The Forgotten Formula for Middle East Peace
A former Israeli prime minister knew that lasting peace is built one agreement at a time, not through grand regional bargains that demand Israel surrender first.
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This is a guest essay by Barak Sella, one of the leading Israeli experts on U.S.-Israel relations and world Jewry.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
On June 11, 1975, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin sat across from U.S. President Gerald Ford in the White House under extraordinary pressure.
U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy had secured a ceasefire and an Israeli pullback from the Suez Canal. But negotiations over a deeper withdrawal had collapsed because Rabin would not cede the strategic Sinai passes or oil fields without receiving more in return.
Ford, furious, warned Rabin that he had ordered “an immediate reassessment of U.S. policy in the area, including our relations with Israel.” His administration was weighing a dramatic pivot: abandoning step-by-step diplomacy with Egypt for a comprehensive settlement of the entire Arab-Israeli conflict. All the states, all the issues, all at once, at a reconvened Geneva conference.
Facing Ford, Rabin insisted:
“If there is any country eager for peace in the area, it is Israel. Israel has fought many wars and lost many people. We know we cannot achieve peace by military means; conditions do not allow this. It happened in 1949, in 1956, in 1967, in 1973. We know that force will not bring a political settlement.”
And then he said no to the comprehensive deal.
A stubborn Israeli prime minister rejecting peace. A frustrated American administration losing patience. Open talk of “reassessing” the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Sound familiar?
Fifty-one years later, history is repeating itself. This month at Tel Aviv University, Rahm Emanuel, a likely Democratic Party presidential contender, came to deliver “hard truths” to Israelis and unveiled the “23-state solution” — a single regional bargain in which Israel accepts a Palestinian state and receives recognition from the entire Arab League.
The idea, championed by the leftist organization J Street, rebrands the Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative of 2002. J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami sums up its theory with a saying attributed to U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower: “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger.”
Rabin, who in the 1990s signed the Oslo Accords (a pair of interim agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization) and paid for it with his life, remains the figure even Israel’s sharpest Democratic Party critics invoke as the model of bold peacemaking. Emanuel did so himself in the Wall Street Journal days before his Tel Aviv speech.
So why did the gold standard of Middle East peacemaking refuse this supposedly once-in-a-lifetime chance to end the conflict?
Because Rabin did not oppose comprehensive peace as a goal. He opposed handing Israel’s largest concessions to a collective Arab framework before peace, security, and reciprocity were defined.
His preferred architecture was a regional American umbrella implemented through direct bilateral agreements. That is the logic of the Abraham Accords, and the reason the Palestinian question should be addressed within them rather than used as the price of admission to regional peace.
Rabin’s supposed rejections were in fact a defense of his principles for peace — principles that still hold in today’s Middle East.
The first was leverage. Israel held three assets in Sinai: the passes, the oil fields, and depth of territory. Trading them for an ambiguous collective process meant entering the negotiations empty-handed. Rabin said, “There is no purpose served for Israel to go to an interim and lose one-and-a-half of our three cards and then have a weaker situation overall.”
The second: peace had to mean peace. Full contractual relations, not just an “end of belligerency.” In the Sinai II negotiations, Israel insisted that Egypt be “effectively taken out of the war” and that its agreement not be linked to negotiations with other Arab states. Each peace had to stand alone.
Third: Israel’s security cannot depend on outside promises. Rabin said, “International guarantees have no meaning whatsoever with us. We have never asked for one American soldier to aid in our defense.”
And fourth: a bargain among governments alone would be hollow. Rabin warned, “Even if such a peace could take place, it would be first a peace by diplomats and governments and not by people.”
Rabin was willing to compromise and take enormous risks. Within months, he signed Sinai II, giving up the passes and oil fields, paving the way to the 1979 peace treaty. What he refused was a structure in which Israel gave irreversible concessions for a vague collective promise.
Rabin’s approach was proved to be the only viable path to peace. When Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made his historic trip to Israel in 1977, he insisted in his speech from the Knesset (Israeli parliament) podium that there could be no separate peace.
But peace only came when, 16 months later, he signed exactly that: a bilateral treaty, for which the Arab League suspended Egypt for a decade. No collective framework has ever produced an Arab-Israeli treaty. Every one that exists (Egypt, Jordan, the Abraham Accords) was signed bilaterally, by a state that broke with the bloc.
Almost two decades later, in March 1993, standing beside U.S. President Bill Clinton, Rabin was asked whether Israel would fully withdraw from the Golan Heights for full peace. His answer compressed the doctrine into two questions:
“Is it a fully fledged peace, open boundaries for movement of people and goods, diplomatic relations including embassies, normalization of relations? Will they let that peace treaty stand on its own two feet, will not be influenced by what happens or doesn’t happen in the negotiations with the other Arab partners?”
As Itamar Rabinovich, Rabin’s chief negotiator with Damascus, has documented, Rabin privately expressed willingness to withdraw from the entire Golan if Syria committed to full peace, with embassies exchanged early in implementation. Syrian President Hafez al-Assad wanted Israel’s withdrawal commitment first and the nature of peace defined later. Rabin was always willing to compromise if it came with peace upfront, not somewhere down the road.
Rahm Emanuel’s 23-state solution reverses Rabin’s logic. Its source, the Arab Peace Initiative, offers Israel undefined “normal relations” in exchange for withdrawal from all territory captured in 1967 and a refugee solution “in accordance with” United Nations Resolution 194.
Even after a grand signing ceremony, Israel would still need to negotiate the content of relations, from security to embassies to trade, with each state separately, having already surrendered its principal assets.
Welding 22 relationships into one bloc also hands leverage to the least willing member. Every crisis and every act of terrorism (which will eventually happen in the Middle East) could threaten the entire structure. Today’s painstaking Israel-Lebanon negotiations show how fragile even one bilateral track is.
The comprehensive model stakes everything, all at once. Rabin’s method was the opposite of Eisenhower’s. When he ran into a problem he could not solve, he made it smaller.
The all-in-one approach also runs against Israeli public opinion. Eighty-one percent of Israelis support the Abraham Accords, while support for Palestinian statehood has collapsed. Israelis have not given up on peace, as support for peace with Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia is still very high. The problem is that no formula has persuaded the public that a Palestinian state would not become a security threat.
The sequence must run the other way: Stabilize the region to advance the Palestinian question, not the reverse.
There is no need to invent a new architecture because the right one already exists. The Abraham Accords are the synthesis that Rabin never lived to see: a comprehensive American umbrella implemented bilaterally. Each agreement is negotiated directly and stands independently, with diplomatic relations, embassies, open skies, trade, tourism, and people-to-people engagement defined from the beginning.
Born under U.S. President Donald Trump and sustained by his successor Joe Biden, the accords are a rare bipartisan framework. They do not force Arab states to pretend the Palestinian question is their only interest. They address the region’s agenda of security, technology, trade, and resistance to Iranian hegemony, while opening borders and building people-to-people relations. They also allow Washington to move from regional policeman toward sponsor of a more self-reliant coalition.
But the Abraham Accords remain incomplete because they bypassed the Palestinians. The answer is to complete it, not discard it: a defined Palestinian track backed by Arab investment and a credible political horizon. Every country can recognize a Palestinian state, but only one recognition matters, and it is Israel’s. The accords are the only framework that can produce conditions with which the Israelis can live.
There are strong voices that oppose the accords that could be very influential in a potential Democratic Party administration. Matt Duss, a trusted foreign-policy advisor to many progressives, including presidential prospect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, argues that they were never really about peace, militarized the region, and relieved pressure on Israel over the Palestinians. His criticism identifies a genuine deficiency: Palestinian exclusion weakened the accords morally and strategically.
But his broader argument reduces them to security cooperation and ignores what makes them historically novel: open borders, commerce, tourism, diplomatic representation, and civil-society relations.
Duss also underestimates the accords’ security value. The infrastructure they built helped degrade Iran’s terror proxies and forged a clear regional alliance deterring the Islamic Republic’s expansionism. Plus, the accords survived the worst regional war since 1948. That does not erase their shortcomings, but durability under fire is the historical test of whether peace is real.
Duss is right about one thing: The accords were never only about Arab-Israeli peace. They are an American strategy stretching from West Africa to the Chinese border, which is precisely why they will outlast any single administration’s Middle East policy.
Rahm Emanuel is a true friend of Israel, and much of his diagnosis is right: Israel’s standing, especially among young Americans, is eroding at alarming speed.
Israel has become a litmus test inside the Democratic Party. With the progressive flank working to shatter the alliance altogether, moderates need a compelling alternative. Resurrecting, under new branding, a collective approach that has never produced a peace treaty is not it.
The next American leader who visits Israel to deliver hard truths should also stop in Ramallah and Gaza and deliver one there: The region has changed, and the Palestinians’ future runs through the Abraham Accords, not around them.
The truth is that the people who really care about Palestinians should be the loudest advocates for the Abraham Accords. The task is not to revive the deal Rabin already rejected. It is to complete the architecture he charted.
 | A guest post by
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I wonder if one reason comprehensive peace plans keep failing is that they create too many veto points. The more countries and issues you tie together, the more opportunities there are for one disagreement to derail everything. Bilateral agreements are more resilient because success depends on only two parties, and if one negotiation stalls, the others can still move forward. Sometimes progress isn't about finding the perfect solution—it's about finding a structure that can survive inevitable setbacks.
Western leaders don’t stop in Gaza or Ramallah to deliver hard truths because the Palestinians won’t care or listen. The West is more interested in using the Palestinian cause as a weapon against Israel than laying the groundwork for peace. When Hamas guns down Palestinians in Gaza, the West is silent. When Hamas steals humanitarian aid, Israel is accused of starving the Palestinians. The West does not hold the Palestinians accountable for their choices or actions. UNRWA has aided and abetted terrorism yet remains funded by much of Europe. The Palestinian Authority continues its pay for slay program and faces no consequences for doing so. Palestinian textbooks continue to preach the destruction of Israel. The draft Palestinian constitution, which France may have helped draft, erases Israel completely. The Palestinians are watching the hate protests in Western cities, are listening to the rhetoric coming from the Democrats and Western governments and have to believe they are winning. The Palestinians have neither a political nor economic reason for moderating their position. There will be no lasting peace - whether through a bilateral or regional framework - until the Palestinians accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state with its capital in Jerusalem. Nothing suggests this will change.