Why John Kerry’s Peace Initiative Failed

Since negotiations between the Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) collapsed in 2014, various studies have emerged to account for what happened and what went wrong. Michael Herzog, a retired Israeli general who has been involved in nearly every round of negotiations since 1993, contends that the talks made progress but failed for a number of reasons, among which Israeli settlement-building was far from the most important. Those reasons include the fact that Jerusalem got nothing of substance in return for releasing hundreds of imprisoned Palestinian terrorists, the misrepresentation of Israeli positions to the Palestinians by American go-betweens, and John Kerry’s insistence on “the titanic goal of reaching agreement on all core issues” within the too-short nine-month deadline imposed on the talks. But perhaps most salient were the attitudes of Palestinian leaders: