Peace and Safety: Israel's Long Road of Peace Deals

Overview

Tony Blair, the Quartet's former Middle East envoy and now a member of Donald Trump's Board of Peace, put it this way in 2007: "Anybody who cares about greater peace and stability in the world knows that a lasting and enduring resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian issue is essential." Few world leaders would disagree. For almost eighty years this conflict has been treated as the one that must be solved before the region, and perhaps the world, can have peace.

Israel was born into war. In 1947 the United Nations proposed dividing the land, with Jerusalem under international control, and the 1949 armistices ended the fighting but not the state of war. The 1967 war left Israel holding the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, and months later the Arab summit at Khartoum resolved on "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it".

The deals since have worn that refusal down. Egypt made peace in 1979 and Jordan in 1994, both with American help. The Oslo process from 1993 began Palestinian self-government but left the hardest questions, including borders, settlements, refugees and Jerusalem, for a final agreement that never came. From 2002 a Quartet of the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia took charge of the process and presented its Road Map the following year. In 2020 the Trump administration's Abraham Accords, named after the patriarch shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims, opened normal relations with the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, and by 2023 talks on Saudi Arabia recognising Israel were reported to be close to a deal.

Every attempt comes back to the same questions: Israel's right to exist, its final borders, the status of the West Bank, the status of Jerusalem, and control of the Temple Mount, where the two Jewish temples once stood and the Al-Aqsa Mosque stands today. These are not side issues. The Camp David summit in 2000 broke down largely over Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, and the uprising that followed became known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Hamas named its 7 October attack "Al-Aqsa Flood", weeks after Saudi normalisation seemed near, and Rabin's assassination two years after Oslo showed the same pattern: peace, then violence.

Meanwhile the circle of guarantors keeps widening, from one US president at Camp David to two superpowers at Madrid (the United States and the Soviet Union), then a Quartet of powers, and in 2025 a declaration signed at Sharm el-Sheikh and a Board of Peace endorsed by the UN Security Council, which its backers say could go on to take up conflicts beyond Gaza.

Paul warned that "when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh" (1 Thessalonians 5:3). Daniel describes a ruler who will "confirm the covenant with many for one week", a week usually read as seven years, and halt the sacrifices halfway through it (Daniel 9:27). As END X explains in Confirmation of the Covenant, Scripture points to a final, internationally sponsored deal that confirms Israel's right to exist in the land and settles Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, opening the way for a third temple where sacrifices begin again before they are stopped. This is where this Signpost meets the others: the temple itself in The Case for the Temple, the powers lining up to guarantee a deal in Trump vs the New World Order, and the war the world fears most in WW3. Whether the covenant comes before or after a third world war is hard to say; it may be the peace that follows a great war, or the peace that leads into one. This Signpost does not claim that any deal so far is that covenant. It tracks whether the peace Scripture describes is taking shape, and who stands ready to confirm it.