Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: Patterns, Problems, Possibilities

Fifteen years since the publication of its second edition, this foundational text in the history of Arab-Israeli peacemaking endeavors has been updated to include developments from the past twenty-five years.

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 peacemaking efforts. In addition to updating all of the book's existing chapters with post-2010 sources and developments, authors Eisenberg and Caplan have added new chapters on the Arab Peace Initiative, the Annapolis Conference, the Kerry mission, and the Abraham Accords, as well as a conclusion that questions several core notions regarding the nature of the conflict, the possibility of its resolution, Arab-Israeli "normalization," and the viability of the two-state solution. An epilogue extends the book's framework into present-day crises in the region, specifically Hamas's 7 October 2023 attack on Israel and Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza. A companion website comprises nine appendices, among them 145 primary source documents, expanded notes, links to websites for maps, data and analysis, peace activities, and additional visual and documentary sources. Also online is a robust instructor's guide offering supplementary resources and ideas for assignments, research and classroom exercises, all of which draw upon and complement the themes running throughout the text.

By measuring contemporary diplomatic episodes against the historical pattern of counterproductive negotiating habits, Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace makes possible a coherent comparison of some eighty years of Arab-Israeli negotiations and offers readers a framework with which to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of peace-making attempts―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, 2025) and author of 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, 2025) and editor (with Yaakov Sharett) of My Struggle for Peace: The Diary of Moshe Sharett, 1953–1956 (IUP, 2019).