For nearly twenty years, Aaron David Miller has played a central role in U.S. efforts to broker Arab-Israeli peace as an advisor to presidents, secretaries of state, and national security advisors. Without partisanship or finger-pointing, Miller records what went right, what went wrong, and how we got where we are today. Here is a look at the peace process from a place at the negotiation table, filled with behind-the-scenes strategy, colorful anecdotes and equally colorful characters, and new interviews with presidents, secretaries of state, and key Arab and Israeli leaders. Honest, critical, and often controversial, Miller's insider's account offers a brilliant new analysis of the problem of Arab-Israeli peace and how it still might be solved.

Aaron David Miller became a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in January 2006, where he wrote The Much Too Promised Land.

For the prior two decades, he served at the Department of State as an advisor to six secretaries of state, where he helped formulate U.S. policy on the Middle East and the Arab-Israel peace process, most recently as the Senior Advisor for Arab-Israeli Negotiations. He also served as the Deputy Special Middle East Coordinator for Arab-Israeli Negotiations, Senior Member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and in the Office of the Historian. He has received the department's Distinguished, Superior, and Meritorious Honor Awards.

Mr. Miller received his Ph.D. in American Diplomatic and Middle East History from the University of Michigan in 1977 and joined the State Department the following year. During 1982 and 1983, he was a Council on Foreign Relations fellow and a resident scholar at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. In 1984 he served a temporary tour at the American Embassy in Amman, Jordan. Between 1998 and 2000, Mr. Miller served on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. After leaving the state department, Mr. Miller served as president of Seeds of Peace from January 2003 until January 2006. Seeds of Peace is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering young leaders from regions of conflict with the leadership skills required to advance reconciliation and coexistence (www.seedsofpeace.org).

His media and speaking appearances include CNN (including “American Morning,” “Wolf Blitzer Reports,”), “The Newshour with Jim Lehrer,” FOX News, “The NBC Nightly News,” “CBS Evening News,” National Public Radio, the BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Al Arabiya, and Al Jazeera. Mr. Miller has also been a featured presenter for the World Economic Forum in Davos and Amman, Harvard University, Columbia University, New York University, University of California at Berkeley, The City Club of Cleveland, Chatham House, and The International Institute for Strategic Studies. He has written three prior books on the Middle East and his articles have appeared in newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The International Herald Tribune.

Mr. Miller lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with his wife, Lindsay. They have two children: a daughter, Jennifer, and a son, Daniel.


From the Hardcover edition.

Chapter One


A Negotiator's Tale

The room was packed. Secretary Baker's press secretary and close advisor, Margaret Tutwiler, had seen to that. Late Friday afternoon in Jerusalem-usually a time of quiet preparation for the Jewish Sabbath-had suddenly seen a frenzy of excitement. As scores of journalists had gathered in the banquet hall of the King David Hotel to await the arrival of the American secretary of state and the Russian foreign minister, anticipation was high.

The two men now entering the hall could not have represented a greater contrast in style or power. Boris Pankin, clad in a dark boxy Soviet-era suit out of the 1950s, embodied a once great empire in decline. Hungry for prestige and respectability, the Russians seemed not to care that they were being used as a decorative ornament in a ceremony orchestrated by the United States. And if they did care, they weren't complaining.

By contrast, Secretary of State James Addison Baker III was riding high. Tall and self-assured, he wore a dark suit, a crisp white shirt, and a trademark boldly colored tie. He had reason to be confident. Baker represented a country that was enjoying unprecedented influence in a region still shaken by America's lightning military victory over Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

On that late Friday afternoon, October 18, 1991, Baker and Pankin, on behalf of their presidents, Bush and Gorbachev, announced that formal invitations would be sent to Israel and to the Arabs to attend a historic peace conference in Madrid. That fall the United States was the only great power in an arc of small ones that stretched from Rabat to Karachi. If there was to be an American moment in the Middle East, this was surely it. And Baker knew that the moment might not last long. Later that day in Jerusalem he would quip with characteristic caution, "Boys, if you want to get off the train, now might be a good time because it could all be downhill from here."

I had no intention of getting off the train. For me the ride was only just beginning. The nine-month period of nonstop diplomacy in the run-up to the Madrid conference had been the most exciting time of my professional life. A dozen years had passed since Jimmy Carter's heroic success in bringing Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin to a peace agreement. And while holding a peace conference of procedures like Madrid was certainly not the same as achieving a peace treaty of consequence between Egypt and Israel, it was still the most important breakthrough in Arab-Israeli peacemaking in more than a decade. To me, Madrid was reason enough to believe that with enough will and determination, American diplomacy could fashion something positive and hopeful from the raw material of a turbulent changing region. And I could become part of it. I had become a believer.


Banking on No

As I look back now, it astonishes me that I ever got into the business of negotiations and diplomacy. Changing the world was definitely part of my family's history, but while I was growing up, it wasn’t part of my personal temperament or interest. Born into an affluent Cleveland real estate family, I had parents and grandparents who were leaders in both the Jewish and the secular communities. During the 1950s my grandfather Leonard Ratner had been active in Zionist politics and philanthropy and would count Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and its fourth, Golda Meir, as personal friends. Leonard was an extraordinary man, an immigrant from Poland, one of nine brothers and sisters, who with piety, love of family, and an uncanny business acumen had sought his fortune in America, made one in the lumber and later the real estate business. My grandfather's love of Judaism and family was rivaled only by his passion for service to the community. He would talk to me endlessly about the importance of the Talmudic concept of tikkun olam, or "fixing the world."

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Excerpted from The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace by Aaron David Miller
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