“Land for peace” is not an abstract slogan. It is a specific diplomatic formula rooted in United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 of November 22, 1967, which called for the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied” in exchange for “termination of all claims or states of belligerency” and respect for the sovereignty of every state in the region. For more than fifty years, Israeli governments of every political stripe have tested that formula in negotiations, signed agreements, and, in most cases, actually transferred territory or redeployed forces. OZJF’s record is a disciplined accounting of those attempts. We do not treat the formula as a scam, and we do not treat it as a guarantee. We sort each signed agreement into one of four categories based on the outcome that followed, not the hopes that accompanied the signing.
Lasting peace
Two signed treaties have produced durable interstate peace: the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty and the 1994 Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty. In the Egyptian case, Israel returned the entire Sinai Peninsula, an area larger than Israel itself, in exchange for mutual recognition, normal diplomatic relations, and demilitarization arrangements monitored by the Multinational Force and Observers. The treaty has now held for more than forty-five years, through the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the rise of Hosni Mubarak, the 2011 revolution, the brief Muslim Brotherhood presidency of Mohamed Morsi, and the counter-coup of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The Jordanian treaty, built on the Washington Declaration framework and signed at Wadi Araba, similarly endured the death of King Hussein, the accession of King Abdullah II, the Second Intifada, and the Gaza wars. Both relationships have been described as “cold peace,” and the criticism is fair. But cold peace is still peace, and both borders have ceased to be war fronts.
Lasting quiet, not peace
The 1974 Israel-Syria Disengagement of Forces Agreement is a different category of success. It is not a peace treaty. Syria never recognized Israel and never opened diplomatic relations. But the disengagement line on the Golan, supervised by the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, produced roughly fifty years of quiet on what had been one of Israel’s most active war fronts. That quiet held through Hafez al-Assad’s rule, the Lebanese civil war, the Syrian civil war, and the tenure of Bashar al-Assad, until the December 2024 collapse of the Assad regime produced a new set of tactical realities on the Golan frontier. OZJF counts this outcome as meaningful but distinguishes it sharply from the Egyptian and Jordanian treaties. Quiet brokered by a buffer force is not the same as peace brokered by a treaty.
Territorial compromise without lasting peace
The Oslo chain, which includes the 1993 Declaration of Principles, the 1994 Gaza-Jericho Agreement, the 1995 Interim Agreement (Oslo II), the 1997 Hebron Protocol, the 1998 Wye River Memorandum, and the 1999 Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum, is a long record of Israeli territorial concession without a corresponding record of durable peace. Israel redeployed from most Palestinian population centers, transferred civil and security authority to the new Palestinian Authority, and accepted a framework leading toward permanent status negotiations. The outcome, documented by the Congressional Research Service, was the collapse of the process into the Second Intifada, which killed more than a thousand Israelis and more than three thousand Palestinians between September 2000 and early 2005. The record here is unambiguous. Israel gave up territory. A lasting peace did not follow. Honest advocacy has to hold both sentences together.
Not a bilateral peace deal
The 2005 Gaza disengagement sits in a separate category because it was not a bilateral peace agreement. It was a unilateral decision by the government of Ariel Sharon, approved by the Knesset and the Israeli Supreme Court, to evacuate every Israeli settlement and military installation from the Gaza Strip and four West Bank settlements. There was no Palestinian counterparty and no reciprocal commitment. The outcome, as documented in State Department reporting and successive CRS reports, was Hamas’s electoral victory in January 2006, the violent Hamas takeover of Gaza in June 2007, and a long sequence of recurring wars in 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, 2021, and the October 7, 2023 attack that triggered the current Gaza war. OZJF’s position is that the Gaza case is why Israelis across the political spectrum are now cautious about further unilateral withdrawals.
What the record shows
The pattern is visible. Peace has worked where Israel negotiated with stable state counterparties that had the institutional capacity to honor their commitments and suppress armed groups inside their own territory. Peace has failed, or produced only territorial compromise without peace, where the counterparty was weak, divided, or unwilling to confront rejectionist violence. This is not a verdict on whether Palestinians deserve a state, or on whether Israel should make further compromises. It is a factual observation about what the signed agreements have produced. Readers who want to go deeper should consult the Avalon Project at Yale Law School for treaty texts, the UN Peacemaker database for primary documents, and the Council on Foreign Relations for contextual analysis. The record rewards patience. It does not reward slogans.