The Difficult Road To Peace: Netanyahu, Israel And The Peace Process (1998)

In May 1996 Binyamin Netanyahu became Israel’s first directly elected prime minister amid widespread international concern about the future of the Middle East peace process given his publicly stated opposition to the Oslo Accords.

In this book Neill Lochery analyses and chronicles the development of the various tracks of the peace process under Netanyahu, and examines whether any useful lessons, either positive or negative, can be drawn from the Middle East peace process and applied to other regions of conflict.

Israel has been at the centre of conflict with the Arab world since its creation over half a century ago. During this time the Middle East has experienced five major wars and a series of low to medium intensity conflicts, guerrilla attacks on Israeli targets and the near total isolation of the Jewish state in between.

However, the Camp David agreement with Egypt and then more recently Israel’s peace accords with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and peace settlement with Jordan have transformed the political landscape of the Middle East.

Central to Dr Lochery’s discussion is the contention that the argument widely employed by academics and the Arab side that Netanyahu is personally to blame for derailing the peace process is simplistic and not totally accurate.  The complexity of the Middle East peace process is such that it was inenvitable that the period of euphoria that followed Rabin’s handshake with Yasser Arafat would be replaced by a more sombre assessment of the difficult road to peace.

Back >>