On 17 January, after nearly 500 days of war, the Israeli cabinet at last approved a ceasefire deal with Hamas, to sighs of relief from many ordinary Gazans and Israelis. In this hour of fragile hope, which follows on the heels of a horrific war, international leaders have proposed to turn the ceasefire into a chance to reboot the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The proposals include plans to facilitate a transition of power away from Hamas in the Gaza Strip and to kickstart deliberations on the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.

Amid the optimism, however, there should be a note of caution. A ceasefire is welcome, and provides a reprieve for the besieged civilians in Gaza and grief-stricken Israeli families, who have suffered unimaginable hardship since 7 October 2023. But Israelis and Palestinians have been here before – the absence of fighting is not the same thing as peace; a ceasefire can provide a pause, a precious window of opportunity, but it will not necessarily lead to a lasting settlement.

To appreciate this point, it is worth returning to the first Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948, and the first set of ceasefires that brought it to a close. On 7 January 1949, a UN-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Egypt went into effect. For over a year, the Israelis had fought for the survival of the Jewish community, and a Jewish state, in Palestine. The opening salvoes began in late November 1947, after the passage of the United Nations resolution for the partition of Palestine. Partition – a two-state solution – was accepted, reluctantly, by the Jewish Agency, and rejected by Palestinian representatives. Between November 1947 and May 1948, Jews were forced to fight against Palestinian militias bolstered by volunteers from the Arab world – the Arab Liberation Army (ALA).

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War began in earnest after Jewish forces routed their Palestinian and Arab counterparts. The Jewish Agency then unilaterally declared the independence of the state of Israel on 14 May 1948, a day before the end of the British Mandate and the evacuation of British forces from Palestine. No sooner had the British evacuated Jerusalem than the armies of surrounding Arab States – of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq – declared war on the fledging state of Israel with the stated intention of destroying it.

The conflict resulted in a victory for Israel, the future of which was now secured, and a humiliation for the Arab states. At the end of the war, the Israelis had managed to substantially increase the territory under their control – from the 55 per cent of mandatory Palestine allocated by the UN in 1947 to 79 per cent. Not for the last time, the borders of Israel had been redrawn through war.

The corollary of Israeli expansion was the creation of a Palestinian refugee problem: at the close of hostilities in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians had been expelled, or fled, from their homes. Throughout the course of the bitter struggle for control of the land, many Palestinians had been the victims of massacres or bouts of ethnic cleansing committed by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). It was, as Palestinians still refer to it, the Nakba – the great ‘catastrophe’ of their historical experience.

The 1949 ceasefire, to all intents and purposes, marked the end of the first Arab-Israeli conflict. It was the fruit of tireless diplomatic efforts made by the UN’s chief mediator, the formidable Ralph Bunche, an African American envoy and political scientist, who then initiated a series of negotiations and armistice agreements between the young Jewish state and her Arab neighbours. The first armistice was signed between Israel and Egypt on 24 January. Where Egypt led, others eventually followed: agreements were signed between Israel and Lebanon in March, between Israel and Jordan in April, and Israel and Syria in July. The preamble to all of these agreements stated that their aim was ‘to facilitate the transition from the present truce to a permanent peace in Palestine’. The guns had finally fallen silent on the 1948 War, and, so contemporaries hoped, the armistice arrangements promised to provide a solid foundation for a durable, negotiated peace in the Middle East. A year later, in 1950, Bunche was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

High hopes were to be disappointed. The 1949 ceasefire did not end conflict between Israel and the Arab states, or between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. For when armistice talks gave way to wrangling over a permanent peace, two issues continued to stalk negotiations between Israel and Arab governments: borders and refugees.

Historians of the Arab-Israeli conflict disagree over the extent to which Israel squandered a golden opportunity to secure a comprehensive peace following the 1949 armistice agreements. Avi Shlaim argues that Israel could, and should, have pursued peace negotiations with a greater willingness to strike a compromise. Benny Morris believes that Shlaim underestimates the degree to which the Arab governments negotiating with Israel were constrained by their own political domestic problems, including furious populations and Palestinian refugees seeking to avenge the humiliations of 1948. In 1949 and later, the public mood in most Arab states was in favour of an adamantine resistance to peace with Israel.

What is clear is that opportunities for serious negotiations, and compromise, were spurned by the Israelis. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, supported by the IDF’s chiefs of staff, had emerged from the 1948 war in a triumphant and uncompromising mood. This mood is captured well in Ben-Gurion’s interview from mid-July 1949 with the American journalist Kenneth Bilby, then writing for the New York Herald Tribune: ‘I am prepared to get up in the middle of the night in order to sign a peace agreement – but I am not in a hurry and I can wait ten years. We are under no pressure whatsoever.’

Indeed, Ben-Gurion was confident that Israel’s negotiating position would only become stronger with time. In one discussion with the Israeli Cabinet on 29 May 1949, Ben-Gurion said unequivocally that ‘the issue of peace between us and the Arabs is important, and it is worth paying a considerable price for it. But when the matter is dragged out – it brings us benefits’. Accordingly, he proposed to avoid any compromise with the Arab states that would reduce Israel’s territory or concede the right of return to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.

Ben-Gurion’s preference for military solutions to resolve diplomatic problems and his willingness to use a state of war to strengthen Israel’s bargaining position find their parallels decades later in Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach to the conflict in Gaza. Netanyahu, like Ben-Gurion before him, has consistently placed a muscular approach to national security, and an inclination to ‘change the facts on the ground’, at the heart of the negotiating strategy.

In aftermath of the 1948 War, Ben-Gurion’s attitude served to undermine peace initiatives with Israel’s Arab neighbours. Approaches, many through secret diplomatic channels, made by Syrian, Jordanian and Egyptian governments were allowed to slip away. In May 1949, Colonel Husni Zaim, the Syrian leader who had installed himself in power through a coup in Damascus, offered to conclude a comprehensive peace treaty, which would have included an offer to resettle 300,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria. Progress towards a personal meeting between Ben-Gurion and Zaim was slow, however, and in August 1949, Zaim was overthrown by another military coup. High-level discussions with the Syrian strongman may ultimately have led nowhere anyway, but the chance to discuss a full peace treaty with an important Arab adversary had gone begging.

A further approach made in 1953 by the Syrian government of Adib al-Shishakli proposed a division of the de-militarised zones (DMZs) lying in between the Syrian and Israeli ceasefire lines at the end of the 1948 War, with Israel taking around 70 per cent of the territory and Syria 30 per cent. On this occasion, the initial diplomatic breakthrough was allowed to fizzle out following disputes over water rights in the DMZs.

Protracted secret negotiations were also held with King Abdullah of Jordan throughout 1949-1951. At the end of the 1948 War, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and Israel were locked into ceasefire lines that cut across the ancient city of Jerusalem, making some kind of co-operation between the two sides essential for the futures of both countries. The two parties came very close to striking a grand bargain. Meeting in Abdullah’s winter palace in Shuneh, near the Allenby Bridge, the Israeli and Jordanian negotiators put together an ambitious draft agreement. It would have partitioned Jerusalem, transferred land by the Dead Sea to Israel, modified borders around Latrun, and provided Jordan with access to the Mediterranean via a land corridor through Israeli territory.

It was not to be. The draft agreement broke down due to disagreements over the size of the proposed Jordanian land corridor. In later negotiations, moreover, Abdullah struggled to overcome his own government’s opposition to signing a separate peace with Israel outside the auspices of the Arab League. As Shlaim writes: ‘Israel was too strong and inflexible while Abdullah was too weak and isolated.’ In July 1951, Abdullah was assassinated by a Palestinian while attending Friday prayers in the Al-Aqsa mosque. With his death, an influential partner for peace had departed the scene.

Finally, discussions with the Free Officers’ regime, which had seized power in Egypt in 1952, followed much the same pattern as those with Syria and Jordan. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser opened a secret channel with the Israeli government via Egyptian and Israeli representatives in Paris. Through this channel, in 1953, he communicated that, while public opinion in the Arab world prevented Egypt from publicly pursuing peace with Israel, the new regime in Cairo was willing to take the first step of avoiding aggressive or belligerent statements against the Jewish state. He proposed that, in return, Israel could assist Egypt in calling for the withdrawal of British forces in Egypt.

Nasser’s overture was rebuffed: Ben-Gurion demanded that Egypt immediately, and explicitly, commit to providing free passage for Israeli ships through the Suez Canal. The secret Paris channel went quiet.

The failure of the peace negotiations after 1948 matters because it allowed the enmity between Israel and the Arab States to fester, and left the Palestinian question unresolved. Out of this lost peace, the roots of later Arab-Israeli conflicts grew, and elements of the Palestinian movement evolved into the militant Palestinian nationalism of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, and then the violently antisemitic Islamism of Hamas.

In the wake of the conflict of 2023-2025, Israel and the Arab states once again find themselves with an opening for a new political settlement. Once again, a victorious Israeli government must decide what it is willing to sacrifice to secure an elusive peace.