The list of failed American initiatives to broker peace between Israel and her neighbors

Less than 24 hours after President Obama’s second inauguration, the first op-ed appeared suggesting he prioritize pushing Israel into a peace agreement with the Palestinians. This notion has become a familiar refrain from people frustrated with the reality that the Palestinians are divided and have demonstrated no interest in negotiating with Israelsince Obama first took office.

Now, Secretary John Kerry is about to embark on his fifth trip to the Middle East in the last half-year with Israel's leaders continuing to say they are prepared to negotiate without preconditions. Meanwhile, the Palestinians persist in demanding that Israel make concessions (a settlement freeze and the release of convicted criminals) and agree to unacceptable terms (e.g., recognition of the 1967 border as the basis for negotiations) before they will sit with any Israeli officials. Given the intransigence of Mahmoud Abbas, and the outright hostility of Hamas, few people expect talks to occur or to achieve any breakthrough on the core issues that have bedeviled negotiators since 1993. Moreover, history shows American initiatives have not only been failures but sometimes make the situation worse by creating unreal expectations.³⁵⁴

While the United States can play a valuable role as a mediator, the parties themselves must resolve their differences.

includes:

• 1953: The Eisenhower Administration tried to ease Arab-Israeli tensions by proposing the joint Arab-Israeli use of the Jordan River, a plan that would have helped the Arab refugees by producing more irrigated land and would have reduced Israel’s need for more water resources. Israel cautiously accepted the plan, the Arab League rejected it.
• 1967: President Johnson outlined five principles for peace. “The first and greatest principle,” he said, “is that every nation in the area has a fundamental right to live and to have this right respected by its neighbors.” TheArab response came a few weeks later: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it ... ”
• 1969: President Nixon’s Secretary of State, William Rogers, offered a plan that sought to “"balance"” U.S. policy, but leaned on the Israelis to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders; to accept many Palestinian refugees; and to allow Jordan a role in Jerusalem. Israel deemed the plan completely unacceptable, and even though Rogers’ plan tilted toward the Arab position, they too rejected it. 
• 1975: President Ford’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had a little more success in his shuttle diplomacy, arranging the disengagement of forces after the 1973 war, but he never put forward a peace plan, and failed to move the parties beyond the cessation of hostilities to the formalization of peace.
• 1978: Jimmy Carter was the model for presidential engagement in the conflict. He wanted an international conference at Geneva to produce a comprehensive peace. While Carter spun his wheels trying to organize a conference, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat decided to bypass the Americans and go directly to the Israeli people and address the Knesset. Despite revisionist history by Carter’s former advisers, the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement was negotiated largely despite Carter. Menachem Begin and Sadat had carried on secret contacts long before Camp David and had reached the basis for an agreement before Carter’s intervention. Carter’s mediation helped seal the treaty, but Sadat’s decision to go to Jerusalem was stimulated largely by his conviction that Carter’s policies were misguided.
• 1982: President Reagan announced a surprise peace initiative that called for allowing the Palestinians self-rule in the territories in association with Jordan. The plan rejected both Israeli annexation and the creation of a Palestinian state. Israel denounced the plan as endangering Israeli security. The plan had been formulated largely to pacify the Arab states, which had been angered by the expulsion of the PLO from Beirut, but they also rejected the Reagan Plan.
• 1991: George Bush's Administration succeeded in convening a historic regional conference in Madrid in 1991, but it ended without any agreements and the multilateral tracks that were supposed to settle some of the more contentious issues rarely met and failed to resolve anything. Moreover, Bush’s perceived hostility toward Israel eroded trust and made it difficult to convince Israelis to take risks for peace.
• 1993: President Clinton barely had time to get his vision of peace together when he discovered the Israelis had secretly negotiated an agreement with the Palestinians in Oslo. The United States had nothing to do with the breakthrough at Oslo and very little influence on the immediate aftermath. In fact, the peace process became increasingly muddled as the United States got more involved.
• 1994: Peace with Jordan also required no real American involvement. The Israelis and Jordanians already were agreed on the main terms of peace, and the main obstacle had been King Hussein’s unwillingness to sign a treaty before Israel had reached an agreement with the Palestinians. After Oslo, he felt safe to move forward and no American plan was needed.
• 2000: In a last ditch effort to save his presidential legacy, Clinton put forward a peace plan to establish a Palestinian state. Again, it was Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s willingness to offer dramatic concessions that raised the prospects for an agreement rather than the president’s initiative. Even after Clinton was prepared to give the Palestinians a state in virtually all the West Bank and Gaza, and to make east Jerusalem their capital, the Palestinians rejected the deal.
• 2002: President George W. Bush also offered a plan, but it was undercut by Yasser Arafat, who obstructed the required reforms of the Palestinian Authority, and refused to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure and stop the violence. Bush’s plan morphed into the Road Map, which drew the support of Great Britain, France, Russia, and the United Nations, but was never implemented because of continuing Palestinian violence. The peace process only began to move again when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made his disengagement proposal, a unilateral approach the State Department had long opposed. Rather than try to capitalize on the momentum created by Israel’s evacuation of the Gaza Strip, however, the Bush Administration remained wedded to the Road Map.
• 2007: In his own last-ditch effort to bring momentum to a stalled process toward peace, George W. Bushorganized the Annapolis Conference in Washington, D.C. While the conference did mark the first time the two-state solution was agreed upon as a framework for eventually ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this abstract commitment from both Israeli and Arab parties made no difference to the situation in Israel or the West Bank; and terrorist organization Hamas had been elected rulers of the all-Palestinian Gaza Strip just several months prior. 
• 2009: President Obama tried in his first term to bring about a peace agreement and not only failed, but was counterproductive and undermined hope for negotiations during those four years. Rather than proposing a peace plan, he began by focusing on a demand for a settlement freeze in the West Bank and Jerusalem in 2009. This, combined with other public comments and policies, caused the Israeli government to doubt his commitment to Israeli security and created tension in the U.S.-Israel relationship. Simultaneously, becauseIsrael agreed only to a temporary 10-month freeze in the West Bank, Arab leaders saw Obama as too weak to force Israel to make concessions, and refused to respond positively to the administration’s requests that they take steps to show their willingness to make peace with Israel if a Palestinian state were established. Meanwhile, the Palestinians, who had negotiated for years without insisting on a settlement freeze, refused to talk to the Israelis unless a total settlement freeze was imposed. After two years, Obama had succeeded in alienating all the parties and the Palestinians refused all Israeli invitations to restart peace talks.
• 2013: On his fourth visit in six months to the region, Secretary of State John Kerry tried to convene a four-party summit in Amman between Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian, and American negotiators before Israeli-Palestinian direct talks. Instead, the press conference to announce the summit was postponed and Kerry ended that trip claiming progress but that more work was needed. Since he took office, Kerry has been shuttling between that Palestinians and Israelis but no breakthrough has been achieved to date.

Secretary Kerry's determination is admirable, but that is insufficient to change the dynamics that have created a stalemate. Despite his best intentions, he will fail so long as the Palestinians refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and accept that they will have to make compromises and agree to end the conflict. The Secretary would be wise to wait for conditions for negotiations to ripen and focus on the more urgent issues in the region: chaos in Egypt, civil war in Syria, the risk of civil war in Lebanon, and the Iranian nuclear threat.