Aaron David Miller

The hardest day after the big peace conference is the morning after.

What do we do now?

How do we make this work?

It's going to take more than Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.

It's going to require an interagency, international effort to scale this up.

Maybe we'll be surprised.

You know, it certainly wasn't a guide when it came to the success or failure of the Oslo process.

I was at the last, actually the only, effort that brought an American president, Bill Clinton, an empowered PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, and a very risk-ready Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, to Camp David in July of 2000.

That summit failed.

And at the end of that two-week period, on the five core issues that need to be resolved, border security, refugees, Jerusalem, and the end of all conflict and claims, the gaps between Israelis and Palestinians were as wide and as deep as the Grand Canyon.

Twenty-five years later, those gaps are not Grand Canyon size.

They are galactic in scope.

So the notion that somehow you could leap forward and resolve these core issues in a way that would be acceptable

to Israelis and Palestinians with the shadow of October 7 looming large strikes me as a idea tethered to a galaxy far, far away rather than to the realities back here on planet Earth.

The 20-point plan is in essence a phased arrangement.

It has a phase one.

People acknowledge it as phase one.

There's even some talk about phase two or three, although there's no real operational detailed roadmap as to how to get from one phase to the other.

If you could get these two parties to actually identify an aspirational end state that they held in common or even to have an American president,

at some point, identify such an aspirational end state.