Quick Take
Transcript extracted from CBS News clip, about Prime Minister Netanyahu's trip to the U.S. to meet with President Trump and Congress members in July, 2025.
It's no accident that it has been 25 years since the Camp David Summit, and we're close to celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Camp David Accords. That was really one of the last major efforts on the part of the United States to get the Israelis and the Palestinians to negotiate peace. Those talks went nowhere for many reasons, but we've got to get back on that track of not just managing this crisis, but resolving it in a way that we have done in the past.
I think the United States has such influence over Israel, given our economic or political or military support to Israel, that the United States doesn't need more cards than it stands to influence Israeli decision making. The question is of political will: is the President ready to exert this time and effort? And it's huge -- it'll be massive expenditure of time and effort -- to come to a sustainable ceasefire and stabilization of Gaza and to move to the next stage, if indeed the President would like to have the Nobel Peace Prize.
This is a moment where he not only can stop the war in Gaza, but move on to a sustainable process that will lead to a solution between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Let me make one point: in between the Jordan River and the eastern Mediterranean, where Israel and Palestine are, there are approximately 7.2 million Palestinian Arabs and approximately the same number of Israeli Jews. Neither one is going anywhere. They have to eventually come to recognize each other's self determination and statehood. That is the end game. That goes beyond the Abraham Accords or the Camp David Summit, that goes beyond half measures.
I would like to see state craft be exercised in Washington, as we have in the past, in my long career. I served eight presidents, from from JFK to Bill Clinton: it can be done.
Although the Camp David talks collapsed, remembering the logic behind them remains essential.
The summit was emblematic of its time: a U.S. president convening Israeli and Palestinian leaders to reach a political solution based on the principle of land for peace. This formula drew partly from international law, which calls for Israel’s withdrawal from territories occupied during the 1967 War and affirms the right of all states in the region to live in peace within recognized boundaries. This approach had previously produced two landmark agreements: the 1979 Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, under which Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula, and the 1994 Wadi Araba Agreement, which established formal borders between Israel and Jordan.
Twenty years later, the Abraham Accords marked a fundamental shift in this equation. For the first time, Israel secured normalization with several Arab states—none of which share a border with it—without making any territorial concessions. This helped entrench the illusion that peace could be achieved without addressing the core issues at the heart of the ongoing conflict: territorial rights, and the right to self-determination. The events of October 7th and their aftermath have laid bare the dangers of sidelining the Palestinian question and the reality that broader Arab-Israeli normalization is not a substitute for a resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Those genuinely invested in diplomacy should remember the logic of Camp David: a just and lasting peace can only be achieved through negotiated territorial compromise rooted in international law.
The Camp David Summit that brought together then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Chairman of the Palestinian National Authority Yasser Arafat at the invitation of President Bill Clinton from July 11-25, 2000, was a watershed moment in the history of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. The storied Presidential retreat would witness a rare yet ambitious attempt to produce a conflict-ending settlement that would address all of the core issues at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian question: the status of Jerusalem, the borders between Israel and a Palestinian state, the issue of Palestinian refugees, and security arrangements between both states.
Camp David ended in failure with both sides trading blame over the outcome. Barak and Clinton accused Arafat of rejecting the most generous peace proposal offered by Israel. Palestinians counter that the U.S. and Israel were essentially negotiating with themselves with no desire to engage in good-faith attempts to reach a balanced agreement.
Camp David was more than an important historical chapter in the saga of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Looking back twenty-five years since, the summit proved to be an important inflection point that in many ways brought us to the current moment of crisis: it proved to be the high-water mark of attempts to reach a viable two-state solution; and of U.S. Presidential involvement (George H.W. Bush convened the Annapolis summit in 2007 between Israeli Prime Minister Olmert and Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas, Obama on his second day in office in 2008 declared solving the conflict would be a top priority).
Both half-hearted attempts similarly ended in failure; Bush preoccupied with the global war on terror, Obama with the chaos unleashed by the Arab Spring.
As a result of these failures, U.S. policy towards the conflict evolved in two diverging directions. The first was benign neglect; managing the conflict rather than solving it as successive administrations turned their attention away from the Middle East and towards Asia. The second approach sought to circumvent the conflict altogether by focusing on normalization between Israel and the Arab states, exemplified by Trump’s stewardship of the 2020 Abraham Accords that brought normalization between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, and Biden’s subsequent attempt to expand the Accords to include Saudi Arabia.
The absence of a viable peace process for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the failure of Camp David left a diplomatic vacuum that allowed for the dynamics of the conflict on the ground to deteriorate. The entrenchment of Israel’s occupation through the construction of illegal settlements, the extreme violence produced by the conflict as witnessed not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank, and the revival of existential narratives – the Holocaust for Israel, the Nakba for Palestinians – is testament to the complete breakdown we are witnessing today.