For more than 15 years the Israeli government and the Palestinians have been -- sometimes more, sometimes less -- involved in peace negotiations.
In 1993, the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, then Foreign Minister (now President) Shimon Peres and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn in the presence of former U.S. President Bill Clinton. The process has lumbered along since then through terror attacks and wars, occasionally been proclaimed dead and then revived under another name.
Former President George Bush made history in 2002 speech when he became the first U.S. president to officially declare that there should be a Palestinian state, living alongside Israel in "peace and security."
His speech was re-tooled and released the following year in 2003 by the Quartet (U.S., European Union, Russia and United Nations) as the road map peace plan, according to which a Palestinian state should have been established by the end of 2005. Both the Palestinian Authority and Israel accepted the phased plan, though Israel submitted a list of more than a dozen reservations it had regarding the plan.
The road map never got off the ground and so Washington gathered all the players together in late 2007 to what became known as the Annapolis peace conference. There in Annapolis, Maryland, the sides re-affirmed their commitment to the road map.
Since 1993 (and before) the Palestinians have declared their right for an independent state in land they claim as theirs. All the while Israel, for the most part, has made the concessions. It gave major Palestinian population centers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to Palestinian Authority control in the 1990s and pulled completely out of the Gaza Strip and four West Bank settlements in 2005, uprooting thousands of Israelis from their homes and destroying the communities.
Palestinian violence has been quelled primarily by Israel's security forces; radical Palestinian groups have never been disarmed; Gaza was taken over by the fundamentalist Islamic Hamas; and current Palestinian leaders don't want to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
Israel is accused of occupying the West Bank (biblical Judea and Samaria) and roundly chastised for its settlement activities there. Some 300,000 Israelis live in mostly well-established communities in the land, which they consider to be their biblical birthright. Yet - whether one agrees or not - Israel has been willing to cut a deal with this land, giving it to the Palestinians in exchange for an elusive peace.
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said that among the key facts that are often forgotten is that there never was a Palestinian state. It is to be carved out of a land that Israel considers its eternal inheritance. And although Israel has educated its children toward peace with its neighbors, the Palestinians never have.