Fixing a Hole: U.S. Diplomacy, World Opinion, and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, 1973–78

Observers of Middle Eastern politics have noted a maddening paradox: On the one hand, there is now widespread international agreement over the basic contours of a workable Israeli-Palestinian settlement—namely, Israel’s withdrawal to the pre-June 1967 lines and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.  On the other hand, we have no clear path toward reaching that goal.  The foreign affairs analyst Fareed Zakaria once quipped that the problem with Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy is not that there’s no light at the end of the tunnel but, rather, that there’s no tunnel.

This paradox, I argue, took shape during the half-decade spanning the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 and the Camp David agreement of 1978.  In those years an international consensus emerged over the appropriate resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute—a consensus that remains substantially unchanged to this day, envisioning the two-state settlement described above.  In precisely this same half-decade, however, the U.S. government locked itself into a diplomatic strategy that made it extremely unlikely that such a settlement would ever be implemented.  By promoting a separate peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, the United States facilitated Egypt’s removal from the Arab-Israeli conflict and thus permitted Israel to consolidate its occupation elsewhere, most notably through the construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.  Such “facts on the ground” have, in the decades since, all but precluded a settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict along lines endorsed by most nations of the world.