ABSTRACT
No single political issue in the post-decolonized Middle East has captured the attention of observers, analysts, and politicians as much as has the Arab-Israeli conflict. Given the widely perceived intractability of the conflict, a working solution that addresses the ostensibly irreconcilable historical claims by the antagonists of the conflict seemed to be in need of a divine miracle. However, events that have unfolded since the demise of the Cold War have proved that the conflict is not as knotty as many thought and, indeed, is amenable to a solution. On 26 October 1994, Israel and Jordan signed a fully fledged peace treaty thus ending 46 years of formal enmity. The treaty came almost a year after the celebrated and highly symbolic handshake between the then Israeli Prime Minster, Yitzhak Rabin, and the chairman of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, at the White House. Thanks to these events there was a widespread conviction throughout the Middle East that Israel and its neighbours had at long last started a process of what might be termed historic reconciliation. It is not unnatural that the Israeli decision to take steps towards peace had not come overnight, but had evolved gradually during decades of war with the Arabs.
