What peace plans has Israel offered over the years?

Israel has proposed several peace plans over its history, including Ehud Barak’s 2000 Camp David proposal and Ehud Olmert’s 2008 offer, but the claim that Palestinians rejected one “generous offer” after another is misleading. Israel’s genuinely generous deal went to Egypt: at Camp David in 1978, Menachem Begin returned the entire Sinai for full peace, formalized in the 1979 Egypt–Israel peace treaty. The 1993 Oslo Accords¹ created the Palestinian Authority with mutual recognition, but Oslo’s five-year path to statehood was never completed.

The 2000 and 2008 offers to Palestinians: Barak and Olmert

Ehud Barak’s Camp David proposal was billed as “unprecedented concessions” that Yasser Arafat rejected. As FAIR documents, this “myth of the generous offer”² omits that it annexed the West Bank’s best land and water, split the territory into disconnected cantons under indefinite Israeli control, and required Palestinians to sign away all further claims. Taba 2001 went further, and Ehud Olmert’s September 2008 offer — full withdrawal from the West Bank with land swaps, shared Jerusalem, and a Palestinian state — came closer to a two-state solution than any Israeli proposal before it. Yet Olmert’s government was collapsing under corruption investigations, negotiations ended without agreement, and no successor picked these offers up.

The initiatives Israel never answered: the Arab Peace Initiative and Netanyahu

The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative³ offered full normalization with all Arab states in exchange for withdrawal to the 1967 lines; Israel never formally responded, and later Israeli responses to follow-up proposals were equally absent. Since 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu’s governments have avoided final-status peace negotiations¹ while expanding settlements, making a two-state solution harder each year. The Sinai-style generosity shown Egypt has never been extended to the people Israel still occupies.