Just over 100 years ago, Theodor Herzl launched the Zionist Movement. They called for a Jewish State in their ancestral land, Palestine. Fifty years later, the State of Israel came into being. Israel was established so that Jews anywhere in the world could have a homeland of their own. After independence, that process began with the in gathering of three quarters of a million Jews from Arab lands. As Communism disintegrated, more than a million Jews emigrated from the Soviet Union. Despite war and terror, Israel has sought peace through both secret and public negotiations. These efforts continue to this day, despite two major Palestinian uprisings.

The negotiator is the only behind-the-scenes account of the negotiations to release abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit. This new work is the remarkable story of Gershon Baskin, who acted on his own initiative to create a secret back channel between Hamas and the Israeli government to secure a prisoner exchange. Through clandestine meetings, nightly e-mails, frantic text messages and tenacious negotiations, Baskin succeeded where official mediators had failed, paving the way for the deal that – ultimately – brought Gilad home.

Until now, there has been no detailed account of Israel's nuclear history. Previous treatments of the subject relied heavily on rumors, leaks, and journalistic speculations. But with Israel and the Bomb, Avner Cohen has forged an interpretive political history that draws on thousands of American and Israeli government documents--most of them recently declassified and never before cited--and more than one hundred interviews with key individuals who played important roles in this story. Cohen reveals that Israel crossed the nuclear weapons threshold on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War, yet it remains ambiguous about its nuclear capability to this day. What made this posture of "opacity" possible, and how did it evolve? Cohen focuses on a two-decade period from about 1950 until 1970, during which David Ben-Gurion's vision of making Israel a nuclear-weapon state was realized. He weaves together the story of the formative years of Israel's nuclear program, from the founding of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission in 1952, to the alliance with France that gave Israel the sophisticated technology it needed, to the failure of American intelligence to identify the Dimona Project for what it was, to the negotiations between President Nixon and Prime Minister Meir that led to the current policy of secrecy. Cohen also analyzes the complex reasons Israel concealed its nuclear program--from concerns over Arab reaction and the negative effect of the debate at home to consideration of America's commitment to nonproliferation. Israel and the Bomb highlights the key questions and the many potent issues surrounding Israel's nuclear history. This book will be a critical resource for students of nuclear proliferation, Middle East politics, Israeli history, and American-Israeli relations, as well as a revelation for general readers.

The two-state solution is doomed; the one-state reality is here to stay Why have Israelis and Palestinians failed to achieve a two-state solution to the conflict that has cost so much and lasted so long? In Paradigm Lost , Ian S. Lustick brings fifty years as an analyst of the Arab-Israeli dispute to bear on this question and offers a provocative explanation of why continued attempts to divide the land will have no more success than would negotiations to establish a one-state solution. Basing his argument on the decisiveness of unanticipated consequences, Lustick shows how the combination of Zionism's partially successful Iron Wall strategy for dealing with Arabs, an Israeli political culture saturated with what the author calls "Holocaustia," and the Israel lobby's dominant influence on American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict scuttled efforts to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Yet, he demonstrates, it has also unintentionally set the stage for new struggles and "better problems" for both Israel and the Palestinians. Drawing on the history of scientific ideas that once seemed certain but were ultimately discarded, Lustick encourages shifting attention from two-state blueprints that provide no map for realistic action to the democratizing competition that arises when different subgroups, forced to be part of the same polity, redefine their interests and form new alliances to pursue them. Paradigm Lost argues that negotiations for a two-state solution between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River are doomed and counterproductive. Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs can enjoy the democracy they deserve but only after decades of struggle amid the unintended but powerful consequences of today's one-state reality.

The definitive and gripping account of the sometimes exhilarating, often tortured twists and turns in the Middle East peace process, viewed from the front row by one of its major players."--Bill Clinton The Missing Peace, published to great acclaim last year, is the most candid inside account of the Middle East peace process ever written. Dennis Ross, the chief Middle East peace negotiator in the presidential administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, is that rare figure who is respected by all parties: Democrats and Republicans, Palestinians and Israelis, presidents and people on the street in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Washington, D.C. Ross recounts the peace process in detail from 1988 to the breakdown of talks in early 2001 that prompted the so-called second Intifada-and takes account of recent developments in a new afterword written for this edition. It's all here: Camp David, Oslo, Geneva, Egypt, and other summits; the assassination of Yitzak Rabin; the rise and fall of Benjamin Netanyahu; the very different characters and strategies of Rabin, Yasir Arafat, and Bill Clinton; and the first steps of the Palestinian Authority. For the first time, the backroom negotiations, the dramatic and often secretive nature of the process, and the reasons for its faltering are on display for all to see. The Missing Peace explains, as no other book has, why Middle East peace remains so elusive.

As Middle-East Bureau Chief of the French Public television network and a resident of Jerusalem since 1968, Charles Enderlin has had unequaled access to leaders and negotiators on all sides. Here he takes the reader step-by-step along the path that began with the hope of agreement but led only to the ultimate collapse of the peace process. The dramatic account moves between the occupied territories and the negotiation tables as it follows the emotional shifts in the conflict from the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin to the years when Benjamin Netenyahu was in power. In a definitive account of the meetings at Camp David in July 2000, Enderlin details what was said between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators brought together by Bill Clinton in the presence of Yasir Arafat, President of the Palestinian Authority, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

From the prelude of the October 1973 Middle East war through the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty in March 1979, Kenneth W. Stein traces American involvement in the Arab-Israeli negotiations. He provides a range of first-hand accounts, recollections and anecdotes from over eighty bureaucrats, diplomats and military leaders who participated in Arab-Israeli peace talks in the 1970's and since. Charting the complex and often contradictory goals of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Syria, the US and the USSR, Stein chronicles the evolution of these negotiations and analyzes the roles of Sadat, Kissinger, Carter, and Begin. --From publisher's description.

"The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is the story of the defining failure of the entire two-state peace paradigm, a rote religion that still dominates the international discourse on Palestine. In its two first parts - Anatomy of a Seminal Mis-encounter and A Savage War for Peace - this book is an insider account of the July 2000 Camp David summit and the negotiations that followed it, amid the Second Intifada, the cruelest war on Palestine since 1948, until the last days of Bill Clinton's presidency. Clinton's Peace Parameters were the "final product" of that endeavor. The failure of Camp David is also explained through the drama of the interplay between its main actors, Ehud Barak, Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat. The Third Part -Defying the Imperatives of Conflict Resolution - comprises six chapters that offer an interpretive account of all peace negotiations to this day; a description of the occupation's traits of permanence; the inherent contradictions of the two-state solution; a scrutiny of ominous alternatives such as the binational state, an Israeli unilateral pullout from much of the West Bank and Donald Trump's Deal of the Century; and a discussion of the "Jordanian option", a solution with a long pedigree here revisited. Underlining the singularity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the last essay examines it in a broad comparative perspective. The Epilogue addresses the consequences of Israel's supposed defeat of the Palestinian national movement on her moral profile and international standing"--

A Personal Account of the Egypt-Israel Peace Negotiations [Sep 01, 1981] Dayan, Moshe

Gilead Sher provides concise contextual background, thought-provoking analysis and insightful personal impressions. He also outlines the painful compromises that both sides would need to make in order to bring an end to this violent conflict, Sher makes a convincing case that any future settlement to the Middle East conflict will be based on the Barak-Clinton-Arafat formula negotiated at Camp David. This book dissects the political, economic, social and cultural reasons that led to the breakdown of the process and the consequent eruption of violence that has engulfed the region.

Presents a chronological account of relations between Egypt and Israel from early Zionist visits in 1903 to the negotiations at Camp David and its aftermath.

A major casualty of the assassin's bullet that struck down Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was a prospective peace accord between Syria and Israel. For the first time, a negotiator who had unique access to Rabin, as well as detailed knowledge of Syrian history and politics, tells the inside story of the failed negotiations. His account provides a key to understanding not only U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East but also the larger Arab-Israeli peace process. During the period from 1992 to 1996, Itamar Rabinovich was Israel's ambassador to Washington, and the chief negotiator with Syria. In this book, he looks back at the course of negotiations, terms of which were known to a surprisingly small group of American, Israeli, and Syrian officials. After Benjamin Netanyahu's election as Israel's prime minister in May 1996, a controversy developed. Even with Netanyahu's change of policy and harder line toward Damascus, Syria began claiming that both Rabin and his successor Peres had pledged full withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Rabinovich takes the reader through the maze of diplomatic subtleties to explain the differences between hypothetical discussion and actual commitment. "To the students of past history and contemporary politics," he writes, "nothing is more beguiling than the myriad threads that run across the invisible line which separates the two." The threads of this story include details of Rabin's negotiations and their impact through two subsequent Israeli administrations in less than a year, the American and Egyptian roles, and the ongoing debate between Syria and Israel on the factual and legal bases for resuming talks. The author portrays all sides and participants with remarkable flair and empathy, as only a privileged player in the events could do. In any assessment of future negotiations in the Middle East, Itamar Rabinovich's book will prove indispensable.

The exclusive--and explosive--account of the politics of one of the most controversial nations in the world. According to Aviva Klompas, representing Israel at the United Nations is like volunteering to sell Red Sox paraphernalia outside Yankee Stadium. During her time as the director of speechwriting for Israel's Permanent Mission to the United Nations, Klompas crafted highly acclaimed speeches that advanced Israel's policies and informed public opinion. In Speaking for Israel, Klompas gives readers a glance behind the curtain of international politics and all the drama, intrigue, and conflict that simmer under the surface. During her tenure as Israel's UN speechwriter, Klompas saw the collapse of four Middle Eastern states, faltering Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, waves of Palestinian terrorism, stop-and-go nuclear negotiations (culminating in the Iran Deal), an attempt to push Palestinian statehood through the UN Security Council, the Palestinians' bid to join the International Criminal Court, the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, and fifty days of war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Constantly in the thick of things, Klompas's experience with the Israeli UN delegation is full to bursting with juicy insider stories and a day-to-day look at what it's like in the top diplomatic echelon. With humor and bite, Speaking for Israel tells her story, one that is both universal and uniquely singular"--Publisher's description.

The award-winning novelist recounts his miraculous survival of the Holocaust, from a forced march across the Ukraine to a labor camp at the age of seven, his escape from the camp, his life in hiding in the Ukranian forests, his negotiation of several displaced persons' camps, his 1946 arrival in Palestine and his struggle to build a new life on the fragments of his past.

In this seminal work originally published in 1992, an insider account from the man who paid off the Iranians for the American hostages Ari Ben-Menashe spent more than a decade in the innermost circles of Israeli intelligence. He was privy to the secret negotiations with the Iranians to delay the release of the American hostages until after the election of Ronald Reagan, he enlisted Robert Gates in the transfer of the $52 million payoff to Iran, and was Robert Maxwell's handler. Ben-Menashe brokered secret Israeli arms sales on four continents and briefed George Bush on the vast arms network. He saw Israel's own nuclear arsenal develop, and watched his masters sponsor monstrous terrorist acts in the name of a higher good. Then, as he questioned the immorality around him, he was cut off and set up. This is the full story of the man who oversaw the accumulation of hundreds of millions of dollars in CIA and Israeli intelligence slush funds.

Throughout the last 100 years, Syria has been a crucial hub of Middle Eastern events. As the birth place and 'pulsating heart' of Arab nationalism, and as the object of colonial and regional ambitions, Syria has been transformed into a regional power exerting influence over its neighbors. Now available in paperback, this unique bestseller sheds new light on the recent history and current politics and policies of this important Middle Eastern country. Author Itamar Rabinovich is uniquely qualified to take a panoramic view of Syria's modern history and contemporary politics. As a scholar, he spent 35 years studying Syria in diplomatic archives and through the range of sources. As a diplomat, he was Yitzhak Rabin's chief negotiator with Syria and Israel's ambassador to Washington, and thus a key participant in some of the events addressed in the book. This enlarged second edition includes a new introduction, as well as two new chapters on the Israeli-Syrian-American peace negotiations and Israel's view of the Syrian uprising. The 23 essays by Rabinovich cover the century from the eve of the First World War to the Bush Administration's row with Bashar al-Asad. The essays focus on three principal themes: the notion of a Syrian entity and its translation into a Syrian state in its current boundaries; the conflict between rival concepts of the political community that inhabits the Syrian state; and issues of foreign policy with a particular emphasis on the Syrian-Israeli conflict and peace process. The main themes of Syrian history and politics are picked up at their inception and followed through the course of the 20th century to the present day.

"The Middle East peace process has been covered extensively by the press, but still has retained many of its secrets. In this book, a selection of articles by former senior Israeli diplomat, Mordechai Gazit, some of these secrets are revealed. The author offers a unique viewpoint on Arab-Israeli relations which is extremely relevant to participants, and to the current debate among historians concerning key events in Israel's history."--Jacket.