I rubbed my eyes in amazement when I read in The Washington Post on June 20 that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was willing to meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) in a tent somewhere between Jerusalem and Ramallah, at any time. I checked several times to make sure I hadn’t surfed by mistake to an old edition of this important newspaper. 

Netanyahu’s remarks made front-page headlines in Israel. I had trouble believing that almost 20 years after an Israeli prime minister (Yitzhak Rabin) and the leader of the Palestinians (Yasser Arafat) shook hands on the White House lawn, the very willingness of an Israeli prime minister to meet with a Palestinian leader was still headline material.

The tent, of all places, took me back to the [1974] signing of the disengagement agreement between Israel and Egypt in a tent at the 101 kilometer point [between Cairo and Suez], or, a somewhat different case, the discussions between government advisor Manuel Trachtenberg and the heads of the summer 2011 social protest [in a tent in Tel Aviv]. 

Almost 15 years have passed since Netanyahu himself sat side-by-side with Yasser Arafat at the Wye Plantation near Washington. The agreement they both signed there said, among other things, that both sides “would immediately resume permanent status negotiations on an accelerated basis and will make a determined effort to achieve the mutual goal of reaching an agreement by May 4, 1999.” Yes, negotiations were supposed to end in May 1999, not to start, maybe, in June 2013.