William N. Robinson is a political analyst, researcher, and consultant specializing in security, governance and political economy. He works with a Horn of Africa‑based war and human rights monitoring organization and holds research fellowships with policy institutes in the Middle East and New Zealand. Find him on Twitter/X @wrobinsonnz.
In the case of Israel and Palestine, what explains diplomacy's perpetual motion without a real resolution? More pointedly, why does "peace" repeatedly fail? Policymakers and newsrooms in Western capitals often ascribe the stalemate to mutual intransigence, suggesting an equal unwillingness to compromise among hardliners in both the Israeli and Palestinian camps.
That dynamic constitutes Israel's greatest diplomatic triumph: its success in crafting the illusion that a neutral space for diplomacy exists at all. There is no objective table for negotiation—only a peace-process industry that Israel designed and controls, sustained by its international backers and marketed to an uncritical global audience.
Thus, for Israel, diplomacy has not failed. It functions precisely as intended, with the absence of peace reflecting not diplomatic failure but, grimly, success. A brief review of previous diplomatic efforts highlights this dynamic.
The United States and the Soviet Union convened the 1991 Madrid Conference to initiate direct negotiations between Israel and a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. Madrid was the diplomatic precursor to the Oslo process, marking a departure from an era of ad hoc diplomacy and great power indulgence. It was also the first track explicitly structured around U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, or the two-state solution framework.
Israel entered the conference reluctantly, corralled by mounting international pressure and the growing political leverage Palestinians attained through the First Intifada. Before negotiations, the Israelis rejected the inclusion of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Once at the table, Israel refused to acknowledge the occupied status of the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli officials have since spoken candidly about the manipulative intent that underpinned their participation at Madrid.
In 1992, former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir admitted that Israel's objective was not resolution but containment, intending to prolong autonomy talks for a decade while accelerating illegal settlement construction. Shamir openly stated his aspiration to quintuple the West Bank's settler population before any final agreement could be reached—effectively creating facts on the ground favorable to Israel.
It is a diplomatic absurdity to expect Palestinians to negotiate for their most basic rights while living under Israel's explicit—and non-negotiable—policy of military occupation. For Palestinians, diplomatic cooperation has proven neither a path to security nor statehood.
- William N. Robinson
In 1993, the Oslo Accords supplanted the Madrid track, formally enshrining the two-state solution as the framework for Israel–Palestine peace negotiations. Western audiences lauded then–Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as a dove of peace for his willingness to negotiate. Yet, even as he signed the accords, Rabin oversaw settlement construction on an industrial scale, undermining the territorial assumptions underpinning the talks.
In a 1995 Knesset address, Rabin declared that a "permanent solution" would include "blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria," an Israeli and biblical term for the occupied West Bank. At Oslo, the PLO formally accepted Resolution 242, while Israel reciprocated with only a vague recognition of the PLO as a representative of the Palestinian people, deliberately avoiding any legal framing that might compel acknowledgement of its occupation. To this day, Israel maintains that these areas are "disputed territories," rejecting the Fourth Geneva Convention's applicability.
Thus, Oslo functioned not as a framework for justice but as a legal-political mechanism for entrenching Israeli domination. It institutionalized a regime of limited autonomy under the guise of peace. Israel's goal of "maximum land with minimum Palestinians" moved that much closer to reality.
As international audiences applauded the initiative, Palestinian territory was spatially dismembered into 165 isolated zones of limited autonomy, each encircled by Israeli military infrastructure. Oslo's bureaucratized rituals and donor-driven benchmarks substituted meaningful sovereignty with technocratic management subordinate to Israeli security imperatives. No settlement freeze was required, even as Rabin performed the role of peacebuilder.
At the July 2000 Camp David II peace summit, Israel's base terms were for a fragmented Palestinian proto-state, devoid of territorial contiguity and sovereignty over key resources and borders. Palestinian negotiators deemed the terms untenable. Israel subsequently blamed the breakdown on Palestinian rejectionism, a narrative echoed by then-U.S. President Bill Clinton.
Yet, as one observer later noted, there was never a genuine Israeli offer. Rather, Israel "always stopped one, if not several, steps short of a proposal," preserving plausible deniability while characterizing the breakdown as Palestinian intransigence. American intermediaries also acknowledged that the Israeli offer fell short of the minimum for a workable agreement.
For Israel, diplomacy has not failed. It functions precisely as intended, with the absence of peace reflecting not diplomatic failure but, grimly, success.
- William N. Robinson
Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami later admitted that, had he been Palestinian, he would have rejected the proposal. Several years later, Aaron David Miller, a senior U.S. negotiator at Camp David, reflected that Washington had not acted as a neutral arbiter, but as "Israel's attorney, catering and coordinating with the Israelis at the expense of successful peace negotiations."
Impending Israeli elections and intensifying state violence against Palestinians subsequently derailed the 2001 Taba Summit. Ariel Sharon, elected Israeli prime minister shortly thereafter, torpedoed the process. Like his predecessors, Sharon preferred an open-ended occupation over any binding settlement that might constrain Israel's extraterritorial interests.
The 2007 Annapolis Conference intended to formally revive then-U.S. President W. George Bush's "Roadmap for Peace," which ostensibly aimed for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. In practice, however, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert refused to negotiate with any Palestinian representative mandated by Gaza, even as the enclave was central to the diplomatic agenda.
Instead, Israel elected to sit opposite Mahmoud Abbas, leader of a deeply fragmented Palestinian Authority confined to the West Bank after a brutal civil war with Hamas over control of the Strip. Just over a year later, Israel launched a major military operation in Gaza, definitively shuttering Bush's peace plan.
The February 2023 Aqaba communiqué ostensibly sought to rein in settlement expansion and settler violence, which reached unprecedented levels in the wake of Benjamin Netanyahu's return to power in 2022. Yet, the communiqué did nothing to slow these trends: 2023 recorded the highest rate of settlement construction in over a decade and became the deadliest year on record for children in the West Bank—before Oct. 7.
Aqaba also neglected to address Israel's escalating provocations against religious institutions in Jerusalem. Not two days after the communiqué, Netanyahu's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—effectively the de facto West Bank governor—enthusiastically advocated for a "second Nakba" and continues to do so.
Thus, today, Palestinians face the impossible task of negotiating within a framework profoundly tilted against them. The optimism of Oslo has long since dissipated. The West Bank's settler population has quintupled since 1993, fulfilling Shamir's aspirations.
It is a diplomatic absurdity to expect Palestinians to negotiate for their most basic rights while living under Israel's explicit—and non-negotiable—policy of military occupation. For Palestinians, diplomatic cooperation has proven neither a path to security nor statehood.
Increasingly, armed resistance is viewed as the only means of asserting national agency. As the International Crisis Group's Tahani Mustafa indicates, many Palestinians "argue that armed struggle at least extracts a tangible cost from Israel for sustaining the occupation, rather than allowing it to continue with impunity."
Israeli officials understand that failed peace tracks provoke further Palestinian armed resistance, producing the pretext for Israel's harsher military responses, expanded settler violence and international tolerance for the occupation's brutality at the expense of legitimate Palestinian desires for self-rule and national sovereignty.
For Israel, diplomacy is the strategic medium for reproducing a status quo that serves its interests, calibrated to defuse pressure without conceding power. In the face of Israel's genocide in Gaza, it is clear that—from Madrid to Aqaba—diplomacy has never been utilized so performatively, malevolently and violently.
