-
toric agreement the PLO recognized Israel’s
sovereignty and renounced violence, while
the Israeli government recognized the PLO as
the representative of the Palestinian people.
The agreement also set several principles
to guide subsequent negotiations. A peace
treaty between Israel and Jordan in 1994
and ongoing negotiations between Israel and
Syria throughout the decade gave much hope
that the Arab–Israeli conflict was nearing
its end. However, strong opposition to the
Oslo peace process from Palestinian groups
such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as well
as the Israeli Right, led to unprecedented
levels of Israeli–Palestinian violence and the
derailing of the peace process. In October
1995 Israel and the Palestinian Authority
signed the Oslo II agreement, which out-
lined the further withdrawal of Israeli forces
from major towns in the West Bank, and
the transferring of civilian authority to the
Palestinians. The agreement was violently
rejected by peace spoilers on both sides, and a
week later the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak
Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Jewish
extremist. The rise of the right-wing Likud
Party under the leadership of Benjamin
Netanyahu and the escalation in terrorist
attacks carried out by Palestinian groups
had brought Israeli–Palestinian relations to
their lowest ebb by the end of the decade.
However, following the return to power of
the Labor Party in Israel in 1999, the new
prime minister, Ehud Barak, was determined
to reach peace agreements with the Pales-
tinians as well as Syria. Despite Barak’s good
intentions neither track of negotiations was
successful: following the collapse of talks with
the Syrians he directed all his attention on the
Palestinian track, and in July 2000 the parties
held dramatic talks at Camp David under the
mediation of US president Bill Clinton. Like
many other episodes in the history of this
conflict, the historiography of this summit,
especially concerning who is responsible for
its failure, remains debated to this day. The
Israelis maintain that in the summit Barak
made the Palestinians the most generous offer
ever presented by an Israeli prime minister,
including 90 percent of the West Bank and
a capital in East Jerusalem; however, the
Palestinians rejected the Israeli offer as unjust
and disingenuous. The collapse of the Camp
David summit led to the most violent episode
in the history of Israeli–Palestinian relations:
as both sides felt disenchanted with the peace
process, the visit of the leader of the Likud
Party, Ariel Sharon, to the holy site of Temple
Mount/Harem al-Sharif in the Old City of
Jerusalem in September 2000, provided the
spark that ignited what became known as
the second Intifada. During the next five
years Palestinian terrorism against Israeli
civilians and Israeli military retributions in
Palestinian areas claimed the lives of more
than 3000 Palestinians and 1000 Israelis.
The peace process was effectively over, and
despite periodic efforts by the United States to
revive negotiations, the two sides had failed
to regain sufficient confidence and trust in
each other to negotiate the end of the conflict.
Israeli–Palestinian talks have been effec-
tively gridlocked since the last major peace

8. 8 ARAB–ISRAELI CONFLICT
initiative at the US-hosted Annapolis
Conference in November 2007, which also
ended in failure. Interspersed only by US
secretary of state John Kerry’s nine-month
mission which ended in failure in April 2014,
the past decade has witnessed considerably
more challenges than opportunities con-
ducive to Israeli–Palestinian negotiations,
let alone substantive peace talks: Israel and
Hamas fought three times in Gaza (2008–9,
2012, 2014) and there were several rounds
of Israeli–Palestinian violence in Jerusalem
and the West Bank. Israel has seen three
Netanyahu-led right-wing governments
(2009–13, 2013–15, 2015–) which were com-
mitted to the expansion of settlement activity
and legislation which undermined the demo-
cratic character of the state of Israel, while
on the Palestinian side efforts to reach unity
between the Fatah and Hamas factions have
failed repeatedly to ease intra-Palestinian
tensions. Furthermore, mutual trust between
Israelis and Palestinians has hit rock bot-
tom following a series of unilateral moves
on both sides, such as Israel’s settlement
activity, the blockade of the Gaza Strip, and
the withholding of Palestinian tax money, as
well as the Palestinian Authority’s successful
upgrade of its international status to that of a
non-Member Observer State at the UN Gen-
eral Assembly (2012), its application to join
fifteen major international conventions and
treaties such as the International Criminal
Court, and the subsequent request from the
ICC to launch an inquiry into alleged war
crimes committed by Israel during the 2014
Gaza War. The absence of Israeli–Palestinian
trust and empathy has been accompanied by
a series of regional events which have fur-
ther destabilized the region and the parties’
relations with old allies. The Netanyahu gov-
ernment in particular has propagated almost
unprecedented levels of anxiety following the
events of the Arab Spring, the two revolutions
in Egypt, the civil war in Syria, the emergence
of Islamic State, and the threat from Iran
and its proxies such as Hezbollah. At the
same time Hamas’s and Fatah’s respective
relations with regional actors such as Egypt,
Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran have
been significantly complicated as a result of
these recent regional developments. Finally,
even the refreshing early rhetoric of the first
Obama administration in the Cairo Speech
(titled “A New Beginning”), was soon fol-
lowed by criticism of a US Middle East policy
which suffered from lack of direction, ideas,
and leadership. The administration’s 2010
announcement of a “Pivot” in US foreign pol-
icy away from the Middle East and towards
Asia, the mishandling of the Syrian civil
war in 2013, and the controversial nuclear
agreement with Iran in 2015 have further
diminished America’s credibility and leverage
in the region. Nevertheless the United States
remains the most important, if not indis-
pensable, intermediary in the conflict. This
is partly because of its historic investment
in Arab–Israeli diplomacy since the early
1970s, as well as its special relationship with
Israel and the power of the pro-Israel lobby in
Washington. Kissinger’s and Carter’s success-
ful mediation efforts in the 1970s not only
cemented the US role as the principal medi-
ator in the region, but they also effectively
shut out any prospects of other third parties
presenting alternative proposals or peace
plans to the disputants. American hegemony
(together with local and regional contexts)
therefore accounts for much of the ebb and
flow in diplomatic activity in the conflict since
the 1970s, with the Norwegian-sponsored
secret Oslo talks being the only exception.
Compared to the predominant role of the
United States in the conflict, European coun-
tries – whether individually or collectively
as the European Community (EC) and later
the European Union (EU) – have struggled
to find a meaningful role to play as interme-
diaries. In its 1980 Venice Declaration the

9. ARAB–ISRAELI CONFLICT 9
EC showed remarkable vision in calling for
Palestinian self-determination and the recog-
nition of the PLO as a legitimate partner in
future Arab–Israeli peace negotiations, while
in its 1999 Berlin Declaration the EU publicly
called for a viable and democratic Palestinian
state alongside a secure Israeli state. However,
despite these important statements, the EU
has failed to demonstrate the necessary abil-
ity and willpower to transform declaratory
policies into consequential actions. Com-
pared to the power brokerage of the United
States and its pro-Israel tilt in negotiations,
the EU’s main contribution lies in the realm
of institutional, humanitarian, and finan-
cial support of the Palestinian Authority. In
response to the violent second Intifada, in
2002 the United States and the EU joined
forces, together with the UN and Russia, to
establish the Quartet on the Middle East;
however, its 2003 Roadmap for peace has
failed to bring the desired results, as Israelis
and Palestinians continued to grow apart
amidst the rising levels of violence. Other
actors have also failed to leave an enduring
impact on the conflict: in 2002 (and again in
2007) the Arab League presented its peace
initiative to Israel, whereby it offered full
peace and the end of conflict in return for
Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 border,
a just solution to the refugee problem, and
the establishment of a Palestinian state with
its capital in East Jerusalem. However, Israel
rejected the initiative as unrealistic and disin-
genuous. The United Nations has also called
for the resumption of the peace process on
numerous occasions; however, its lack of
political clout and automatic pro-Palestine
majority have prevented it from playing a
more substantive and conclusive role in this
conflict.
Despite the multitude of diplomatic efforts
it is clear that a resolution of the Arab–Israeli
conflict can only come as a result of real
change in the attitudes and perceptions of
the parties themselves. However, in such a
challenging environment – both domestically
and regionally – it would be unrealistic to
expect a positive change in the immediate
future. Judging by its tumultuous history and
recent trends, there is little hope that the
Arab–Israeli conflict will soon be resolved.
SEE ALSO: Begin, Menachem (1913–92);
Bunche, Ralph (1903/4–71); Carter, Jimmy
(1924–); Clinton, Bill (1946–); Hussein, King
(1935–99); Kissinger, Henry (1923–); Nasser,
Gamal Abdel (1918–70); Non-State Actors and
Diplomacy; Oil Diplomacy; Palestine Crisis of
1948; Sadat, Anwar (1918–81); Suez Crisis
(1956); Truman, Harry S. (1884–1972); United
Nations
SUGGESTED READINGS
Adwan, S., and E. Naveh (Eds.) (2012) Side by Side:
Parallel Histories of Israel–Palestine. New York:
The New Press.
Ben-Ami, S. (2007) Scars of War, Wounds of Peace:
The Israeli–Arab Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Bickerton, I., and C. Klausner (2014) A History
of the Arab–Israeli Conflict. Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Pearson.
Caplan, N. (2010) The Israel–Palestine Conflict:
Contested Histories. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Chomsky, N. (1999) Fateful Triangle: The United
States, Israel and the Palestinians. Brooklyn:
South End Press.
Dowty, A. (2012) Israel/Palestine. Cambridge:
Polity.
Eisenberg, L., and N. Caplan (2010) Negotiating
Arab–Israeli Peace: Patterns, Problems, Possibil-
ities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gelvin, J. (2014) The Israel–Palestine Conflict: One
Hundred Years of War. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gilbert, M. (2008) Israel: A History. New York:
HarperCollins.
Herzog, C. (2010) The Arab–Israeli Wars: War and
Peace in the Middle East. Barnsley: Frontline
Books.
Khalidi, R. (2007) The Iron Cage: The Story of the
Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Boston: Bea-
con Press.

10. 10 ARAB–ISRAELI CONFLICT
Laqueur, W., and B. Rubin (Eds.) (2008) The
Israel–Arab Reader: A Documentary History of
the Middle East Conflict. New York: Penguin.
Lesch, D. (2007) The Arab–Israeli Conflict: A His-
tory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mahler, G., and A. Mahler (2009) The Arab–Israeli
Conflict: An Introduction and Documentary
Reader. London: Routledge.
Mearsheimer, J., and S. Walt (2008) The Israel
Lobby and US Foreign Policy. New York: FSG.
Morris, B. (1999) Righteous Victims: A History of
the Zionist–Arab Conflict, 1881–1999. New York:
Random House.
Pappe, I. (2006) A History of Modern Palestine: One
Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Peters, J., and D. Newman (Eds.) (2015) Rout-
ledge Handbook on the Israeli–Palestinian Con-
flict. London: Routledge.
Quandt, W. (2005) Peace Process: American Diplo-
macy and the Arab–Israeli Conflict Since 1967.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rabinovich, I. (2011) The Lingering Conflict: Israel,
the Arabs, and the Middle East, 1948–2011.
Washington, DC: Brookings.
Said, E. (1992) The Question of Palestine. New York:
Vintage.
Segev, T. (2001) One Palestine, Complete: Jews and
Arabs under the British Mandate. New York:
Henry Holt.
Shlaim, A. (2000) The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab
World. London: Penguin.
Smith, C. (2014) Palestine and the Arab–Israeli
Conflict: A History with Documents. New York:
St. Martin’s Press.
Tessler, M. (2009) A History of the Israeli–
Palestinian Conflict. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press.