ABSTRACT
On October 30, 1991, after intensive diplomatic maneuvering by Secretary of State James Baker, the Middle East peace conference opened in Madrid under the co-sponsorship of the United States and the Soviet Union. Although the Madrid conference should be viewed as part of the Ronald Reagan-George Bush Middle East peace efforts, the immediate catalyst behind the conference was the Gulf war. Bush initially believed that because Arabs and Israelis faced a common enemy during the Gulf war, the prospect of an Arab-Israeli peace at the end of that war was better than ever. The Madrid conference was modeled after the 1987 London document and George Shultz's international conference idea of 1988—which Yitzhak Shamir had zealously rejected. The endorsement of Madrid conference by Shamir's right-wing coalition, however reluctant, can only be understood within the context of events that began with Gulf war. The war and the Iraqi Scud attacks on Israeli cities produced two immediate internal developments in the Israeli polity.
