A timeline of the decades-long peace negotiations that came before the Israel-Hamas war.
Even though Israel has approved a temporary ceasefire in its unprecedented assault on Gaza following Hamas’s October 7 attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear that he still believes it is a “time for war,” not for peace.
On Tuesday, he vowed that the war will continue “until Hamas is destroyed, all the hostages are released and there is nobody in Gaza who can threaten Israel.”
But while US leaders have supported the Israeli war effort, they have also held out hope for an eventual two-state solution in which Israel and a sovereign Palestine exist side by side: “The only ultimate answer here is a two-state solution that’s real,” US President Joe Biden said recently.
The two-state solution isn’t the only approach to solving the Israel-Palestine conflict. But it is the mainstream one; it’s been the international community’s approach for the last several decades. The idea is that US-brokered negotiations can lead to a peace treaty, or a “final status agreement,” which would establish a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank in exchange for a permanent end to hostilities.
But in the three decades since this peace process really began — with the historic Oslo Accords in 1993 — the two-state solution has slipped further away. A lack of political will in Israel, Palestine, and the US, as well as disagreement over the precise contours of the deal, have rendered negotiations unsuccessful. Major sticking points include: what the borders of the two states should be (and where Jerusalem falls in that), whether Palestinian refugees who were forced out of what is now Israel will be able to once again live there (also known as the “right of return”), and how to establish security guarantees for both Israelis and Palestinians. Today, all of these issues remain major impediments to peace.
Violence perpetrated by Palestinian militants such as Hamas — an organization many countries designate as a terrorist group — as well as by Israeli security forces, has eroded trust on both sides. So, too, has Israel’s expansion of illegal settlements in West Bank territory that the international community sought to set aside for Palestine. The more extreme elements of Israeli and Palestinian society, and their political leaders, have forestalled negotiations at critical moments.
Israel and its allies have often laid the blame at the feet of Palestinians for rejecting what they saw as generous offers. “You are leading your people and the region to a catastrophe,” former US President Bill Clinton famously told the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat when he refused a peace deal proposed at Camp David in 2000.
But Palestinians contend that those offers, no matter how generous by Israeli standards, never went far enough. Israel has always had the military and diplomatic edge in the conflict, with a powerful ally in the US. And Palestinians have been forced to progressively narrow their conception of acceptable peace, let alone a fair peace, especially as Israel treats its territorial expansion as a fait accompli and normalizes relations with Arab countries that had previously fought for the Palestinian cause.
“Palestinians wonder whether they are always doomed to accept what they have previously refused just to find that it is no more an offer — if it ever was an offer — again to be faced with new attempts to extort new concessions from them for an undefined future,” writes Palestinian diplomat Afif Safieh in his 2011 book, The Peace Process: From Breakthrough to Breakdown.
Here is what you need to know about the history of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and why they have repeatedly failed.
1967: UN Resolution 242
In 1967, Israel fought Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the Six-Day War, a brief but intense conflict over water, land, and Palestine. Israel defeated the three Arab states, capturing Gaza, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, parts of East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.
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Following the conflict, the UN adopted Resolution 242, which calls on Arab countries to recognize Israel’s right to “live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force,” as well as for Israel to withdraw from “territories occupied” in the conflict — essentially, to revert to its pre-1967 borders, a provision that Israel has since resisted.
Israel, Egypt, and Jordan all came to accept the resolution, ushering in temporary peace between them. Egypt and Jordan recognized Israel’s existence and ceased direct hostilities with the country, though Israel didn’t uphold its part of the deal, never fully reverting to its pre-1967 borders — a choice that led to the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Still, achieving buy-in from Arab nations that were once hostile to Israel was a significant step toward opening formal Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. The resolution was later affirmed in 1973 in UN Resolution 338, which, along with resolution 242, served as the foundation of peace talks in the region for decades to come.
1978: Camp David Accords
The Camp David Accords established long-lasting (but cold) peace between Egypt and Israel, and also had a significant impact on the trajectory of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
The Accords, brokered by then-US President Jimmy Carter, came after a ceasefire in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Egypt and Syria fought Israel, hoping to regain territory lost in previous conflicts. As part of the deal, Egypt and Israel agreed to refrain from use of force to resolve their disputes, and Israel agreed to a path toward returning the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. (Syria signed a separate disengagement agreement with Israel.)
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Israel and Egypt also addressed the fate of Palestinians: They reiterated their commitment to UN Resolutions 242 and 338. Both countries called for Palestinians to participate in future negotiations, “full autonomy” for people in the West Bank and Gaza, a provisional government in those territories supported by Israeli security forces, and negotiations to determine Palestinians’ final status within five years. Palestinians were not formally invited to participate in the talks because the US refused to deal with the Palestine Liberation Organization, an umbrella group for Palestinian nationalists, so long as they refused to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and to renounce terrorism.
The Accords are considered a major watershed moment in Middle East peacemaking — earning then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat Nobel Peace Prizes — and provided a blueprint for subsequent negotiations.
However, while Israel successfully kept the peace with Egypt, it did not abide by its commitments to Palestinians in the Accords. The five-year deadline for beginning to grant Palestinian people autonomy within the West Bank and Gaza came and went, and Israeli settlements in the occupied territories ballooned.
Carter writes in his 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid that by “remov[ing] Egypt’s considerable strength from the military equation of the Middle East,” Israel “permitted itself renewed freedom to pursue the goals of a fervent and dedicated minority of its citizens to confiscate, settle, and fortify the occupied territories.”
Historians — including Seth Anziska, author of the 2018 book Preventing Palestine — have also argued that the Accords had the effect of limiting remedies available to the Palestinians by focusing on establishing an ill-defined goal of “full autonomy” rather than sovereignty.
Essentially, the Accords successfully kept war from breaking out between Israel and Egypt. But in the view of Carter and others critical of the deal’s limitations, the agreement also removed incentives Israel may have had to pursue peace with the Palestinians, setting the stage for the next few decades of difficulties.
1988: Amid the First Intifada, Arafat acknowledges Israel’s right to exist
In 1987, Palestinian frustrations had reached a boiling point following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon to root out the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) presence there, the construction of new Israeli settlements, and increased repression by Israeli security forces in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians staged their First Intifada, Arabic for “shaking off,” engaging in nonviolent mass protests that often turned into violent clashes with Israeli security forces. It was amid this fighting that Hamas rose in prominence, initially committing to a nonviolent strategy alongside the PLO to facilitate peace talks.
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With the intifada unfolding, PLO leader Yasser Arafat, known as the father of Palestinian nationalism, made an announcement that paved the way for direct negotiations with the Israelis.
Arafat said that the PLO, which had previously sought to defeat and replace the state of Israel — often via violent means, like airplane hijackings and bombings of Jewish civilians across the globe — had ‘’accepted the existence of Israel as a state in the region’’ and ‘’declared its rejection and condemnation of terrorism in all its forms.’’
“We accept two states, the Palestine state and the Jewish state of Israel,” he said.
Though the initial reception from the US and Israel was icy, it was a significant capitulation. The PLO was still widely regarded as a terrorist group, including by the US, following the announcement. But it would begin to take a more active role in determining the future of the Palestinians.
1991: Madrid Conference
In 1991, representatives from the US, Soviet Union, Israel, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, as well as non-PLO Palestinian delegates, convened for the first time in Madrid to hold negotiations to create a new framework for the peace process. The conference was conceived by then-US Secretary of State James Baker to change course from a continued pattern of conflict during the final years of the First Intifada.
There were still significant disagreements between the US and Israel around what peace should look like, particularly on settlement expansion, and no formal agreements came of the conference.
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But “what Madrid did achieve was significant,” write George Mitchell, former US President Barack Obama’s special envoy for Middle East peace, and Alon Sachar, a Middle East expert and former adviser to the US Ambassador to Israel, in the 2016 book A Path to Peace. That included bolstering public support for negotiations in Israel, which elected Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister in 1992 on a platform that focused on Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. Together, Rabin’s election and the hope generated in Madrid laid the groundwork for the first major breakthrough in decades.
1993: Oslo
The year 1993 marked a breakthrough that established the modern peace process as we know it.
The PLO and Israel entered secret negotiations — facilitated by Norwegian politicians through a think tank in Oslo — at a moment when both felt backed into a corner. Israel was facing increasing international pressure to engage in peace talks following its violent clampdowns on Palestinian protesters in the intifada. And the PLO was weakened after supporting Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein before his defeat by US and international forces in the First Gulf War. The fall of the Soviet Union had also reduced Cold War tensions in the Middle East that had previously made peacemaking difficult.
The secret talks allowed the negotiators to discuss difficult issues without fear of political blowback. After some progress had been made, the Israelis elevated them to official, public negotiations in Oslo. Then-US President Bill Clinton had a limited role in the negotiations, but held a formal signing ceremony for the so-called Oslo Accords on the White House lawn in Washington, DC, in 1993, in which Rabin and Arafat famously shook hands.
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The Accords allowed Palestinians to self-govern in the West Bank and Gaza and established the Palestinian Authority as the government of those areas. Israel agreed to withdraw its security forces from Gaza and “redeploy” those located in the West Bank in phases. In exchange, the PLO formally recognized the state of Israel and the right of its citizens to live in peace, accepting the language of UN Resolution 242. “To this day Palestinians refer to their acquiescence to 242 as their historic compromise, the moment they accepted partition,” Mitchell and Sachar write.
Critically, the PLO failed to limit Israel’s continued military presence in Gaza and the West Bank in key ways. The agreement provided no timeline for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and gave Israelis exclusive jurisdiction over their settlements in the occupied territories. At this time, the settler population there exceeded 280,000 and would increase by almost 70,000 in the following five years.
Meanwhile, the Palestinians were left to manage their own affairs, including administering security and public services, relieving Israel of “formal responsibility for the living conditions and welfare of the territories’ rapidly increasing population, still completely dominated by Israeli forces,” Carter writes.
The Accords also established a five-year interim period in which the thornier issues of the conflict were meant to be resolved once and for all: the fate of a Palestinian state and its borders, whether Palestinian refugees would be able to return to Israel or the Palestinian territories or be compensated, what would happen to Israeli settlers and Jerusalem, and water usage. But that would never come to be.
1995: Oslo II
Oslo II built on the momentum of the first Oslo agreement, which was received positively by both Palestinians and Israelis. In September 1995, Rabin and Arafat convened to sign a second agreement in DC that divided the West Bank into three zones, labeled Areas A, B, and C, keeping Gaza continuous. The hope was that, eventually, the Palestinian state would be formed in these areas.
The newly created Palestinian Authority (PA) was given full control over Area A, which encompassed the Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Jenin, Nablus, and Bethlehem. In Area B, which spans a dense zone around those Area A cities, the Palestinian Authority was to have civil jurisdiction in partnership with Israel, which would administer security. Area C, which represented most of the West Bank (and encompassed all of the settlements that Israel had built since it captured the territory in 1967) was to be administered entirely by Israel. Israel was still permitted to collect taxes from the many Palestinians living anywhere in the West Bank and Gaza if they worked in Israel, which it would then distribute to the PA. The Israelis had agreed to withdraw from most of Gaza ahead of Oslo II.
Rabin also agreed that Israel would withdraw from Areas A and B within three months of the signing of the agreement, and would negotiate further withdrawals in the five-year interim period established in the first Oslo agreement.
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Radicals on both sides sought to prevent both Oslo I and II’s implementation. Rabin, who had become the face of the peace movement in Israel, was assassinated by a Jewish extremist who opposed the Accords just months later. A period of heightened attacks by Hamas followed. Public support for the peace process eroded, leading to Netanyahu’s election as prime minister in 1996. He opposed the Oslo Accords, arguing they only encouraged attacks like those Hamas was launching at the time, and that Israel needed to take a hard line against the Palestinians. He also distrusted the PLO’s Arafat, a feeling that was mutual.
Netanyahu’s first government wasn’t as far right as his latest one, but decisions he made in the years to come would make negotiations increasingly difficult.
2000: Camp David and the Clinton parameters
Following Rabin’s assassination and Netanyahu’s election, the Accords were threatened, and Clinton tried to salvage the negotiations by inviting Arafat and Netanyahu to Maryland’s Wye River plantation in 1998. There, the leaders agreed to additional Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank as well as Palestinians taking measures to prevent violence against Israel — but both sides accused each other of failing to properly implement the agreement.
That contributed to a deteriorating political situation in Israel, where Netanyahu was facing criticism from the left for failing to make enough progress on negotiations and from the right for making what they saw as unreasonable territorial concessions. Netanyahu was subsequently voted out in 1999, with Ehud Barak taking his place as prime minister and promising an agreement with the Palestinians within 15 months.
At Barak’s urging, Clinton held another summit at Camp David in July 2000, where the leaders failed to come to an agreement on borders, Jerusalem, and Palestinian refugees’ “right of return.” Why they failed is a subject of disagreement: Clinton and other pro-Israel voices have blamed Arafat, arguing that he was unwilling to make peace, while others say the negotiations were designed to fail because they didn’t meet the “minimum requirements of any Palestinian leader,” as Robert Malley, one of the US negotiators, argued several years later. It was nevertheless a blow to Barak, who would not survive long as prime minister.
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The failures of Camp David led Clinton to undertake a last ditch effort to salvage negotiations before he left office. At the outset of a Second Intifada, which would prove more bloody than the last, Clinton proposed his own parameters for peace.
In Clinton’s plan, 80 percent of Israeli settlers would remain in the West Bank, covering about 10 percent of the occupied land. Israel would have exclusive access to the utilities and certain roads that serviced them and would be allowed to create a security perimeter around the settlements. Palestinians would get some land adjacent to Gaza in exchange.
The rest of the West Bank would go to the new state of Palestine, which would also encompass all of Gaza. The new country would be demilitarized and supported by an international force. Palestinians would control the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, including what is known to Muslims as the al-Aqsa Mosque, and Israelis would control the Western Wall.
Displaced Palestinians from around the world would have the right to return to the West Bank and Gaza, but not to their former homes in any land owned by Israel. Israel has generally opposed a right of return for Palestinians, which it “views as a tactic to undermine Jewish self-determination,” Mitchell and Sachar write. The return of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced in 1948 would erode Israel’s Jewish demographic majority.
Israel accepted the framework with reservations that Clinton said were “within [his] parameters.” Arafat also accepted the parameters but with reservations that Clinton deemed incongruous with an agreement. Part of the problem for Arafat was that the parameters required too many Palestinian concessions on land for settlers and on right of return, some foreign affairs experts have argued.
Clinton later wrote in his memoir that Arafat had made an “error of historic proportions.”
Carter saw Arafat’s decision differently, writing that “there was no possibility that any Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive, but official statements from Washington and Jerusalem were successful in placing the entire onus for the failure on Yasser Arafat.”
This was the closest that the Israelis and Palestinians have come in recent years to achieving a peace agreement.
2002-2003: Various frameworks for peace are developed
The Second Intifada, which ended with a ceasefire in 2003 following significant loss of life, made official peace overtures difficult. But several initiatives that were not orchestrated by Israeli or Palestinian government representatives were nevertheless pursued during this period.
That included the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative proposed by the Saudi Crown Prince, which proposed Arab nations’ recognition of Israel in exchange for its withdrawal from the occupied territories, among other elements of a peace plan. It was embraced by many Arab countries and Palestinian leaders, but dismissed by the new Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government as a “nonstarter” just as it was launching a major invasion of the West Bank in response to the Second Intifada. There was also the 2003 Geneva Initiative, spearheaded by former Israeli and Palestinian officials, which aimed to provide a comprehensive plan for implementation of a two-state solution based on the framework discussed in the Clinton Parameters and the Arab Peace Initiative. It was also rejected by Sharon.
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The US, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations — together, the Quartet — also announced a roadmap for peace in 2003 that described progressive steps toward a two-state solution over the course of three years, with political, security, economic, humanitarian, and institution-building benchmarks.
The roadmap was grounded in then-US President George W. Bush’s belief that Palestinian militant violence was a primary obstacle to peace. He and the international community therefore demanded that Arafat step aside in favor of new Palestinian leadership to continue negotiations. At the time, there were still significant numbers of suicide bombings on Israeli and Jewish targets committed by Palestinian militants. Arafat agreed to step aside; the more moderate Mahmoud Abbas replaced him.
The Palestinians accepted the roadmap — despite the fact that Bush had made assurances to the Israelis that they would not be expected to totally withdraw from the occupied territories and that Palestinians would not have right of return to Israel. But the Israeli government, led by Sharon, demanded prerequisites that ultimately doomed the deal. Those included dismantling all Palestinian militant groups, precluding any reference to UN Resolution 242, and barring discussion of Israeli settlements.
“The practical result of all this is that the Roadmap for Peace had become moot,” Carter writes.
2005: Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and some settlements in the West Bank
Despite previously advocating for expansionist policies in the occupied territories, Sharon announced an Israeli “disengagement plan” for Gaza in 2005 that involved the unilateral withdrawal of Israeli settlements and military forces. However, Israel maintained control of the Gazan airspace and cooperated with Egypt in administering its border with Gaza.
Approximately 8,500 Israeli settlers — some of whom had lived there for decades and resisted the plan — were removed from their homes, and some were compensated. Israel ceded control of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, led by Abbas, who was elected its president that year. Israel also vacated four Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
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The move was surprising from Sharon, who had for years pursued a dream of a “Greater Israel,” understood by many Israelis as their biblical lands that encompass the Palestinian territories. It earned him a reputation as a peacemaker who was seeking to deescalate the situation. But as Dartmouth professor Bernard Avishai later argued in the New Yorker, the decision was “not meant to precede a negotiated settlement of any kind but to obviate the need for one.”
Sharon wanted to “cut Israel’s losses” in Gaza, Avishai argues, while pursuing his long-term goals of annexing Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, and all major Israeli settlements in the West Bank, pushing the Palestinians well beyond Israel’s 1967 borders and behind the illegal “separation barrier” he had built. Sharon, however, suffered from a stroke soon after that would leave him incapable of fully carrying out that vision.
Hamas won a majority in the PA in the 2006 elections following the withdrawal. The US refused to recognize their new government and pressured Abbas’s government to overturn the results, helping spark a brief civil war that culminated in the group taking control of Gaza while the PA, led by politicians aligned with Abbas, continued to govern in the West Bank.
2008: Olmert’s peace offer
After the schism in the Palestinian government, Ehud Olmert, who became Israel’s prime minister after Sharon suffered from a stroke, decided to reopen peace talks with the PA in Annapolis, Maryland, for the first time since 2000.
Hamas supported the talks and was prepared to reverse its policy of rejecting Israel if an agreement that the Palestinian people would approve of could be finalized.
Olmert presented a proposal to Abbas that included significant territorial concessions, though the exact contours of the proposal are vague and were never fully disclosed. Reportedly, Olmert offered Palestinians 5.8 percent of Israeli land, consisting of lightly populated farmland, in exchange for 6.3 percent of the West Bank, encompassing major Israeli settlements. On other issues, however, there appeared to still be significant gaps between the Israeli and Palestinian positions on refugees, Jerusalem, and an Israeli withdrawal.
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Abbas did not accept the proposal, later saying he wasn’t provided enough detail, though Olmert speculates that Abbas was “entirely for it” and believes Abbas likely regrets that he did not sign the deal. In that respect, Abbas’s rejection of the offer is sometimes compared to Arafat’s reaction to the Clinton Parameters: It was “the best an Israeli prime minister had ever offered to a Palestinian leader” in terms of territory, Mitchell and Sachar write. But Abbas later stated that he believed the offer did not meet Palestinian aspirations for an independent and viable state.
Some reports suggest that Abbas was also concerned about the political situation in Israel at the time, as Olmert had announced his intention to resign over corruption allegations. Olmert later served a prison sentence for accepting bribes and committing obstruction of justice. Netanyahu succeeded him and rejected the talks as dangerous for Israel, raising questions as to whether he would have honored any agreement signed.
2014: Negotiations led by John Kerry collapse
Obama’s presidency began in 2009 with the ending of a Gaza war, known as Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, and he appointed George Mitchell, co-author of the 2016 book A Path to Peace, to shepherd peace talks. But the Israeli government was skeptical of Obama, and the heft Mitchell brought as a former negotiator with Northern Ireland did not directly translate to Israel and Palestine.
It quickly became clear Obama’s peace overtures weren’t working. Senior US officials had begun warning that because of the pace of Israel’s settlement expansion, the horizon of the two-state outcome was approaching, and human rights organizations were increasingly calling the situation in the West Bank apartheid. US Secretary of State John Kerry put his hat in the ring, setting a deadline of mid-2014 to reach a comprehensive agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Kerry started with a series of confidence-building measures: Israel agreed to progressively release Palestinian prisoners in four parts while Palestinians agreed to halt the process of applying for membership as a country in international bodies. However, when Israel refused to release the fourth group of prisoners and continued to expand its settlements, Abbas reacted by applying for Palestine to be recognized by 15 UN and other international bodies.
Both sides also faced opposition within their own camps. Hamas rejected the talks, saying that Abbas had no authority to negotiate on behalf of Palestinians since no formal elections had been held in the Palestinian territories since 2005. The group called for a third intifada, though it never materialized.
Netanyahu’s Likud party proposed legislation to annex the Jordan Valley in direct contradiction of the US’s proposal during the talks that the area go to Palestinians. Hardliners also threatened to resign from Netanyahu’s government if he agreed to Israel’s 1967 borders as a starting point for negotiations.
These challenges led to a breakdown in the talks in April 2014.
2020: Trump’s “Deal of the Century”
Former President Donald Trump severely undermined the prospect of Palestinian autonomy, delivering several major wins for Israel that poisoned dialogue with the Palestinians.
He recognized the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights, which Syria says should rightfully be its property — a decision later reaffirmed under Biden. He reversed decades of US policy and moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018 — a decision made in recognition of the fact that Israel had made unified Jerusalem its capital, but that ignores Palestinian claims on East Jerusalem that are recognized by the UN. It’s now incredibly politically difficult for any American president to move the embassy back to Tel Aviv.
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The Trump administration also argued in 2019 that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are not necessarily illegal, lending legitimacy to Israel’s claims on the territories. Israel’s annexations and settlements are widely regarded as illegal under international law, and no other country has recognized them.
Though Trump unveiled a plan in 2020 that he hailed as the peace “deal of the century,” Palestinians vehemently rejected it. The proposal would have allowed Israel to absorb the vast majority of settlements in the occupied West Bank, home to more than half a million Israelis, required that Palestine be fully demilitarized, and rejected Palestinian refugees’ right of return outright. It would have also recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, while also impossibly recognizing Jerusalem as the “undivided capital” of Israel.
“We say a thousand nos to the Deal of The Century,” Abbas said at the time.
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Trump’s barefaced pro-Israel policies undermined the US’s ability to credibly moderate peace talks going forward. There’s also no one credible representative for Palestinians across the occupied territories with which to negotiate. Polling in recent years but before Hamas’s October 7 attack has shown that the PA, under Abbas’s leadership, is broadly unpopular when compared with Hamas, and as Mitchell and Sachar note, has become seen as “behaving like a security subcontractor easing the burden for Israel of the occupation.” That’s partially by the design of Netanyahu, who has propped up Hamas at the expense of a unified Palestinian voice in peace talks.
Even if there were strong representatives, Trump wasn’t interested in pursuing a peace plan. His administration created the Abraham Accords, which were normalization deals between Israel and Arab states like the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco (Arab states that had previously not recognized Israel); such deals did not include any progress on the Palestinian issue. Biden took up this policy, and his team put a major emphasis on bringing Saudi Arabia into the normalization fold during his first two and a half years in office. This Trump-Biden approach went against the Arab Peace Initiative and cut Palestinians out of the conversation.
2023: The US renews calls for a two-state solution
For years after Trump announced his framework, no meaningful attempts were made to reopen peace negotiations, with US President Joe Biden looking to turn his attention to other parts of the world, including China and Russia, and Israel signing normalization agreements with some of its Arab neighbors.
But that calculus changed with the onset of the war in Gaza. The Biden administration has offered its nearly unconditional support to Israel, but has raised concerns about Israel’s ability to achieve its stated goal of eliminating Hamas and its methods as civilian casualties skyrocket. It has also called for a renewed commitment to a two-state solution.
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The Biden administration’s focus on a two-state solution raises the question as to whether the window for that path to peace has passed. Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories has become entrenched, and its settler population in the West Bank has grown to at least 700,000, leading some observers — including Carter — to argue that the reality is that Israel and Palestine are a de facto one state.
“A system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights. This is the policy now being followed,” Carter wrote in his 2006 book.
As the war continues, Biden has called on Israel to disentangle itself from Palestine, and has warned the country against trying to occupy Gaza once it concludes its offensive. But Following Hamas’s October 7 attack and the destruction Israel has wreaked in Gaza, reversing the status quo now seems more difficult than ever.
Here’s what the reported hostage deal does — and doesn’t — mean for war in Gaza.
On Tuesday, the Israeli government reportedly approved a deal with Hamas that the state of Qatar brokered and that has been more than a month in the making.
The final deal has yet to be officially announced, but the rough outlines reported in the media throughout Tuesday include several key planks: Hamas would exchange 50 hostages — women and children who are Israeli and dual-national — with Israel for about 150 Palestinian prisoners currently held in custody, mostly women. If all goes to plan, Israel would commence a four-day ceasefire in Gaza and would also stop drone overflights for six hours a day. After those days, the ceasefire could be extended a day with each additional 10 or 20 hostages Hamas releases, though the details are a bit different in each news report. During this period, Israel would not allow Palestinians to return to northern Gaza, but would allow some 300 trucks of aid in daily, including fuel.
This is a deal that has essentially been on the table for about a month, and according to the Guardian, negotiations were already happening before Israel launched its ground attacks on Gaza. Israel had defined its twin objectives as eliminating Hamas and bringing the hostages back, but experts noted that the former had been the priority until political dynamics led to an increased willingness among Israeli leadership to accept a truce to bring some hostages home. “Public pressure led Netanyahu to agree to a deal that he refused until now,” wrote journalist Yossi Verter in Haaretz’s Hebrew edition.
The deal itself would be neither a resolution to the war nor to the roots of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It’s a significant development that’s better than nothing, but it’s not a long-term solution.
[Related: Everything you need to know about Israel-Palestine]
When Hamas conducted its October 7 attack and took about 240 Israeli, dual-national, and international people hostage, Israel’s security outlook changed. Its drive to pursue a destructive military campaign in Gaza is based in a desire to “destroy Hamas.” But, as US and Arab officials acknowledged at an international summit over the weekend, there is no plan for Gaza the day after, or even now. Israel’s lack of strategy or goals in its response to the Hamas attack of October 7 has led to a situation where Israel’s ongoing military operations risk becoming a forever war just like America’s over the last two decades.
At the same time, Palestinians in Gaza are suffering most. Al Jazeera has reported that there are no functioning hospitals in the northern part of occupied territory, in large part due to Israeli military incursions and a lack of fuel, and that the remaining 21 of Gaza’s 35 hospitals are “completely out of service.” In the lead-up to the announcement of a ceasefire, Israel’s attacks on Gaza continued.
If this deal is confirmed, it is a diplomatic achievement, to be sure, but it’s only the beginning of a set of complex negotiations that will be needed to address the ongoing war, the humanitarian crisis facing Palestinians in Gaza, and the potential for the war to extend to the broader Middle East.
Why is there a deal now?
For weeks, Qatar, with US buy-in, has been helping facilitate negotiations between Israel and Hamas over a deal somewhat along the lines of today’s. But the experts I’ve spoken to in recent weeks had reservations. The skepticism was not around the need for the talks or their import, but more about their fragility; these deals are only real once they’re announced, and even then they are tenuous. (At least once over the last week, media reports indicated a deal was imminent, only for those assertions to be walked back.)
But this evening, Netanyahu endorsed the deal and pushed his government’s ministers to accept it. “Tonight we stand before a difficult decision, but it is the right decision. All security organizations support it fully,” he told Israeli television. The White House has maintained that the deal was “close” but President Joe Biden wouldn’t go into further detail. On Tuesday evening, the deal’s announcement appeared imminent, and likely to come from the Qatari government if and when all parties agreed.
A combination of Qatar’s orchestration of the deal, Israeli internal political pressure on Netanyahu, and Hamas’s commitment to getting the release of Palestinian prisoners has contributed to this truce and exchange.
Some secrecy is required for such a deal to work, but that can also work to its detriment. Analysts speculate, for example, that Hamas would treat the exchange of Israeli civilians differently than it would Israeli soldiers.
In the past, Israel has been willing to exchange many Palestinians for its soldiers: Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, was released from an Israeli prison as part of the 2011 deal for the Israeli soldier that released 1,000 Palestinians, for example. “We will not forget our prisoners who we left behind,” Sinwar said upon his release.
The terms are not likely to be made public in full, and there aren’t really any enforcement mechanisms. “It’s hard to tell when an agreement was violated, who violated it, and then how we can kind of get back to some sort of ceasefire agreement,” Yousef Munayyer, a researcher at the Arab Center in Washington, DC, told me. “This is something that’s played out between Israel and Hamas a lot, going back to 2008. So one of my concerns is like, what are the exact terms of this agreement? And are both sides publicly committing to the same terms?”
Israelis will have 24 hours to appeal any deal to the Supreme Court, according to the country’s national security adviser.
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Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
One reason Israel has agreed to the deal now is the growing advocacy from the families of hostages. “The government is in complete disarray,” Mairav Zonszein, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, told me. “In the first few weeks of this, the hostages were like an afterthought, they were not the priority. That’s a huge shift that happened in the last few weeks, where the families after the initial shock started to organize themselves and they basically put it on the agenda.”
As the families became more and more organized and more agitated, they became more convinced that the Israeli government was avoiding doing the deal. Their slogan became “Deal Now!” These demands didn’t just exert pressure on Netanyahu’s government, but on him individually — calling into question his longtime framing of himself as Mr. Security, at a moment when he’s extremely politically vulnerable.
Israel has perhaps also made a strategic calculation that its military campaign of 46 days had shown it was serious about its objective of eliminating Hamas. However impossible experts say that it might be to decimate a militant group that’s part of a broader social and political organization, Israel didn’t want to look as though they were compromising from a position of weakness. “For the Israelis, politically, I don’t think they were going to be prepared to accept any sort of exchange on October 8,” Munayyer explained. “They first wanted to do some damage. They first wanted to make it feel like they were imposing a price on Hamas before they made any sort of agreement, even though it was likely that an agreement was inevitable at some point.”
Though Israel still sees negotiations as a defeat or a concession, it’s really the only path to future peace and security for the region.
The future of Gaza is unclear
Whatever the shape of the deal, the question looms of what happens next to Gaza.
In the short term, more suffering seems clear. Netanyahu has pledged to continue military operations in Gaza after the five-day pause. “The war has its stages, and the release of the hostages has its stages as well. But we won’t rest until we achieve total victory, and until we bring everyone back,” he said in the televised remarks.
There also is no ceasefire or pause negotiated on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah and Israel have been trading strikes.
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Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images
And longer term, what came out of last week’s summit of Middle East leaders in Manama, Bahrain, is that there is no plan, no commitment, no interest. “After two days of talking to officials about the plan for post-war Gaza, the inescapable conclusion is that there is no plan. The shattered enclave will need external help to provide security, reconstruction and basic services,” the Economist reported. “But no one—not Israel, not America, not Arab states or Palestinian leaders—wants to take responsibility for it.”
And it’s easy for Biden’s people to talk about a two-state solution, as we’ve seen in their talking points in recent days. The Israeli military operation will only go so far in achieving its goals. There will need to be a bigger political agreement to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Its core concerns won’t be solved militarily, as the hostage exchange deal makes clear. “You need a political path,” Ezzedine Choukri Fishere, a former Egyptian diplomat now at Dartmouth College, told me recently. “If this is only talk as it has been over the last few decades, then the outcome will be the same”: a frozen peace process that has gone nowhere.
Like this exchange, such an over-the-horizon conversation about what happens to Gaza and the future of Palestinians is going to require engaging indirectly with Hamas. “The stated goal of destroying Hamas is not achievable,” Khaled Elgindy, a researcher with the Middle East Institute, told me last month. “So how do you even know when you’ve gotten to the day after?” That’s not exactly popular to hear.
One thing to watch is whether more Western countries and organizations call for a ceasefire. Though the French president, the United Nations, and leading humanitarian groups have urged one, other countries have rejected these calls. This pause may lead others to join the group. And that may ultimately put pressure on the Biden administration and other leaders. “The idea is that you need to stop the killing in order to figure out how you can build on that, how you can try to figure out alternatives to the fighting,” Zonszein told me.
Right now, Gaza needs aid. The 300 trucks that US humanitarian envoy David Satterfield briefed journalists about today won’t be enough, and Israel has restricted movement within Gaza. The UN notes that there still isn’t electricity in Gaza, hospitals face severe shortages, and Israel has not allowed food shipments to enter northern Gaza. According to the latest data from the Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 14,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, over half of whom are women and children, and 1.7 million people have been internally displaced. The situation in Gaza is beyond dire, with 53 journalists reportedly killed in Israeli strikes and more than 100 United Nations officials killed. The World Health Organization described al-Shifa Hospital as a “death zone.”
At the same time, militant groups with links to Iran are attacking US military installations in Iraq, Syria, and off the coast of Yemen. The risks of this war expanding and drawing the US into a more direct role endure.
The truce represents a major breakthrough after six weeks of war between Israel and Hamas, but the bigger takeaway is clear: More diplomacy is needed now. Five days of pause isn’t enough.
To the victor — Microsoft — go the spoils?
The seismic shake-up at OpenAI has come as a shock to almost everyone. But the truth is, the company was probably always going to break. It was built on a fault line so deep and unstable that eventually, stability would give way to chaos.
That fault line was OpenAI’s dual mission: to build AI that’s smarter than humanity, while also making sure that AI would be safe and beneficial to humanity. There’s an inherent tension between those goals because advanced AI could harm humans in a variety of ways, from entrenching bias to enabling bioterrorism. Now, the tension in OpenAI’s mandate appears to have helped precipitate the tech industry’s biggest earthquake in decades.
On Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was fired by the board over an alleged lack of transparency, and company president Greg Brockman then quit in protest. On Saturday, the pair tried to get the board to reinstate them, but negotiations didn’t go their way. By Sunday, both had accepted jobs with major OpenAI investor Microsoft, where they can continue their work on cutting-edge AI. By Monday, 95 percent of OpenAI employees were threatening to leave for Microsoft, too. By Tuesday, new reports indicated Altman and Brockman were still in talks about a possible return to OpenAI.
As chaotic as all this was, the aftershocks for the AI ecosystem might be scarier. A flow of talent from OpenAI to Microsoft means a flow from a company that had been founded on worries about AI safety to a company that can barely be bothered to pay lip service to the concept.
Which raises the big question: Did OpenAI’s board make the right decision when it fired Altman? Or, given that companies like Microsoft will readily hoover up OpenAI’s talented employees, where they can then rush ahead on building AI with less concern for safety, did the board actually make the world a more dangerous place?
The answer may well be “yes” to both.
OpenAI’s board did exactly what it was supposed to do: Protect the company’s integrity
OpenAI is not a typical tech company. It has a unique structure, and that structure is key to understanding the current shake-up.
The company was originally founded as a nonprofit focused on AI research in 2015. But in 2019, hungry for the resources it would need to create AGI — artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical system that can match or exceed human abilities — OpenAI created a for-profit entity. That allowed investors to pour money into OpenAI and potentially earn a return on it, though their profits would be capped, according to the rules of the new setup, and anything above the cap would revert to the nonprofit. Crucially, the nonprofit board retained the power to govern the for-profit entity. That included hiring and firing power.
The board’s job was to make sure OpenAI stuck to its mission, as expressed in its charter, which states clearly, “Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity.” Not to investors. Not to employees. To humanity.
The charter also states, “We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions.” But it also paradoxically states, “To be effective at addressing AGI’s impact on society, OpenAI must be on the cutting edge of AI capabilities.”
This reads a lot like: We’re worried about a race where everyone’s pushing to be at the front of the pack. But we’ve got to be at the front of the pack.
Each of those two impulses found an avatar in one of OpenAI’s leaders. Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI co-founder and top AI researcher, reportedly worried that the company was moving too fast, trying to make a splash and a profit at the expense of safety. Since July, he’s co-led OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team, which aims to figure out how to manage the risk of superintelligent AI.
Altman, meanwhile, was moving full steam ahead. Under his tenure, OpenAI did more than any other company to catalyze an arms race dynamic, most notably with the launch of ChatGPT last November. More recently, Altman was reportedly fundraising with autocratic regimes in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia so he could spin up a new AI chip-making company. That in itself could raise safety concerns, since such regimes might use AI to supercharge digital surveillance or human rights abuses.
We still don’t know exactly why the OpenAI board fired Altman. The board has said that he was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” Sutskever, who spearheaded Altman’s ouster, initially defended the move in similar terms: “This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity,” he said. (Sutskever later flipped sides, however, and said he regretted participating in the ouster.)
“Sam Altman and Greg Brockman seem to be of the view that accelerating AI can achieve the most good for humanity. The plurality of the board, however, appears to be of a different view that the pace of advancement is too fast and could compromise safety and trust,” said Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University.
“I think that the board made the only decision they felt like they could make. They stuck to it even against enormous risk and resistance,” AI expert Gary Marcus told me. “I think they saw something from Sam that they thought they could not live with and stay true to their mission. So in their eyes, they made the right choice. What the fallout of that choice is going to be, we don’t know.”
“The problem is that the board may have won the battle but lost the war,” Kreps said.
In other words, if the board fired Altman in part over concerns that his accelerationist impulse was jeopardizing the safety part of OpenAI’s mission, it won the battle, in that it kept the company true to the mission.
But unfortunately, it may have lost the larger war — the effort to keep AI safe for humankind — because the coup may push some of OpenAI’s top talent straight into the arms of Microsoft. Which brings us to …
The AI risk landscape is probably worse now than it was before Altman’s dismissal
The coup has caused an unbelievable amount of chaos. According to futurist Amy Webb, the CEO of the Future Today Institute, OpenAI’s board failed to practice “strategic foresight” — to understand how its sudden dismissal of Altman might cause the company to implode and might reverberate across the larger AI ecosystem. “You have to think through the next-order implications of your actions,” she told me.
Altman, Brockman, and several others have already joined Microsoft. That, in itself, should raise questions about how committed these individuals really are to safety, Marcus said. And it may not bode well for the AI risk landscape.
After all, Microsoft laid off its entire AI ethics team earlier this year. When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella teamed up with OpenAI to embed its GPT-4 into Bing search in February, he taunted competitor Google: “We made them dance.” And upon hiring Altman, Nadella tweeted that he was excited for the ousted leader to set “a new pace for innovation.”
Firing Altman means that “OpenAI can wash its hands of any responsibility for any possible future missteps on AI development but can’t stop it from happening, and will now be in a compromised position to influence that development,” Kreps said, because it has damaged trust and potentially pushed its top talent elsewhere. “The developments show just how dynamic and high-stakes the AI space has become, and that it’s impossible either to stop or contain the progress.”
Impossible may be too strong a word. But containing the progress would require changing the underlying incentive structure in the AI industry, and that has proven extremely difficult in the context of hyper-capitalist, hyper-competitive, move-fast-and-break-things Silicon Valley. Being at the cutting edge of tech development is what earns profit and prestige, but that does not lend itself to slowing down, even when slowing down is strongly warranted.
Under Altman, OpenAI tried to square this circle by arguing that researchers need to play with advanced AI to figure out how to make advanced AI safe — so accelerating development is actually helpful. That was tenuous logic even a decade ago, but it doesn’t hold up today, when we’ve got AI systems so advanced and so opaque (think: GPT-4) that many experts say we need to figure out how they work before we build more black boxes that are even more unexplainable.
OpenAI had also run into a more prosaic problem that made it susceptible to taking a profit-seeking path: It needed money. To run large-scale AI experiments these days, you need a ton of computing power — more than 300,000 times what you needed a decade ago — and that’s incredibly expensive. So to stay at the cutting edge, it had to create a for-profit arm and partner with Microsoft. OpenAI wasn’t alone in this: The rival company Anthropic, which former OpenAI employees spun up because they wanted to focus more on safety, started out by arguing that we need to change the underlying incentive structure in the industry, but it ended up joining forces with Amazon.
Given all this, is it even possible to build an AI company that advances the state of the art while also truly prioritizing ethics and safety?
“It’s looking like maybe not,” Marcus said.
Webb was even more direct, saying, “I don’t think it’s possible.” Instead, she emphasized that the government needs to change the underlying incentive structure within which all these companies operate. That would include a mix of carrots and sticks: positive incentives, like tax breaks for companies that prove they’re upholding the highest safety standards; and negative incentives, like regulation.
In the meantime, the AI industry is a Wild West, where each company plays by its own rules.
The OpenAI board seems to prioritize the company’s original mission: looking out for humanity’s interests above all else. The wider AI industry? Not so much. Unfortunately, that’s where OpenAI’s top talent might now find itself.