Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: Patterns, Problems, Possibilities

Fifteen years since the publication of its second edition, this foundational text in Arab-Israeli peace studies has been updated to include developments from the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Thoroughly revised and expanded, the third edition of Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace examines the history of recurrent efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict since the 1970s and identifies a pattern of negative negotiating behaviors that repeatedly derail efforts to achieve peace. In addition to updating all of the book's existing chapters with post-2010 sources and developments, Eisenberg and Caplan have added new chapters to the text on the two-state solution and Arab-Israeli "normalization," a conclusion that questions several core notions regarding the nature of the conflict and its possible resolution, and an epilogue that extends the book's framework into present-day crises in the region, including Hamas's 7 October 2023 attack on Israel and Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza. This edition also offers new material on the Arab Peace Initiative, the Annapolis Conference, the Kerry mission, and the Abraham Accords. A companion website comprises nine appendices, among them expanded notes, additional visual and documentary sources, and supplementary resources for instructors.

By measuring contemporary diplomatic episodes against the pattern of counterproductive negotiating habits, Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace makes possible a coherent comparison of almost eighty years of Arab-Israeli negotiations and gives readers a framework with which to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of peace-making attempts in the past, present, and future.

Laura Zittrain Eisenberg is Professor Emerita of History at Carnegie Mellon University. She is co-author (with Neil Caplan) of Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: Patterns, Problems, Possibilities (IUP, 1998, 2010) and My Enemy's Enemy: Lebanon in the Early Zionist Imagination, 1900-1948.
Neil Caplan is Scholar in Residence at Vanier College and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of History at Concordia University. He is author of The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Contested Histories; Futile Diplomacy: A History of Arab-Israeli Negotiations, 1913-56; and Palestine Jewry and the Arab Question, 1917-1925. He is co-author (with Laura Zittrain Eisenberg) of Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: Patterns, Problems, Possibilities (IUP, 1998, 2010) and editor (with Yaakov Sharett) of My Struggle for Peace: The Diary of Moshe Sharett, 1953-1956 (IUP, 2019).