There is no more fundamental concern in international relations than war and peace. Although much has been written about why states go to war, there is insufficient attention to why they make peace. This is particularly the case for long-standing conflicts in which the opposing leaders hold apparently irreconcilable positions. This book examines leaders dealing with the seemingly intractable conflict between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors. It takes as an intellectual target of opportunity six Israeli prime ministers and asks why some of them have persisted in their hard-line positions, whereas others have opted to become peacemakers.

There is perhaps no situation in which the knife-edge between peace and war is more precarious and for which the impact of a leader’s decisions – regarding the populations in the immediate area as well as global geopolitics – is more profound than the Middle East, and specifically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Stretching over the past sixty-five years, this conflict has consumed the energies (and lives) of generations of Israelis and Palestinians and has been a thorn in the side of every U.S. administration dealing with the Middle East. If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a powder keg, this book argues that political leaders can either light the fuse or extinguish the fire and engage in peace negotiations. The Israeli case is particularly fruitful for such an examination, both because of the geopolitical importance of the conflict and its passionate intensity, and because it forms an excellent laboratory in which to examine the differences leaders make. All six prime ministers considered here were responding to similar changes on the part of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) starting in 1988. By focusing on the Israeli leaders, I examine how different leaders operate in and respond to similar circumstances.