Daniel Levy writes:

From the mid-1990s to the early noughties, much of my professional life was spent in a rather niche pursuit that came flooding back to me with yesterday’s release of President Trump’s “Peace Vision.”

The drafting of Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements became my thing—sometimes in uniform serving in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), sometimes as a concerned citizen in informal and often clandestine talks, and sometimes as an adviser in the offices of the Israeli prime minister and then justice minister during official negotiations.

I was a negotiator at the agenda-setting Oslo B agreements under Yitzhak Rabin; submitted texts from afar to Clinton’s Camp David Summit with Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak; and then joined the follow-up talks between Israelis and Palestinians, in Taba in January 2001. I have participated in numerous track-two Israeli-Palestinian talks before becoming a lead drafter of the unauthorized Geneva Accord plan in December 2003. The picture of that signing ceremony of Israelis and Palestinians seeking a new way forward still hangs in my study.

Some of those texts saw the light of day and some were even signed with great pomp and ceremony in the presence of world leaders. None, of course, led to anything approaching peace. [Continue reading…]