The Best Primer I’ve Heard on Israeli-Palestinian Peace Efforts

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2023

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It is too early to talk about a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. With the trauma of Oct. 7 still fresh for the Israeli public and with the ongoing devastation in Gaza, any talk of conflict-ending solutions is cruel fantasy. But it wasn’t always. Peace efforts in the Middle East have been tried over and over again. It is not a history without breakthroughs. There was a time when a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt would have been unthinkable. But that agreement lives alongside a long list of collapsed negotiations. Why? I wanted to have someone on the show who could help me read this checkered history. Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.” Few people have been as intimately involved in the many Middle East peace processes as Miller. He’s a decades-long veteran of the State Department who has touched peace negotiations under the Reagan, the Clinton and both Bush administrations. His book is the best I’ve read on the peace processes and what went wrong. In this conversation, we explore the frustrating, uneven history of Arab-Israeli peace efforts, Miller’s hard-won insights about the reality of peace negotiations and the idiosyncratic personalities who have most influenced the prospects for peace in the Middle East. Book Recommendations: The Peace Puzzle by Daniel C. Kurtzer, Scott B. Lasensky, William B. Quandt, Steven L. Spiegel and Shibley Telhami Arabs and Israelis by Abdel Monem Said Aly, Shai Feldman and Khalil Shikaki The Missing Peace by Dennis Ross Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Emefa Agawu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Rollin Hu. Mixing by Jeff Geld, with Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero. Archival clips from A.P. Archive, CBS, C-SPAN and NBC.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. I've come back and forth on whether to do an episode on why the Israeli
0:27.2	Palestinian peace process has failed and failed and failed.
0:32.7	My worry is that immersing in past failure can become just a way to justify present action, or worse, justify
0:39.4	present refusal to keep trying.
0:42.2	Peace processes don't work until they do.
0:44.2	Israelis and Palestinians and for that matter Americans are trapped in arguments over their
0:49.3	past. Sometimes it's the ability to forget, not the ability to remember that is necessary to forge a future.
0:57.0	But I can see in the conversations I'm having and the emails I'm getting that what did or didn't happen in this or that negotiation,
1:04.0	it really lingers in people's minds.
1:06.6	So I wanted to at least try and do an episode tracing the shape of the successes and
1:11.3	there have been some and failures until now.
1:14.0	My guest today is Aaron David Miller. Miller was a negotiator and an advisor on the
1:19.0	American side in the many Middle East peace processes, the United States attempted to host, to influence, to manage,
1:26.2	from 1985 to 2003. So he worked on this under Ronald Reagan, under George H.W. Bush,
1:31.5	under Bill Clinton, under George W. Bush.
1:33.3	W. Bush.
1:34.3	He's now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
1:37.3	And he's the author of the book, The Much Too Promised to Land, which is, I think, the
1:42.4	best single volume history I've read of the various
1:44.9	peace efforts. One thing this conversation helped clarify for me. We talk about deals in terms
1:51.0	of compromises and concessions,
1:53.0	as if there is some perfect formula out there
	...

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