In October 1991, the Madrid Conference convened at the initiative of Secretary of State James Baker and under the joint auspices of US President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, just a few months after the end of the first Gulf War. Israel participated in the conference, alongside Palestinian representatives (in the Jordanian delegation) and representatives from Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt.

The conference, which was the first attempt to create direct dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians and Arab countries (except for Egypt, with which Israel already had full diplomatic relations), convened against a backdrop of violence and terror in Israel and an endless war in Lebanon, thanks to American leadership that understood the importance of dialogue while also acknowledging the challenges.

“Before we run, we will walk, and before we walk, we will crawl, and yesterday we started to crawl,” said Secretary Baker, referring to the first day of discussions. And indeed, the conference began with crawling, even with confrontations that led Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to abandon the talks and leave the stage to then-Deputy Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. However, in retrospect, the discussions laid the groundwork for the Oslo Accords, Israel’s peace treaty with Jordan, and ultimately the Abraham Accords.

President George H.W. Bush, who in retrospect had one of the most successful administrations in terms of foreign policy implementation, took advantage of the dramatic international change brought about by the fall of the Soviet Union and the unipolar moment, as well as the success of the international coalition in the first Gulf War (which had achievable goals, unlike the second Gulf War led by his son George W. Bush), to convene all the relevant regional players in Madrid.

The conference featured bilateral tracks alongside a multilateral track, based on the........

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