Indyk, who was born in England and educated in Australia, served twice as United States ambassador to Israel – from 1995 to 1997, and 2000 to 2001 – and played a central role in President Bill Clinton’s attempts to arrive at a comprehensive peace settlement in the Middle East. These efforts, as Indyk admits, largely ended in failure. They also left their share of lessons. The book’s release, at the dawn of the Obama administration, coincides with a renewed openness in Washington towards traditional diplomacy and engagement in the Middle East.

Indyk is scathing about George W. Bush’s abandonment of diplomacy (particularly during his first term) and his declared policy of pursuing democracy in favour of stability. But he does not deny the ultimate failures of Clinton’s initiatives, which were followed by the second Palestinian intifada. In both cases, as Indyk admits, American policy has suffered from a perpetual, double-sided innocence. An instinctive belief among US policy-makers in America’s capacity to shape the region for the better has its flipside: a naïve and presumptuous arrogance which has led to short-sightedness and diplomatic missteps.

Indyk recalls telling Clinton before the 1992 election that the then Democratic nominee could achieve four peace deals in his first term. In the end, they achieved one: between Israel and Jordan in 1994. (They also staged the famous ceremony at the White House Rose Garden at which Rabin quoted Ecclesiastes and shook hands with the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.) There have been no peace deals since. Indyk recalls being told by Bush, after his first meeting with Ariel Sharon, that ‘there’s no Nobel Peace Prize to be had here’.

Clinton was deeply committed to the quest for a comprehensive settlement in the Middle East, but he was also fortunate to have come into office at a time that was ripe for peace. A year before his inauguration, Israel had elected Rabin and ousted Yitzhak Shamir, a hawk who had been reluctant to engage with the Palestinians or Israel’s Arab neighbours. The platform for the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking efforts throughout most of the 1990s – the Oslo accords – was negotiated secretly and with no American input. The first Palestinian intifada, which began in 1987, was petering out but had left its mark on the Israeli public, which started to swing behind moves to resolve the status of the Palestinian territories.

Clinton, according to Indyk, showed little initial interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was determined to focus on a deal with Syria, which would have encouraged deals with Jordan (which eventuated anyway) and Lebanon. But a Syrian deal would have had less impact on negotiations with the Palestinians, whose dispute with Israel is far more complex and entrenched, and whose governance was then still highly decentralised.

The importance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to promoting broader regional stability has since become accepted wisdom. Interestingly, however, the recent Gaza conflict and the divided Palestinian leadership have led to renewed support for the ‘Syria first’ approach amongst some commentators and leaders in Israel and the United States. Syria and Israel have been conducting private, low-level talks for more than a year and the new Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has signalled he is committed to their continuation. These talks have been brokered by Turkey, with little apparent American input; in fact, the United States, which has sidelined Syria for its alleged failure to rein in Iraqi militants, was initially resistant to the talks. Syria, in turn, has reportedly demanded that the United States become involved as the talks progress. Indyk says his years of diplomacy have repeatedly demonstrated that the United States is best advised to stay out of direct negotiations and to leave the warring parties to sort out their differences. The United States can enter in the final stages to cement (and fund) the handshake.

Indyk recalls a discussion with Rabin on the eve of the summit at which Israel and Jordan were due to sign their peace treaty:

[Rabin] assured me that when the summit convened in Washington, the president would not be disappointed. He warned me that if I talked to anybody about the negotiations, ‘you will destroy everything!’.

       As I hung up the phone it finally dawned on me that Jordan and Israel, like the PLO and Israel before them, when they decided to make the deal were quite capable of reaching an agreement without the help of the United States. Clinton’s role was as the underwriter of the enterprise.

The trickier problem is determining when the parties are ready for peace. Bush’s prediction about Nobel prizes proved prescient, but history will never be able to record whether his cynicism also led to his empty-handedness. When Bush shifted towards diplomacy in his second term, his timing was off.

A tragic pattern emerges from Indyk’s account of the failure of diplomacy under Clinton: one side is ready for peace, but the other is not. On the Israel-Palestinian front, Indyk’s blame falls almost entirely on Arafat, whom he describes as manipulative, untrustworthy and fearful of peace. On the Israel-Syria front, Indyk blames both sides, though he is more critical of the former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, who, he believes, was deeply insecure and never finally bold enough to demonstrate publicly to either the Syrian or Israeli public that he was committed to peace. But Barak, who was Israeli prime minister during the US-sponsored Israeli-Syrian negotiations in 1999–2000, is also blamed, particularly for backing away from the first serious effort at a deal at Shepherdstown, in 2000 (Assad is blamed for backing away from the second effort at Geneva two months later).

Indyk, who wants to impart lessons from his own diplomatic mistakes, sifts through the many causes of the failures of all these talks. Occasionally, he is too ready to stretch breakthroughs and failures into rules of statecraft. But the value of his book is that it recalls a time when the warring parties tried and went close – very close, according to Indyk – to making peace.

Despite all the bad faith that surrounded these endless initiatives, they did not begin – or rarely began – with failure as a foregone conclusion. Even when one leader or another used the failure of a summit to convince a domestic audience of his toughness, this still tended to be part of a broader aim of preparing the public for future concessions.

Indyk’s efforts are evidence of a time and an atmosphere that are too often forgotten. Back then, peace was a possibility and the failure of negotiations had yet to be coloured by history with the shades of destiny.