Madrid Conference

The Madrid Conference opened on 30 October 1991 in the Spanish capital, convened jointly by US President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in the closing weeks of the Soviet Union's existence. It was the first time Israel sat publicly at a negotiating table with delegations from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinians (the latter participating as part of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, since Israel refused to negotiate with the PLO directly at that stage).

The conference was made politically possible by the geopolitical shifts following the 1990–91 Gulf War, which had weakened Iraq, exposed Palestinian diplomatic isolation after Yasser Arafat's support for Saddam Hussein, and given Washington unusual leverage with regional actors. US Secretary of State James Baker conducted shuttle diplomacy through the spring and summer of 1991 to assemble the participants. Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González hosted the proceedings at the Royal Palace.

Madrid established a two-track structure that shaped Middle East diplomacy for years:

• Bilateral tracks between Israel and each of its neighbors (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinians), which continued in Washington and elsewhere.
• Multilateral working groups launched in Moscow in January 1992, covering arms control and regional security, water, refugees, environment, and economic development.

The conference itself produced no signed agreement; its opening session featured speeches rather than negotiations, and several were notably confrontational. Yet Madrid created the diplomatic framework and personal channels that fed into later breakthroughs, including the Oslo Accords (1993) between Israel and the PLO and the Israel–Jordan peace treaty (1994). The Syrian and Lebanese tracks ultimately stalled. Madrid is therefore remembered less for its immediate output than for normalizing direct Arab–Israeli negotiations and shifting the conflict from a question of recognition to one of terms.