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The Madrid Conference was hosted by the government of Spain and co-sponsored by the USA and the USSR. It convened on October 30, 1991 and lasted for three days. It was an early attempt by the international community to start a peace process through negotiations involving Israel and the Palestinians as well as Arab countries including Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. It was the last conference held with both the USSR and US present; the USSR collapsed later that year in December 1991.

In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, US President George H. W. Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker formulated the framework of objectives, and together with the Soviet Union extended a letter of invitation, dated October 30, 1991 to Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinians.


The conference

The Palestinian team, because of Israeli objections, was initially formally a part of a joint Palestinian-Jordanian delegation and consisted of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza without open PLO associations like Saeb Erekat and Haidar Abdel-Shafi, the head of the delegation. However, the delegation was in constant communication with the PLO leadership in Tunis. Over Israeli objections, the PLO dispatched an unofficial "advisory delegation," headed by Faisal Husseini to act as a liaison.

The purpose of the conference was to serve as an opening forum for the participants and had no power to impose solutions or veto agreements. It inaugurated negotiations on both bilateral and multilateral tracks that also involved the international community. The Syrian and Lebanese negotiators agreed on a common strategy.

The first-ever public bilateral talks between Israel and its neighbors (except Egypt) were aimed at achieving peace treaties between the 3 Arab states and Israel, while the talks with the Palestinians were based on a two-stage formula, the first consisting of negotiating interim self-government arrangements, to be followed by permanent status negotiations. (This formula was essentially followed in the later Oslo Accords.) They opened immediately following the conference on November 3, 1991, in Madrid, and were followed by over a dozen formal rounds in Washington, DC, from December 9, 1991, to January 24, 1994.

The multilateral negotiations, which opened in Moscow on January 28, 1992, were held in five separate forums each focused on a major issue - water, environment, arms control, refugees and economic development, and were later held, until November 1993 throughout the world including European capitals and the Middle East. At first, Israel refused to take part in the refugee and economic meetings as Palestinians from outside the West Bank and Gaza were present. Syria and Lebanon refused to take part in multilateral meetings as long as there was no concrete progress on the bilateral level.

Formal talks in the multilateral track, which had been frozen for several years, resumed on January 31, 2000, with a meeting of the Steering Committee in Moscow, to be followed by meetings of the working groups.

The Israeli-Jordan negotiations, which emanated from the Madrid conference, eventually led to a peace treaty in 1994. The Israeli-Syrian negotiations included series of follow-on meetings, which according to some reports, came quite close, but failed to result in a peace treaty.

The bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations did not go well under the Shamir government. The Madrid negotiations were later upstaged and eventually replaced by initially secret and illegal negotiations (according to Israeli law at the time) following the 1992 Israeli election, during which Rabin and Labor pledged to end Shamir's settlement policy and reformulate national priorities. These independent negotiations eventually led to the exchange of letters and the subsequent signing of the Declaration of Principles, on the lawn of the White House on September 13, 1993. While the principles were essentially based on terms which the Palestinian negotiators in the Madrid round had earlier rejected, the negotiating positions and their negotiating partner had changed.