OPPapers.com

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict And Diplomacy In The Modern Middle East

In 1991 after United States led United Nations forces had defeated Saddam Hussein in Operation Desert Storm, Secretary of State James Baker declared that the United States along with Soviet Russia would sponsor a conference in Madrid to help bring peace to the Middle East. Secretary Baker decided to have the conference focus solely on what he called “the big thing”: the Arab-Israeli conflict, which Mr. Baker viewed as the key to future peace for the entire region. In December of 2006 the same Mr. Baker, as head of the Iraq Study Group, determined that bringing an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was vital to United States success in Iraq.
Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, has a similar view, telling a South Korean newspaper that “If the issues in the conflict between Israel and Palestine [sic] go well, other issues in the Middle East…are likely to follow suit,” (Commentary). Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General of the United Nations, in his last Middle East report in December of 2006, said that "the search for stability in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere will be greatly served by a concerted effort to address the legitimate aspirations of Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese to achieve two independent and secure states of Israel and Palestine, an end to the occupation of Arab land both in the occupied Palestinian territory and the Golan Heights,” (Al-Jazeera). This, however, is not a feeling that is shared by only these three men but a growing majority of diplomats throughout the world today. Over the past several years, accumulating with the month long war between Israel and Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, diplomats throughout the world have placed the solving of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the center of their Middle East agenda. Those who hold this view have been dubbed “realists” in many political circles and publications.
In a Middle East today that has seen over 22-full scale wars over the past 80...