How We Got to This Point

That strengthening relationship carried unintended consequences. When Israel's Arab neighbors launched a surprise invasion on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur in October 1973, then Prime Minister Golda Meir urgently requested an American airlift. Nixon eventually authorized a massive aid package—560 supply flights, 22,000 tons of equipment and weapons and 80 aircraft—to assist the Israeli military. The Arab world's subsequent embargo marked the start of modern Middle East oil politics. Tyler argues that the glut of weapons and easy American support emboldened the Israeli military in later conflicts like the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which spawned the Iranian-sponsored Islamist group Hizbullah.

As the Cold War eventually thawed, American presidents thought they might finally end the violence. Former Soviet clients in the Arab world, once relentlessly hostile to Israel, began seeking peace instead. George H.W. Bush tried getting tough with Israel to push the process along, threatening to withhold critical loan guarantees unless it halted settlement construction. Jim Baker, his secretary of state, publicly challenged the Israelis, reciting the White House switchboard number and demanding: "When you're serious about peace, call us." Bill Clinton took the opposite tack, closely coordinating peace proposals with Israeli negotiators. As Kurtzer and Lasensky argue, both strategies had flaws. Baker alienated some American Jews; Clinton's approach angered Palestinians. Still, there finally seemed to be some movement. In 1993 Israel and the Palestinians signed the Oslo accords; Jordan's King Hussein followed the next year with his own separate peace. Even Syria's strongman Hafez al-Assad began signaling his eagerness for talks.

Some of the Clinton-era Mideast hands who may return in the Obama administration believe the time is once again right to engage Syria. They're probably right, but Indyk's past experience is instructive. In the early winter of 1999, Assad summoned Clinton's peace team to his gray-marble palace high on a Damascus hilltop. The Syrian had six months to live, and he knew it. Assad had always acted as if he'd wait forever to get what he wanted; in negotiations he was known to deliver four-hour disquisitions on Saladin and the Crusaders. Baker once referred to the autocrat's interminable diatribes as "bladder diplomacy." Yet now Assad was curt and hurried. The Lion of Damascus was "a sick man, his emaciated face almost skeletal, his handshake bony and weak," Indyk writes. Assad told the Americans he thought a peace deal was "close." He seemed to be rapidly withdrawing demands. "I think we're lowering the bar," he told the startled Americans. "We should do something quickly."

The Syrian talks grew so intense and promising that jealous Palestinians began referring to Damascus as "the other woman." Yet the affair proved short-lived. One month after the Damascus meeting, Clinton summoned Israel's then prime minister, Ehud Barak, to Washington to work on the details. When the Israeli's Boeing 707 landed at Andrews Air Force Base, the prime minister, under intense fire at home from his political enemies, refused to get off his plane. Barak sent for Indyk, who was waiting on the tarmac. The American found the prime minister firmly planted in his blue leather lounge chair. "I can't do it," Barak said, adding later: "I cannot look like a freier"—a sucker—"in front of my people." He eventually rejoined the talks, but the gaps were widening. After details of subsequent negotiations leaked to an Israeli paper, Assad also began to hesitate. He stopped returning Clinton's calls. Six months later the Syrian leader was dead—and so was the peace process. As Clinton's Israeli-Palestinian talks also collapsed, the second intifada began—a conflict that would ultimately kill more than 5,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis.

George W. Bush arrived in the Oval Office determined to wash his hands of the conflict. One day in March 2001, Indyk, who remained as U.S. ambassador to Israel for a short time during the Bush administration, accompanied Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to a meeting with the president. On the way out, Bush stopped the diplomat at the door. "There's nothing to be done" with the Arab-Israeli conflict, the president declared. "No Nobel Peace Prize to be had here." Seven years later, with the region still in chaos, Barack Obama's shot at a Nobel may be equally remote. But after decades of conflict, it's hard to think of a more critical place to try.

© 2009