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Pictures from "Photograph Insert" section of "Promised Land" (at end of book) (1): Caption: "Palestinians in Gaza watching me speak in Cairo on June 4, 2009. During the campaign, I’d pledged to deliver an address to the world’s Muslims, believing that acknowledging the sources of tension between the West and the Muslim world would be a first step toward peaceful coexistence."; (2): Caption: "[From left to right] President Mahmoud Abbas, President Hosni Mubarak, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu [and Obama; the two other people in the picture are not identified] checking their watches to see if the sun had officially set. It was the Muslim month of Ramadan, and we had to be sure the fast had been lifted before sitting down to dinner."

Obama "Promised Land" (2020): On Israel-Palestine, From Chapter 25

Mine was hardly the first U.S. administration to lose sleep over those relatively thin pieces of real estate. The conflict between Arabs and Jews had been an open sore on the region for almost a century, dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British, who were then occupying Palestine, committed to create a “national home for the Jewish people” in a region overwhelmingly populated by Arabs. Over the next twenty or so years, Zionist leaders mobilized a surge of Jewish migration to Palestine and organized highly trained armed forces to defend their settlements. In 1947, in the wake of World War II and in the shadow of the Holocaust’s unspeakable crimes, the United Nations approved a partition plan to establish two sovereign states, one Jewish, the other Arab, with Jerusalem—a city considered holy by Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike—to be governed by an international body. Zionist leaders embraced the plan, but Arab Palestinians, as well as surrounding Arab nations that were also just emerging from colonial rule, strenuously objected. As Britain withdrew, the two sides quickly fell into war. And with Jewish militias claiming victory in 1948, the State of Israel was officially born.

For the Jewish people, it was a dream fulfilled, a state of their own in their historic homeland after centuries of exile, religious persecution, and the more recent horrors of the Holocaust. But for the roughly seven hundred thousand Arab Palestinians who found themselves stateless and driven from their lands, the same events would be a part of what became known as the Nakba, or “Catastrophe.” For the next three decades, Israel would engage in a succession of conflicts with its Arab neighbors—most significantly the Six-Day War of 1967, in which a greatly outnumbered Israeli military routed the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In the process, Israel seized control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The memory of those losses, and the humiliation that came with it, became a defining aspect of Arab nationalism, and support for the Palestinian cause a central tenet of Arab foreign policy.

Meanwhile, Palestinians living within the occupied territories, mostly in refugee camps, found themselves governed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), with their movements and economic activity severely restricted, prompting calls for armed resistance and resulting in the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Arab politicians routinely denounced Israel, often in explicitly anti-Semitic terms, and most governments in the region embraced the PLO’s chairman, Yasser Arafat, as a freedom fighter—even as his organization and its affiliates engaged in escalating and bloody terrorist attacks against unarmed civilians.

The United States was no bystander in all this. Jewish Americans had suffered generations of discrimination in their own country, but they and other Jews emigrating from the West to Israel still shared language, customs, and appearance with their white Christian brethren, and in comparison to Arabs, they still enjoyed far more sympathy from the American public. Harry Truman had been the first foreign leader to formally recognize Israel as a sovereign state, and the American Jewish community pressed U.S. officials to assist the fledgling nation. With the world’s two Cold War superpowers vying for influence in the Middle East, the United States became Israel’s primary patron—and with that, Israel’s problems with its neighbors became America’s problems as well.

...

Along with giving Jordan license to follow Egypt’s example and conclude its own peace deal with Israel, Oslo provided a framework for the eventual creation of an autonomous Palestinian state, one that, ideally, would coexist with a secure Israel that was at peace with its neighbors. But old wounds, and the lure of violence over compromise among factions on both sides, proved too much to overcome. Rabin was assassinated by a far-right Israeli extremist in 1995. His liberal successor, Shimon Peres, served for seven months before losing a snap election to Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing Likud party, whose platform had once included total annexation of the Palestinian territories. Unhappy about the Oslo Accords, harder-line organizations like Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad set about undermining the credibility of Arafat and his Fatah party with Palestinians, calling for armed struggle to take back Arab lands and push Israel into the sea.

After Netanyahu was defeated in the 1999 election, his more liberal successor, Ehud Barak, made efforts to establish a broader peace in the Middle East, including outlining a two-state solution that went further than any previous Israeli proposal. Arafat demanded more concessions, however, and talks collapsed in recrimination. Meanwhile, one day in September 2000, Likud party leader Ariel Sharon led a group of Israeli legislators on a deliberately provocative and highly publicized visit to one of Islam’s holiest sites, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. It was a stunt designed to assert Israel’s claim over the wider territory, one that challenged the leadership of Ehud Barak and enraged Arabs near and far. Four months later, Sharon became Israel’s next prime minister, governing throughout what became known as the Second Intifada: four years of violence between the two sides, marked by tear gas and rubber bullets directed at stone-throwing protesters; Palestinian suicide bombs detonated outside an Israeli nightclub and in buses carrying senior citizens and schoolchildren; deadly IDF retaliatory raids and the indiscriminate arrest of thousands of Palestinians; and Hamas rockets launched from Gaza into Israeli border towns, answered by U.S.-supplied Israeli Apache helicopters leveling entire neighborhoods.

Approximately a thousand Israelis and three thousand Palestinians died during this period—including scores of children—and by the time the violence subsided, in 2005, the prospects for resolving the underlying conflict had fundamentally changed. The Bush administration’s focus on Iraq, Afghanistan, and the War on Terror left it little bandwidth to worry about Middle East peace, and while Bush remained officially supportive of a two-state solution, he was reluctant to press Sharon on the issue. Publicly, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states continued to offer support to the Palestinian cause, but they were increasingly more concerned with limiting Iranian influence and rooting out extremist threats to their own regimes. The Palestinians themselves had splintered after Arafat’s death in 2004: Gaza came under the control of Hamas and soon found itself under a tightly enforced Israeli blockade, while the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority, which continued to govern the West Bank, came to be viewed by even some of its supporters as feckless and corrupt.

Most important, Israeli attitudes toward peace talks had hardened, in part because peace no longer seemed so crucial to ensuring the country’s safety and prosperity. The Israel of the 1960s that remained lodged in the popular imagination, with its communal kibbutz living and periodic rationing of basic supplies, had been transformed into a modern economic powerhouse. It was no longer the plucky David surrounded by hostile Goliaths; thanks to tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military aid, the Israeli armed forces were now matchless in the region. Terrorist bombings and attacks within Israel had all but ceased, due in some measure to the fact that Israel had erected a wall more than four hundred miles long between itself and the Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, punctuated with strategically placed checkpoints to control the flow of Palestinian workers in and out of Israel. Every so often, rocket fire from Gaza still endangered those living in Israeli border towns, and the presence of Jewish Israeli settlers in the West Bank sometimes triggered deadly skirmishes. For most residents of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, however, the Palestinians lived largely out of sight, their struggles and resentments troubling but remote.

Given everything that was already on my plate when I became president, it would have been tempting to just do my best to manage the status quo, quash any outbreaks of renewed violence between Israeli and Palestinian factions, and otherwise leave the whole mess alone. But taking into account the broader foreign policy concerns, I decided I couldn’t go that route. Israel remained a key U.S. ally, and even with the threats reduced, it still endured terrorist attacks that jeopardized not only its citizens but also the thousands of Americans who lived or traveled there. At the same time, just about every country in the world considered Israel’s continued occupation of the Palestinian territories to be a violation of international law. As a result, our diplomats found themselves in the awkward position of having to defend Israel for actions that we ourselves opposed. U.S. officials also had to explain why it wasn’t hypocritical for us to press countries like China or Iran on their human rights records while showing little concern for the rights of Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Israeli occupation continued to inflame the Arab community and feed anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world.

...

Yes, many of Arafat’s tactics had been abhorrent. Yes, Palestinian leaders had too often missed opportunities for peace; there’d been no Havel or Gandhi to mobilize a nonviolent movement with the moral force to sway Israeli public opinion. And yet none of that negated the fact that millions of Palestinians lacked self-determination and many of the basic rights that even citizens of non-democratic countries enjoyed. Generations were growing up in a starved and shrunken world from which they literally couldn’t escape, their daily lives subject to the whims of a distant, often hostile authority and the suspicions of every blank-faced, rifle-carrying soldier demanding to see their papers at each checkpoint they passed.

By the time I took office, though, most congressional Republicans had abandoned any pretense of caring about what happened to the Palestinians. Indeed, a strong majority of white evangelicals—the GOP’s most reliable voting bloc—believed that the creation and gradual expansion of Israel fulfilled God’s promise to Abraham and heralded Christ’s eventual return. On the Democratic side, even stalwart progressives were loath to look less pro-Israel than Republicans, especially since many of them were Jewish themselves or represented sizable Jewish constituencies.

Also, members of both parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful bipartisan lobbying organization dedicated to ensuring unwavering U.S. support for Israel. AIPAC’s clout could be brought to bear on virtually every congressional district in the country, and just about every politician in Washington— including me—counted AIPAC members among their key supporters and donors. In the past, the organization had accommodated a spectrum of views on Middle East peace, insisting mainly that those seeking its endorsement support a continuation of U.S. aid to Israel and oppose efforts to isolate or condemn Israel via the U.N. and other international bodies. But as Israeli politics had moved to the right, so had AIPAC’s policy positions. Its staff and leaders increasingly argued that there should be “no daylight” between the U.S. and Israeli governments, even when Israel took actions that were contrary to U.S. policy. Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as “anti-Israel” (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election.

I’d been on the receiving end of some of this during my presidential campaign, as Jewish supporters reported having to beat back assertions in their synagogues and on email chains that I was insufficiently supportive of— or even hostile toward—Israel. They attributed these whisper campaigns not to any particular position I’d taken (my backing of a two-state solution and opposition to Israeli settlements were identical to the positions of the other candidates) but rather to my expressions of concern for ordinary Palestinians; my friendships with certain critics of Israeli policy, including an activist and Middle East scholar named Rashid Khalidi; and the fact that, as Ben [Rhodes?] bluntly put it, “You’re a Black man with a Muslim name who lived in the same neighborhood as Louis Farrakhan and went to Jeremiah Wright’s church.”

On Election Day, I’d end up getting more than 70 percent of the Jewish vote, but as far as many AIPAC board members were concerned, I remained suspect, a man of divided loyalties: someone whose support for Israel, as one of Axe’s friends colorfully put it, wasn’t “felt in his kishkes”—“guts,” in Yiddish.

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But he [Rahm Immanuel] wasn’t optimistic [on progress to peace]—and the more time I spent with Netanyahu and his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, the more I understood why.

Built like a linebacker, with a square jaw, broad features, and a gray comb-over, Netanyahu was smart, canny, tough, and a gifted communicator in both Hebrew and English. (He’d been born in Israel but spent most of his formative years in Philadelphia, and traces of that city’s accent lingered in his polished baritone.) His family had deep roots in the Zionist movement: His grandfather, a rabbi, emigrated from Poland to British-governed Palestine in 1920, while his father—a professor of history best known for his writings on the persecution of Jews during the Spanish Inquisition—became a leader in the movement’s more militant wing before Israel’s founding. Although raised in a secular household, Netanyahu inherited his father’s devotion to the defense of Israel: He’d been a member of a special forces unit in the IDF and had fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and his older brother had died a hero in the legendary Entebbe raid of 1976, in which Israeli commandos rescued 102 passengers from Palestinian terrorists who had hijacked an Air France flight.

Whether Netanyahu also inherited his father’s unabashed hostility toward Arabs (“The tendency towards conflict is in the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won’t allow him any compromise or agreement”) was harder to say. What was certain was that he had built his entire political persona around an image of strength and the message that Jews couldn’t afford phony pieties—that they lived in a tough neighborhood and so had to be tough. This philosophy neatly aligned him with the most hawkish members of AIPAC, as well as Republican officials and wealthy American right-wingers. Netanyahu could be charming, or at least solicitous, when it served his purposes; he’d gone out of his way, for example, to meet me in a Chicago airport lounge shortly after I’d been elected to the U.S. Senate, lavishing praise on me for an inconsequential pro-Israel bill I’d supported in the Illinois state legislature. But his vision of himself as the chief defender of the Jewish people against calamity allowed him to justify almost anything that would keep him in power—and his familiarity with American politics and media gave him confidence that he could resist whatever pressure a Democratic administration like mine might try to apply.

My early discussions with Netanyahu—both over the phone and during his visits to Washington—had gone well enough, despite our very different worldviews. He was most interested in talking about Iran, which he rightly viewed as Israel’s largest security threat, and we agreed to coordinate efforts to prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. But when I raised the possibility of restarting peace talks with the Palestinians, he was decidedly noncommittal.

“I want to assure you, Israel wants peace,” Netanyahu said. “But a true peace has to meet Israel’s security needs.” He made it clear to me that he thought Abbas was likely unwilling or unable to do so, a point he would also stress in public.

I understood his point. If Netanyahu’s reluctance to enter into peace talks was born of Israel’s growing strength, then the reluctance of Palestinian president Abbas was born of political weakness. White-haired and mustached, mild-mannered and deliberate in his movements, Abbas had helped Arafat found the Fatah party, which later became the dominant party of the PLO, spending most of his career managing diplomatic and administrative efforts in the shadow of the more charismatic chairman. He’d been the preferred choice of both the United States and Israel to lead the Palestinians after Arafat’s death, in large part due to his unequivocal recognition of Israel and his long-standing renunciation of violence. But his innate caution and willingness to cooperate with the Israeli security apparatus (not to mention reports of corruption inside his administration) had damaged his reputation with his own people. Having already lost control of Gaza to Hamas in the 2006 legislative elections, he viewed peace talks with Israel as a risk not worth taking—at least not without some tangible concessions that would provide him political cover.

The immediate question was how to coax Netanyahu and Abbas to the negotiating table. To come up with answers, I relied on a talented group of diplomats, starting with Hillary, who was well versed on the issues and already had relationships with many of the region’s major players. To underscore the high priority I’d placed on the issue, I appointed former Senate majority leader George Mitchell as my special envoy for Middle East peace. Mitchell was a throwback—a hard-driving, pragmatic politician with a thick Maine accent who had demonstrated his peacemaking skills by negotiating the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which brought an end to the decades-long conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

We began by calling for a temporary freeze on Israel’s construction of new settlements in the West Bank, a significant sticking point between the two parties, so that negotiations might proceed in earnest. Settlement construction, once limited to small outposts of religious believers, had over time become de facto government policy, and in 2009, there were about three hundred thousand Israeli settlers living outside the country’s recognized borders. Developers, meanwhile, continued to build tidy subdivisions in and around the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the disputed, predominantly Arab section of the city that Palestinians hoped to one day make their capital. All this was done with the blessing of politicians who either shared the religious convictions of the settler movement, saw the political benefit of catering to settlers, or were simply interested in alleviating Israel’s housing crunch. For Palestinians, the explosion in settlements amounted to a slow-motion annexation of their land and stood as a symbol of the Palestinian Authority’s impotence.

We knew that Netanyahu would probably resist the idea of a freeze. The settlers had become a meaningful political force, their movement well represented within Netanyahu’s coalition government. Moreover, he would complain that the good-faith gesture we’d be asking from the Palestinians in return—that Abbas and the Palestinian Authority take concrete steps to end incitements to violence inside the West Bank—was a great deal harder to measure. But given the asymmetry in power between Israel and the Palestinians—there wasn’t much, after all, that Abbas could give the Israelis that the Israelis couldn’t already take on their own—I thought it was reasonable to ask the stronger party to take a bigger first step in the direction of peace.

As expected, Netanyahu’s initial response to our proposed settlement freeze was sharply negative, and his allies in Washington were soon publicly accusing us of weakening the U.S.-Israeli alliance. The White House phones started ringing off the hook, as members of my national security team fielded calls from reporters, leaders of American Jewish organizations, prominent supporters, and members of Congress, all wondering why we were picking on Israel and focusing on settlements when everyone knew that Palestinian violence was the main impediment to peace. One afternoon, Ben [Rhodes?] hurried in late for a meeting, looking particularly harried after having spent the better part of an hour on the phone with a highly agitated liberal Democratic congressman.

“I thought he opposes settlements,” I said.

“He does,” Ben [Rhodes?] said. “He also opposes us doing anything to actually stop settlements.”

This sort of pressure continued for much of 2009, along with questions about my kishkes. Periodically, we’d invite the leaders of Jewish organizations or members of Congress to the White House for meetings with me and my team, so that we could assure them of our ironclad commitment to Israel’s security and the U.S.-Israel relationship. It wasn’t a hard argument to make; despite my difference with Netanyahu on a settlement freeze, I’d delivered on my promise to enhance U.S.-Israel cooperation across the board, working to counteract the Iranian threat and to help fund the eventual development of an “Iron Dome” defense system, which would allow Israel to shoot down Syrian-made rockets coming from Gaza or from Hezbollah positions inside Lebanon. Nevertheless, the noise orchestrated by Netanyahu had the intended effect of gobbling up our time, putting us on the defensive, and reminding me that normal policy differences with an Israeli prime minister —even one who presided over a fragile coalition government—exacted a domestic political cost that simply didn’t exist when I dealt with the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, or any of our other closest allies.

But shortly after I delivered my Cairo speech, in early June 2009, Netanyahu cracked open the door to progress by responding with an address of his own in which he declared, for the first time, his conditional support for a two-state solution. And after months of wrangling, he and Abbas finally agreed to join me for a face-to-face discussion while they were both in town for the annual leaders’ gathering at the U.N. General Assembly at the end of September. The two men were courteous to each other (Netanyahu garrulous and physically at ease, Abbas largely expressionless, save for the occasional nod) but appeared unmoved when I urged them to take some risks for peace. Two months later, Netanyahu agreed to institute a ten- month freeze on the issuance of new settlement permits in the West Bank. Pointedly he refused to extend the freeze to construction in East Jerusalem.

Any optimism I felt about Bibi’s concession was short-lived. No sooner had Netanyahu announced the temporary freeze than Abbas dismissed it as meaningless, complaining about the exclusion of East Jerusalem and the fact that construction of already-approved projects was continuing apace. He insisted that in the absence of a total freeze, he would not join any talks. Other Arab leaders quickly echoed these sentiments, spurred in part by editorializing from Al Jazeera, the Qatari-controlled media outlet that had become the dominant news source in the region, having built its popularity by fanning the flames of anger and resentment among Arabs with the same algorithmic precision that Fox News deployed so skillfully with conservative white voters in the States.

The situation only got messier in March 2010, when, just as Joe Biden was visiting Israel on a goodwill mission, the Israeli Interior Ministry announced permits for the construction of sixteen hundred new housing units in East Jerusalem. Although Netanyahu insisted that his office had nothing to do with the timing of the permits, the move reinforced perceptions among Palestinians that the freeze was a sham and the United States was in on it. I instructed Hillary [Clinton] to call Netanyahu and let him know I wasn’t happy, and we reiterated our suggestion that his government show more restraint on expanding settlements. His response, delivered at AIPAC’s annual conference in Washington later that month, was to declare to thunderous applause that “Jerusalem is not a settlement—it is our capital.”

The following day, Netanyahu and I sat down for a meeting at the White House. Downplaying the growing tension, I accepted the fiction that the permit announcement had been just a misunderstanding, and our discussions ran well over the allotted time. Because I had another commitment and Netanyahu still had a few items he wanted to cover, I suggested we pause and resume the conversation in an hour, arranging in the meantime for his delegation to regroup in the Roosevelt Room. He said he was happy to wait, and after that second session, we ended the evening on cordial terms, having met for more than two hours total. The next day, however, Rahm [Immanuel] stormed into the office, saying there were media reports that I’d deliberately snubbed Netanyahu by keeping him waiting, leading to accusations that I had allowed a case of personal pique to damage the vital U.S.-Israel relationship.

That was a rare instance when I outcursed Rahm.

Looking back, I sometimes ponder the age-old question of how much difference the particular characteristics of individual leaders make in the sweep of history—whether those of us who rise to power are mere conduits for the deep, relentless currents of the times or whether we’re at least partly the authors of what’s to come. I wonder whether our insecurities and our hopes, our childhood traumas or memories of unexpected kindness carry as much force as any technological shift or socioeconomic trend. I wonder whether a President Hillary Clinton or President John McCain [two rival presidential candidates in the 2008 election] might have elicited more trust from the two sides; whether things might have played out differently if someone other than Netanyahu had occupied the prime minister’s seat or if Abbas had been a younger man, more intent on making his mark than protecting himself from criticism.

What I do know is that despite the hours Hillary [Clinton] and George Mitchell spent doing shuttle diplomacy, our plans for peace talks went nowhere until late in August 2010, just one month before the settlement freeze was set to expire, when Abbas finally agreed to direct talks, thanks largely to the intervention of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan. Abbas conditioned his participation, however, on Israel’s willingness to keep the settlement freeze in place—the same freeze he’d spent the previous nine months decrying as useless.

With no time to lose, we arranged to have Netanyahu, Abbas, Mubarak, and Abdullah join me at meetings and an intimate White House dinner on September 1 to launch the talks. The day was largely ceremonial—the hard work of hammering out a deal would shift to Hillary, Mitchell, and the negotiating teams. Still, we dressed up the whole affair with photo ops and press availabilities and as much fanfare as we could muster, and the atmosphere among the four leaders was warm and collegial throughout. I still have a photograph of the five of us looking at President Mubarak’s watch to check that the sun had officially set, since it was the Muslim month of Ramadan, and we had to confirm that the religiously prescribed fast had been lifted before seating everyone for dinner.

In the soft light of the Old Family Dining Room, each of us took turns describing our visions for the future. We talked of predecessors like Begin and Sadat, Rabin and Jordan’s King Hussein, who’d had the courage and wisdom to bridge old divides. We spoke of the costs of endless conflict, the fathers who never came home, the mothers who had buried their children.

To an outsider, it would have seemed a hopeful moment, the start of something new.

And yet later that night, when the dinner was over and the leaders had gone back to their hotels and I sat in the Treaty Room going over my briefs for the next day, I couldn’t help feeling a vague sense of disquiet. The speeches, the small talk, the easy familiarity—it all felt too comfortable, almost ritualized, a performance that each of the four leaders had probably participated in dozens of times before, designed to placate the latest U.S. president who thought things could change. I imagined them shaking hands afterward, like actors taking off their costumes and makeup backstage, before returning to the world that they knew—a world in which Netanyahu could blame the absence of peace on Abbas’s weakness while doing everything he could to keep him weak, and Abbas could publicly accuse Israel of war crimes while quietly negotiating business contracts with the Israelis, and Arab leaders could bemoan the injustices endured by Palestinians under occupation while their own internal security forces ruthlessly ferreted out dissenters and malcontents who might threaten their grip on power. And I thought of all the children, whether in Gaza or in Israeli settlements or on the street corners of Cairo and Amman, who would continue to grow up knowing mainly violence, coercion, fear, and the nursing of hatred because, deep down, none of the leaders I’d met with believed anything else was possible.

A world without illusions—that’s what they’d call it.

The Israelis and Palestinians would end up meeting only twice in direct peace talks—once in Washington, the day after our White House dinner, and then again twelve days later for a two-part conversation, with Mubarak hosting negotiators in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el Sheikh before the group moved to Netanyahu’s Jerusalem residence. Hillary [Clinton] and Mitchell reported that the discussions were substantive, with the United States dangling incentives to both sides, including plumped-up aid packages, and even considering a possible early release of Jonathan Pollard, an American convicted of spying for Israel who’d become a hero to many right-leaning Israelis.

But it was all to no avail. The Israelis refused to extend the settlement freeze. The Palestinians withdrew from negotiations. By December 2010, Abbas was threatening to go to the U.N., seeking recognition of a Palestinian state—and to the International Criminal Court, seeking Israel’s prosecution for alleged war crimes in Gaza. Netanyahu was threatening to make life harder for the Palestinian Authority. George Mitchell tried to put things in perspective, reminding me that during negotiations to end the Northern Ireland conflict, “We had seven hundred bad days—and one good one.” Still, it felt as if in the near term, at least, the window for any peace deal had closed.

In the months to come, I’d think back often to my dinner with Abbas and Netanyahu, Mubarak and King Abdullah, the pantomime of it, their lack of resolve. To insist that the old order in the Middle East would indefinitely hold, to believe that the children of despair wouldn’t revolt, at some point, against those who maintained it—that, it turned out, was the greatest illusion of all.