The Madrid Peace Conference

On 30 October 1991, in the aftermath of the Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the Madrid Peace Conference opened under the joint chairmanship of US president George H.W. Bush and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. It was the first time Israel sat down to negotiate with all of its Arab neighbors at once — Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinians.

The terms had been set by months of American shuttle diplomacy. Israel refused to deal with the PLO, so the Palestinians attended as part of a joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation, their team drawn from the occupied territories and advised — openly, though unofficially — by the PLO leadership in Tunis. The negotiating framework, laid out in the co-sponsors’ letter of invitation, was UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338: land for peace.

After three days of public sessions, the conference broke into bilateral tracks — Israel with Syria, Lebanon, and the Jordanian–Palestinian delegation — later joined by a multilateral track on regional issues. The bilateral talks moved to Washington and dragged on without breakthrough. But Madrid shattered the taboo on direct negotiation and created the diplomatic cover within which, months later, Israel and the PLO opened the secret channel that produced the 1993 Oslo Accords.